Red Dawn Strange Days: Cold War Britain

MUSIC: "Our Day Will Come" by Patti Page

# Our day will come

# And we'll have everything

# We'll share the joy... #

It's easy to forget that for five of the last eight decades,

Britain was at war.

# No-one can tell me that I'm too young to know... #

It was a war that framed all our lives.

# And you love me... #

Welcome to Cold War Britain.

This was a war between us, the democratic, capitalist West,

and them, the Communist, totalitarian East.

It was a war of high-stakes diplomacy...

..secrets and paranoia...

..in which we lived every day in the shadow of Armageddon.

And yet it was also so much more.

The Cold War was also fought in our families,

in our shopping centres,

in our culture

and in our heads.

UPBEAT JAZZ MUSIC

On 13th November 1945,

here in West London,

thousands of fans were gathering to watch

a simply extraordinary game of football.

By the time the gates at Chelsea Football Club clanged shut,

more than 75,000 tickets had changed hands.

Locked out here were 15,000 people,

determined that, by hook or by crook,

they were going to see the game.

All up and down the Fulham Road was a biblical tide of humanity.

People even tried to ram their way through

the gates of Stamford Bridge.

And the reason for all this frenzied excitement?

The Russians were coming.

That summer, British and Soviet soldiers had come together

to celebrate the end of their long struggle against Nazi Germany.

The Red Army had lost almost 10 million men,

but they'd broken the back of Hitler's forces.

NEWSREEL: The first Soviet football team ever to visit Britain

lands at Croydon from Moscow.

Russia's crack 11, the Dynamos, brought several hundredweight

of special diet with them in their two red-starred Dakota aircraft.

To celebrate the triumphant unity of East and West,

Britain's football authorities invited Russia's top team,

Moscow Dynamo, on a national tour.

The Russians' courage had won them plenty of admirers

and waves of goodwill rolled down through the excited crowds.

Chelsea's fans crowded the goalmouths,

they perched on the stands

and they even waved red flags.

And as the two teams lined up before kick-off, Dynamo's players

presented their counterparts with bunches of flowers.

The Chelsea players didn't know where to look.

But the Russians did things differently.

For one thing, they warmed up on the pitch,

which was something no British team ever did.

CROWD ROARS AND RATTLE CLICKS

When the match kicked off, it was show time.

MUSIC: "Kalinka"

The Russian game was fast and fluid, with short passes.

They called it "passovochka" and the crowd loved it.

For an encounter between old wartime allies,

the match ended in a suitably diplomatic three-all draw.

And the British press seemed delighted.

"Dynamo", said one paper,

"are the greatest club to have visited these islands."

NEWSREEL: The inspired singing of Land Of Our Fathers

was the prelude to football's...

The rest of the Dynamos' tour included thrilling football,

dense fog and even the odd punch-up.

And here are the classified results.

Cardiff City 1-10 Dynamo.

Arsenal 3-4 Dynamo.

Glasgow Rangers 2-2 Dynamo.

The tour looked like a goal-packed, crowd-pleasing success.

But off the pitch, there were growing tensions.

The Russians seemed secretive, surly and suspicious.

They were, after all, the team of the Soviet secret police.

The papers were getting suspicious

of these silent, mysterious Russians

and there was growing criticism of their supposedly rough tactics.

The Daily Express even ran an open letter

to Dynamo's captain, Mikhail Semichastny,

explaining why the British fans had started booing him.

"Shirt-pulling and pushing", it said, "are not English customs."

At the end of the tour, Semichastny got his own back.

"The British teams' tactics", he said, "were stuck in the past."

They were merely "elementary."

But there was more to this than handbags at ten paces.

There was a growing sense of discord between the Russian officials

and their British counterparts,

a sense that this "goodwill tour"

was turning into a political minefield.

Almost a month after they had landed,

the Russian invasion was over.

MUSIC: "They Can't Take That Away from Me" by Fred Astaire

You helped us to write another page in the history of football.

We're glad you came. Sorry we didn't see you play more matches,

but it won't be long, we hope, before we play another.

But the fond farewells told only part of the story.

The Dynamos hadn't come to make friends.

They'd come to make a point.

"We are the new superpower,

"on the pitch and in the world."

And one writer in particular put his finger on it.

"Now that the brief visit of the Dynamos has come to an end",

he said, "it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people

"were saying privately before the Dynamos even arrived

"and that is that sport is an unfailing cause of ill will,

"and that if such a visit as this

"had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations,

"it could only be to make them slightly worse than before."

