Apocalypse: War of Worlds

The Spanish civil war reaches its bloody climax, the League of Nations seems toothless against the aggression of Italy, of Germany and of Japan. Neville Chamberlain is the man of the hour - but Adolf Hitler is the man of the times and 1938 brings a group of our titans together when Chamberlain invents 'shuttle diplomacy' at Munich, joining Hitler and Mussolini and thinking he has secured 'peace for our time' - "Good man!" telegraphs FDR. But peace is the last thing on Hitler's mind and the episode ends with war again burning across Europe.

The first concentration camps were set up as of 1918, a few months after the October Revolution. The new Bolshevik regime wished to rid itself of its political adversaries and use work to re-educate the so-called social misfits. The first wide-scale experiment was that of the Solovetsky Islands. Thousands of political prisoners and criminals, both men and women, were imprisoned there in inhumane conditions. After the death of Lenin in 1922, Stalin came to power and launched the accelerated industrialisation of the country along with the collectivisation of agriculture, which would lead to deadly famines. Immense building projects were launched in the most remote regions such as Kolyma in Siberia. The GPU, the Communist Party's secret police, which was in charge of cleansing society and ridding it of undesirables, sent hundreds of thousands of Russians to the camps to participate in the establishment of socialism.

It is easy to imagine that the past was lived in black and white, but of course, it was not. This landmark series uses modern colouration techniques to present a history of America in colour, for the first time. Season two will take viewers on another visually stunning journey, shifting the focus from various decades to iconic thematic episodes in history, including: Titans of Industry: The story of a rising generation of industrialists like Henry Ford and inventors such as Thomas Edison who came to tower over America, transformed the country and impact the global landscape.