Historical turning points are complex and multi-layered events with a huge cast list of big and not-so-big players. To do them justice in a way that makes the event understandable to an uninformed or semi-informed audience and at the same time pleases the academic historian is a tall order. A documentary-drama, unless it is a TV series, must tell the tale in a few hours. To gain an audience and hold its attention, it must have a cast of A-listed actors, and be a spectacle. It is a very expensive undertaking and highly likely to be a flop. As a result, audio-visual overviews of great events in the past fifty years have nearly always been drama-documentaries, which are much cheaper to mount, use a voiceover or onscreen presenter to move the narrative quickly along, and have an elastic length, which ensures they can explore seminal episodes as fully or as little as is felt necessary.