His name was George Orwell.

For years, Orwell had been warning

about the ruthless ambitions of the Soviet Union.

And in the months following the war,

his prophecies seemed to be coming true.

Across Eastern Europe, Soviet-backed communists were seizing power

and strangling their fledgling democracies.

Millions of people were now falling under the shadow of Stalinism.

Many people assumed that with victory won against the Germans

and the Japanese, we could all settle down to a lifetime of peace.

But Orwell knew that we were already facing a new kind of conflict,

an armed standoff

against the totalitarian empire of the Soviet Union

and in October 1945, in the pages of the left-wing magazine Tribune,

he gave this conflict its name -

not the Third World War,

but the Cold War.

CHEERING

Orwell wasn't alone in his horror of Soviet communism.

There was one politician more than any other who had been trying

for decades to alert the British people to the threat of Bolshevism,

what he called "The poisoned peril from the East."

That man was Winston Churchill.

BLUES MUSIC

In the spring of 1946, Winston Churchill took a holiday.

He'd been having a bit of a rough time.

Despite his wartime heroism, the voters had kicked him out

of Downing Street and for the past few months,

Churchill had been in a deep depression,

so he decided to come somewhere where people still loved him -

America.

And as his train rattled through the night,

he and his travelling companion cracked open the cards

and started knocking back the bourbon.

But Churchill's drinking partner wasn't just anybody.

It was a man called Harry S Truman,

President of the United States.

And there was more to Churchill's holiday than met the eye,

because when his train met its destination, he was planning

to deliver a very particular message to the American people.

MUSIC: "Don't Fence Me In" by Roy Rogers

Churchill had been invited to speak

at a small liberal arts college in Fulton, Missouri,

the home state of President Truman.

It was meant to be an off-duty speech,

but as Churchill admitted to Truman,

he wanted his words to be heard across the world.

"Under your auspices", Churchill said,

"anything I say will command attention."

While Churchill was travelling across America, he wrote home

to Britain's new Labour Prime Minister, Mr Clement Attlee

and casually mentioned he might be giving a speech

very similar to the one he'd already given at Harvard two years before.

But that wasn't entirely true. This was going to be something different.

In fact, in Washington, Churchill had asked Harry Truman

to help him write it.

"It's your speech", Truman said, "you write it yourself."

He even refused to read a draft.

But that night on the train, a few stiff drinks down the line,

Truman changed his mind,

and when he put the speech down, he said it was "admirable".

"It will do nothing but good", he added,

"although it would make a stir."

That was putting it mildly.

For Joseph Stalin and for many others, this was the moment

when the Cold War began.

Churchill and Truman were shown

into Westminster College's spruced-up gym,

the only place large enough to cram everyone in.

And it's one of the great privileges of my lifetime

to be able to present to you that great world citizen,

Winston Churchill.

APPLAUSE

From Stettin in the Baltic

to Trieste in the Adriatic

an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states

of Central and Eastern Europe

and all are subjects, in one form or another,

not only to Soviet influence,

but to a very high

and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

An iron curtain that dropped around Poland,

Hungary,

Yugoslavia,

Bulgaria...

In this Iron Curtain speech,

Churchill was the first Western statesman to single out

the Soviet Union as the greatest threat to world peace.

And he also gave us a three-word phrase

that we're still arguing about to this day.

A special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire

and the United States of America.

APPLAUSE

Churchill himself was half-American

and he passionately believed that Britain's security

and prosperity depended on closer ties with our American cousins.

Britain's finances were in ruins.

The empire was in trouble and in Asia and the Middle East,

our age-old rival, the Russian bear, was flexing its muscles.

So in this gym in the Missouri heartland,

he set out to woo his listeners, to persuade them

to stick with the Western alliance

and to stand by Britain in the face of a new and terrible enemy.

MUSIC: "A Taste Of Honey" by Julie London

Back at home, many ordinary people were already enjoying

a special relationship with all things American.

In the late 1940s, the United States

seemed the land of jitterbugs and jazz,

fresh fashions and Coca-Cola,

a paradise of high living, popular culture

and mass consumerism.

BOYS' CHOIR

But not everybody was so enthused by the American dream.

Some idealists still preferred the stark rigours of Soviet realism.

Canterbury Cathedral,

for centuries the magnificent heart of the Church of England.

It hardly looks like a hotbed of communism, but from 1931 to 1963,

that's exactly what it was, thanks to the activities of just one man,

the Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson,

the Red Dean of Canterbury.

Cordial and warm welcome to our cathedral church.

Like Winston Churchill, Johnson was a Victorian.

They were even born in the same year, 1874,

but while Churchill looked at the Soviet Union

and saw the work of the Devil,

Hewlett Johnson thought he saw the kingdom of heaven.

I read as widely as I could and communism struck me

at once as both Christian and practicable.

MUSIC: "Trouble Of The World" by Mahalia Jackson

As a young man,

Johnson had campaigned for the rights of poor workers

and when he became Dean of Canterbury, he visited China

and Russia, where he fell in love with communism in action.

You know, the thing about Hewlett Johnson is that he was

absolutely typical of a whole generation of high-minded,

well-meaning intellectuals,

who in the 1930s had convinced themselves that Soviet communism

represented not just economic but spiritual salvation.

And these are his sermon notes,

in which he tried to reconcile Christianity and communism

to show, I suppose, that Jesus and Lenin and Stalin

are basically just saying the same thing.

"Jesus called for universal brotherhood and meant it.

"Communism calls for a world brotherhood and means it.

"Jesus challenged class as class.

"Communism builds the classless society."

And all of that made him probably the single best-known mouthpiece

for Soviet communism in the whole Western world.

Johnson's promotional efforts did not go unnoticed in the Kremlin.

MUSIC: "Mad About The Boy" by Patti Page

In 1945, Hewlett Johnson came here to Moscow

for an extraordinary meeting with Joseph Stalin himself.

Now, Johnson was something of a Stalin fan.

There was no cruelty, he thought, in Stalin's face,

just a steady purpose and a kindly geniality.

Nothing could have been more unlike the faces of Mussolini or Hitler.

Now, for his part, Stalin wanted to use the meeting

as a way of sending two messages to the West.

First of all, it was a capitalist lie that he was anti-religion,

because people here in Moscow, he said,

had complete freedom of worship and freedom of conscience,

and secondly, it was also a lie that he was anti-Western

or anti-British, because all he wanted was world peace.

CHEERING

Not even the tensions of the Cold War

could shake the strange romance

between the Soviet tyrant and the Anglican priest.

In 1951, Hewlett Johnson won perhaps the ultimate accolade -

this splendidly embossed prize.

He was only the second person to win it, you know.

The first was Pablo Picasso.

And what was it?

It was the International Stalin Peace Prize!

Even illustrated with a lovely picture of the man himself.

The honour that has been given to me today...

..is the greatest honour

that any country could give...

..to any man.

This peace award...

..the portrait,

that greatest fighter for peace...

..Stalin.

As the Red Dean fondly gazed at his Soviet bauble,

the truth about life in Stalin's Russia was already emerging.

Far from being a workers' paradise,

the Soviet Union was in many ways just as cruel as Hitler's Germany.

But the terrible revelations of Stalin's show trials

and labour camps never shook Hewlett Johnson's faith

in the Soviet Union or the communist ideal

and although MI5 kept a vague eye on him,

Johnson stayed in his Canterbury post,

tolerated and even cherished by the Anglican hierarchy.

Perhaps the best tribute I can pay to him is to say

that he is loved and respected by many people who detest his politics.

So, was Hewlett Johnson a bad man?

Well, let's be generous.

Let's just say that maybe like so many fellow travellers

he was just naive and stubborn, self-deluded.

The great irony, though, is that while MI5 were keeping tabs

on the Red Dean, the real traitors were right under their noses.

MUSIC: "Too Young" by Nat King Cole

One evening in May 1951, at a house on the edge of the North Downs,

a young pregnant woman was cooking a slap-up dinner

to celebrate her husband's 38th birthday.

But as they were sitting down to eat,

they were interrupted by a knock at the door.

The man on the doorstep was called Roger Styles.

They invited him in. He stayed for dinner

and then the birthday boy said that he and the mysterious Mr Styles

had to leave for a pressing engagement,

but they wouldn't be long.

He never came back.

NEWSREADER: This is the BBC Home Service

and here is the news.

Mr Morrison has made a statement in the House Of Commons

about the disappearance of the two Foreign Office officials.

He said there had been no confirmed news of their whereabouts

since they landed in France on 26th May...

The runaway husband's name was Donald Maclean

and he was the head of the American department

at the Foreign Office.

As for the mysterious Roger Styles, he too was a diplomat,

and his real name was Guy Burgess.

He'd put together his alias

from the titles of two Agatha Christie books.

Burgess and Maclean were two members

of the soon-to-be notorious Cambridge spy ring.

They had been playing a long game,

but by 1951, their luck had run out.

Fearing exposure, they had fled to the continent,

bound eventually for Moscow,

And they had left behind not just Maclean's pregnant wife,

but a host of unanswered questions.

To the bewildered British public,

the defections of Burgess and Maclean

came as a terrible shock.

50s Britain was a land of deference and decorum.

These men were pillars of the establishment -

upper class and well-educated.

Yet now they of all people stood exposed as communist traitors.

In the Cold War, it seemed, nobody could be trusted.

But the roots of Burgess and Maclean's betrayals

went all the way back to their student days together,

at Cambridge University in the 1930s.

It is in this atmosphere

that an undergraduate lives his three years at Cambridge.

It is a life with opportunities for friendship and comradeship,

where one meets all types of men,

where new ideas are formed

and olds ones discarded or strengthened.

While these young Cambridge men were sitting up late into the night,

putting the world to rights,

Britain was gripped by the Great Depression.

They saw capitalism in ruins

and millions of ordinary British families,

poor and starving, paying the heavy price.

They saw fascism on the march, not just in continental Europe,

but in Britain itself.

And for some of these undergraduate idealists,

there was only one answer.

Marxism.

It may sound odd to us now,

but to these young, well-educated, privileged students,

Britain's democratic parties,

the old men of their parents' generation,

had palpably failed to deal with the economic trauma

of the Great Depression.

Here in Cambridge in the 1930s,

the red flag looked like a beacon of hope

and the Soviet Union, a promised land,

where poverty and inequality would become things of the past.

As another Cambridge student put it,

Russia looked like "terra incognita" -

a land of mystery, and for some, infinite promise,

where dreams would come true

and the evils of contemporary society be corrected.

But it wasn't just Marxism

that occupied the Cambridge students.

Guy Burgess was openly and flamboyantly gay

and rumours of homosexual activities

swirled around the entire Cambridge spy ring.

This was an age when homosexuality was still illegal.

Sleeping with another man

involved a level of discretion, deception, even subterfuge.

That was no bad preparation for a life in the shadows.

When the Cambridge spies were finally exposed,

their sexuality became a central part of the story.

Many people assumed that treachery and homosexuality

were just two sides of the same coin.

Perhaps they thought sexual deviancy and political deviancy

went hand in hand.

Perhaps all homosexuals were potential traitors.

In 50s Britain, to be different was to be suspect.

This was a deeply conformist society,

both politically and socially.

To many people, rich and poor, young and old,

homosexuality seemed frightening, dangerous, even subversive.

And after the flight of Burgess and Maclean,

the Tory politician Lord Hailsham spoke for many

when he described homosexuality as "a proselytising religion,

"contagious, incurable and self-perpetuating."

It's surely no accident that between 1950 and 1954,

the annual prosecution rate of gay men rose by 50%

All of this only added to the climate of suspicion.

In this unsettling new Cold War Britain,

nothing was as it seemed, and perhaps nobody could be trusted.

At a time of intense public anxiety about national security,

Britain's homosexuals made very convenient scapegoats.

Find the homosexual, find the spy - so went the reasoning.

"There has, for years", said the Sunday Pictorial in 1955,

"existed within the Foreign Office service

"a chain or clique of perverted men."

The Civil Service even drew up official guidelines

for identifying suspected homosexuals

as security risks.

But, you know, I don't think Burgess and Maclean

betrayed Britain because they were gay.

I think they did it because they were true believers -

they genuinely thought that Moscow was right

and that communism was the future.

Many people were deeply disturbed to see how intellectual idealism

could turn into spying and subterfuge.

And with the British way of life apparently under threat,

some ardent democrats felt driven to desperate measures.

March, 1949.

A dying man lies in a sanatorium bed,

desperately scribbling a list of names.

And when he's finished,

he hands the list to a friend who works for the government.

On the list were the names of people

he believed were a danger to the country,

potential agents of the Soviet Union.

The friend worked

for the Foreign Office's new Covert Political Warfare department,

the Information Research division.

And the man in the bed was George Orwell.

A year later, in this building,

Orwell finally lost his long battle with TB.

He was just 46.

Just as the Civil Service later identified suspected homosexuals

as security risks,

so Orwell's list named the people he thought untrustworthy -

fellow travellers who might betray

their native land to the Soviet Union.

Here was one of democracy's greatest modern champions.

So terrified of the threat of totalitarianism

that in his final months, he was prepared to turn informer.

It might have been a scene from his greatest novel, 1984.

This, in 1984, is London.

Chief city of Airstrip One,

a province of the state of Oceania.

The Ministry of Truth was startlingly different

from any other object in sight.

It was an enormous pyramidal structure

of glittering white concrete

soaring up terrace after terrace 300 metres into the air.

From where Winston stood, it was just possible to read,

picked out on its white face in elegant lettering,

the three slogans of the party.

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery,

Ignorance is Strength.

And here it is, the University of London's Senate House,

Britain's Ministry of information during WWII

and the model for George Orwell's Ministry of Truth.

It's here that we meet 1984's hero, Winston Smith.

His job, to rewrite history in the name of a one-party state

dedicated to controlling every aspect of human existence.

Mind, body and soul.

Are you guilty?

Of course I am.

You don't think the party would arrest an innocent man, do you?

Thoughtcrime's a dreadful thing.

It gets a hold of you without you even knowing it!

I talked in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me say?

"Down with Big Brother," over and over and over again!

Oh, I'm glad they've got me.

Saved me.

For British readers,

1984 was a terrifying vision of a totalitarian future.

In an age of perpetual war between rival power blocks,

even individual dreams have been sacrificed

to the demands of the party.

The thought police watch your every movement

and they listen to your every word.

This is a world of total state control.

A world of total terror.

At the heart of Orwell's chilling vision

was a very British horror of ideological extremism.

Now, Orwell himself was an old Etonian

who had chosen to spend his life fighting for the poorest

and most downtrodden people in the country.

But like the great majority of his fellow Britons,

he had a deep, even visceral distaste

for grand ideological projects that claimed to be improving humanity,

but cared nothing for the common man.

Now, in 1984, Orwell's chief target is Stalin's Russia.

A regime that preached a gospel of peace, but had murdered millions.

And for a generation of British readers,

1984 became their image of the Soviet Union.

But there's a bit more to it than that.

1984 is, after all, a portrait of a totalitarian Britain.

A vision of what could happen right here,

in the heart of Britain's green and pleasant land.

As a result, many readers assumed

that Orwell's real target lay closer to home.

So in June 1949, six months before he died,

Orwell issued a statement through his publisher.

"My recent novel..." he said, "..is not intended as an attack on socialism.

"Labour's older men..." he thought,

"..were safe, but the younger generation is suspect

"and the seeds of totalitarian thought

"are probably widespread among them."

For Orwell, that made it all the more urgent

that Labour tackle what he called

the hard problems of post-war Britain.

We got one little bit of steak on Friday

and blimey, we've had it for the rest of the week then.

What does a man live on?

11 pence of meat? Disgusting!

This was an age of grim austerity.

Despite the end of the war, rationing was tighter than ever.

No cigarettes. No matches. Not today.

I'm afraid not. No eggs. No!

# Don't know why

# There's no sun up in the sky

# Stormy weather. #

Ordinary life was bleak and pinched.

The perfect breeding ground, some feared, for communism.

# Can't go on

# Everything I had is gone... #

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Clement Attlee's Labour Party

had won a stunning landslide victory.

Now, Attlee himself was an eminently practical man.

"People..." he once said, "..are converted more

"by what they see socialists are

"than by what they hear them say."

And he was determined to deliver not just better schools

and more jobs and rising living standards,

but what he called security for all against a rainy day.

What we know as the Welfare State.

You'll be getting a booklet like this.

Although it's quite small, it affects one and all.

Every Master and Mrs and Miss.

Put it safely away. You may need it one day.

Then you can read what to do. Right? Ha-Ha! You lucky people!

As Attlee saw it, the Welfare State

would be a crucial weapon in the war against international extremism.

Give people a safety net.

Give them faith in the system

and there'll be no need for them to look elsewhere.

"Communists find opportunity..." Attlee said in 1950,

"..wherever poverty prevails.

"We are trying to remove such conditions."

Attlee confronted one of the greatest challenges

any British government has ever faced.

How to harness the power of democratic capitalism

to rebuild a shattered society.

# Blue skies smiling at me... #

And for millions of people,

his Welfare State offered a glimpse of a better world.

By 1950, new homes for 9,000 people

were being built on a bomb-damaged area in east London.

A couple of royal labourers even lent a hand.

This building site was effectively a front in the Cold War.

A showcase for Western capitalism.

The new Lansbury neighbourhood,

which will be a complete little town when ready,

welcomes the first tenant, Mr Albert Snoddy,

to its first completed block of flats.

With developments like the Lansbury estate

came a renewed sense of optimism.

And all the time, the Government's public information films

tried to explain to people what they could now expect

from Britain's Welfare State.

How old are you?

If you're as old as him,

you'll have found a big increase in your old-age pension.

Now 26 shillings for a single person, 42 shillings for a married couple.

The scheme is comprehensive.

It's not only to help you when you're ill,

but to help keep you when you're well.

And, of course,

the younger generation will stand to gain the biggest benefits of all.

These reforms weren't just meeting real human needs,

they were sending a very clear message - you don't need communism.

Because with social democracy, you get all of the benefits

and none of the terror.

CANNON BOOMS

In the summer of 1950,

the battle of ideas escalated into a genuine battleground.

When communist North Korea invaded its southern neighbour,

British troops were sent to hold the line against the red menace.

And in a tight-lipped radio address to the nation,

Attlee warned that the fighting in Korea

could have devastating consequences at home.

ON RADIO: The fire that's been started in distant Korea.

may burn down your house.

I would ask you all to be on your guard against the enemy within.

There are those who would stop at nothing to injure our economy

and our defence.

The price of liberty is still eternal vigilance.

Fire!

BOOM

Exchange? Hello, exchange?

Exchange...?

Every fire engine and ambulance you can get to pier 47.

The battle lines in the Cold War were now unmistakably drawn.

Western democracy versus Soviet communism.

It seemed clear cut - you were either one of us or one of them.

Beneath the surface, seditious forces were plotting our downfall.

In High Treason, British film-goers saw a shadowy network planning

a sabotage campaign, in preparation for an Eastern European-style coup.

Many of the plotters in High Treason are precisely

the kind of people you'd expect - foreigners, pacifists,

intellectuals, schoolteachers -

all the traditional villains of the British imagination.

But some members of their sinister little cell seem perfectly normal.

There are local government officers, civil servants, even shopkeepers.

The hidden menace at the heart of the high street.

If further action in Europe is to take place,

plan X23 has got to be a success.

We intend to destroy the eight great power producing

centres in this country.

Three of them are in London,

of which Battersea here is our own particular concern.

When High Treason went on general release in 1952,

the critics hailed it as a tense and topical thriller.

But it was by no means the only British picture to be

steeped in the anxieties of the Cold War.

May I have the pleasure?

Melinda, I'd like you to meet... Yes, thank you.

..Major Curragh.

Major Curragh, I don't believe you know Miss Greyton.

'As early as 1949,

'one 17-year-old starlet got her first big adult role'

in a film called Conspirator, in which she played the gullible

young bride of a British officer, who turns out to be a Soviet agent.

I'm glad you found out about this.

I've been too alone - you don't know how alone.

You don't know what it is to keep a constant watch over yourself because of a belief.

You're a traitor!

You're a traitor and a spy.

Those are just unpleasant words.

I'm a loyal supporter of the greatest social experiment in the world.

What Conspirator and High Treason have in common

is the idea of communism as a secretive, insidious threat.

A kind of alien virus, seeping into British life

and polluting everything it touches.

And that view was even more pronounced across the Atlantic,

where many Americans already believed that some of the most

famous men in the world had fallen victim to the Marxist plague.

# When the moon hits your eye

# Like a big pizza pie, that's amore

# When the world seems to shine

# Like you've had too much wine, that's amore... #

September, 1952, and on board the Queen Elizabeth is

one of the most famous men in the world.

For the first time in more than 20 years,

Charlie Chaplin is heading back to Britain.

Chaplin was enjoying a typically convivial lunch

when one of has friends handed him a note.

It was a telegram, and as Chaplin read it,

the colour drained from his face.

In Washington DC,

the Attorney General had just announced that Charlie Chaplin

was barred from returning to American shores -

unless he appeared before an immigration board of enquiry

to answer charges of a political nature and/or moral turpitude.

Chaplin's now en route to England. He is a British subject.

Although he lived here for years and grew rich,

he never became a citizen.

As one of the greatest performers in the world,

Chaplin had the ultimate rags-to-riches story.

From grinding poverty in a London workhouse,

to fame and fortune in the Hollywood sunshine,

Chaplin seemed the very embodiment of the American dream.

But for the American authorities,

he had dangerously unconventional views.

And this was no time to be a non-conformist.

Are you a member of the Communist Party? Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Are you a member of the Communist Party?

# Children, have you ever met the Bogeyman before? #

Since the late 1930s, the House Un-American Activities Committee,

or HUAC, had been investigating allegations of communist subversion.

But in the starkly polarized climate of the Cold War,

American suspicion and paranoia had reached extraordinary heights.

They are lying, dirty, shrewd, Godless, murderous,

determined and it is not an American political party like any other.

It's an international criminal conspiracy.

'Nobody was above suspicion.

'And by 1947, HUAC's attentions had moved to Hollywood.'

My name is Gary Cooper. I live in Los Angeles, California.

Ronald Reagan, 9137 Cordell Drive, Los Angeles 46.

'The committee's members had become convinced that Hollywood -

the great American dream factory - had become a hotbed of communism.

The reds, they thought,

were brainwashing the masses through the silver screen.

But HUAC's answer - show trials and blacklists,

looked like something from Orwell's 1984.

Chaplin was appalled by the very idea of a committee to investigate

un-American activities.

"It was a dishonest phrase to begin with," he said later,

"Elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice

"of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority one."

All his life, Chaplin had been the great champion of the underdog,

but now he found himself part of a left wing,

unorthodox and vulnerable minority.

For decades there had been rumours that Chaplin was a communist.

He first came to the attention of the FBI in 1922.

And in 1941, an FBI report described Chaplin's closing speech in his film

The Great Dictator, as nothing more than subtle communist propaganda.

You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful,

to make this life a wonderful adventure.

In the name of democracy, let us use that power, let us all unite!

# You are my sunshine, my only sunshine... #

The FBI collected a staggering 2,000 files on Chaplin,

some of which hint at what he really thought.

# Please, don't take my sunshine away... #

So, was Charlie Chaplin a communist?

Well, I'm not so sure.

In the early 1940s he did say he thought there was

a lot of good in communism.

But when he was interviewed by immigration officials in 1948,

he gave a slightly more qualified answer.

"I'm a liberal..." he said, "..and I'm interested in peace,

"but by no means am I interested in communism."

What about, was he a communist sympathiser?

"During the war, everybody was a communist sympathiser.

"By that I mean the communists of Russia.

"I naturally felt..." and he's talking about the war again,

"I naturally felt they put up a very good cause.

"I've always felt grateful because they helped us get ready

"and to prepare our own way of life."

The tragedy for Chaplin, is that those words alone,

for many people, were enough to damn him.

As the Queen Elizabeth approached Southampton in 1952,

Chaplin was still in shock at the news of his American ban.

But in London, the crowds greeted him as a returning hero.

In the end, he decided not to fight the ban, but to stay in Europe.

He settled quietly in Switzerland and for the next five years,

he didn't make a single film.

When he did return to the cinema, it was with a British picture,

that mocks the excesses of the red scares.

The committee cites this witness for contempt of Congress!

That's very unsporting-like on your part.

SCREAMING

Charlie Chaplin's fame couldn't protect him

from the creeping paranoia of the Cold War.

This climate of suspicion threw up new and disturbing moral dilemmas.

What and whom would we sacrifice to protect democracy?

And just how far would we go just to preserve our own liberties?

But preserving our own liberties meant confronting the biggest

moral dilemma of the modern age - to bomb, or not to bomb?

June 1942, the aircraft carrier HMS Campania set sail from this

jetty, to accompany a ship called HMS Plym for thousands of miles

across the world.

For the men on board, this would be a voyage like no other.

As one of Britain's military chiefs put it,

"Any right-minded man could look forward to a grand experience,

"combined with all the fun of a picnic."

BOOM

So why had Britain decided to build its own nuclear weapons?

Well, on the surface, it looks a purely defensive decision -

the bomb as the ultimate safeguard against Soviet attack.

I think there was rather more to it than that.

This wasn't just a question of keeping the Russians at bay,

it was also a question of Britain's position in the world and,

once again, of our relationship with the Americans.

# You never know how much I loved you... #

The Americans had had the bomb since 1945.

And if we wanted them to take us seriously, we'd have to go nuclear.

# You give me fever... #

Not all of Attlee's ministers were convinced that we needed our own

atomic bomb.

And at a crucial meeting in 1946, they lined up to question the costs.

But then, Attlee's foreign secretary Ernest Bevin burst in late.

"We've got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs," he said.

"And we've got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it."

BOOM

In an evermore insecure, frightening world,

the bomb looked like Britain's ticket to a place at the top table.

When the news of the British bomb got back home,

many people were absolutely delighted.

"Today..." said the Daily Mirror, "..Britain is Great Britain again."

And it wasn't just Fleet Street's finest who thought so.

A few days later, one Mr Robins of Edmonton wrote into the paper

to say that Britain's bomb was a wonderful thing.

"It has exploded at last..."

he said, "..the inferiority complex from which we were suffering."

You see, for most ordinary people,

the British bomb was all about our national virility.

It was a kind of atomic Viagra, restoring our political manhood,

and it sent a very clear message to the rest of the world -

to Moscow and to Washington - don't mess with Britain.

# Don't they know, it's the end of the world? #

At a time of unprecedented austerity,

nuclear weapons were extraordinarily expensive.

When Churchill returned to power in 1951, he discovered that

Attlee had secretly spent ?100 million on atomic hardware.

To its critics, the real problem with Britain's bomb

wasn't that it was expensive, it was that it was wrong.

Even Churchill himself, in his last great Commons speech in 1955,

acknowledged the moral dilemmas of the nuclear age.

"By a process of sublime irony..." he said, "..we have reached

"a stage where safety will be the sturdy child of terror,

"and survival, the twin brother of annihilation."

By the mid-'50s, Britain was promising its children longer

and healthier lives than ever.

And yet, it was also preparing for Armageddon.

Here was the central paradox of Cold War Britain.

High hopes of a better future,

beside a terrible dread that we might all be doomed anyway.

But while the world still turned, one thing seemed certain -

the bomb had put Britain back in the top rank

of the world's great powers.

# Wonderful, it's marvellous

# You should care for me... #

October 1956, and here outside Covent Garden's Royal Opera House,

people had been queuing for three days

for the hottest tickets in town.

It's amazing. We've been doing this for about ten years at Covent Gardens,

so we're quite used to it.

But we've never had a three-day queue.

For London's culture vultures, this was an evening not to be missed.

A rare British appearance by the Bolshoi Ballet.

Well, I think it's the only way of getting to see the Russians.

As I've said before, if they're going to come all the way from Moscow,

the least I can do is make an effort to see them.

I should never like to go there to do it.

The performance even had the royal seal of approval.

The Bolshoi was Russian culture at its most glorious -

glittering and exotic.

It was also a shiny example of Soviet soft power -

art in the service of communism.

But even as the dancers were gliding across the London stage,

another European capital was experiencing another

different kind of Russian visit.

DRAMATIC CLASSICAL MUSIC

The night the Bolshoi captivated London has

gone down in history as Bloody Thursday.

Because hundreds of miles

away on the Great Hungarian Plain, Soviet tanks were rumbling

towards Budapest in a raw display of old-fashioned hard power.

In 1956 the people of Hungary had risen

up against their communist masters.

The Kremlin promptly sent in the tanks, and even as the Bolshoi

lit up London, the Red Army opened fire on the Budapest crowds.

NEWSREEL: Hungarians began a heroic bid for freedom with

a fight for life against red oppression.

By the end of the uprising,

thousands of Hungarians had lost their lives.

Never had there been a more brutal or a more spectacular

demonstration of the Soviet Union's determination to crush all

dissent behind the Iron Curtain.

But here in London, Hungary wasn't even the first

item on the agenda for Sir Anthony Eden's Conservative government.

Because, at the every moment the Red Army was

rumbling into Budapest, British tanks were taking

part in an equally controversial military adventure.

# Please, please, please, please... #

Months before, the Egyptian Government had nationalised

the Suez Canal -

long thought vital to Britain's imperial interests.

Now, Eden was trying to snatch it back.

But his timing couldn't have been worse.

As the crises of Suez and Hungary unfolded side-by-side,

the limits of British power were painfully exposed.

In Hungary, The Kremlin ignored the West's hand-wringing protests

and mercilessly throttled a popular revolution.

But at Suez, the Americans refused to back our little show

of military strength and Britain was forced into a red-faced withdrawal.

For the British people, the events of 1956 were a humiliating

lesson in the harsh new realities of the Cold War world.

Out of the ashes of the Second World War, Britain found itself in

a new and deadly global struggle.

We dreamed that our children would inhabit a better world.

Richer, cleaner and safer than ever.

But Cold War Britain was a land of nightmares.

And in the future,

we would live every day on the brink of apocalypse.

BOOM

Next time...

Britain gets more prosperous, the world gets more dangerous

and the Cold War becomes a morally murky business.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd