Days That Shook The World – The Complete First Season + Pilot (BBC DVD Set)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: D    Episodes: C+

 

 

Representing a shift I am not the biggest fan of, documentary TV series are replacing hard facts with faint and often boring, extended recreations of the events with no name actors and barely credible locations as if they were actual archive footage.  Days That Shook The World – The Complete First Season + Pilot (2003) with 13 such shows including such diverse subjects as:

 

P) First In Flight: The Wright Brothers/The Moon Landing

1) Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II/Death of Diana

2) Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand/Death of Hitler

3) Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr./Release of Nelson Mandela

4) Hiroshima

5) Murder of the Romanovs/Fall of Berlin Wall

6) Kristallnacht/Birth of Israel

7) Tutankhamun’s Tomb/Rosetta Stone

8) First Nuclear Reactor/Chernobyl

9) Black September/Lockerbie

10) Assassination of JFK/Resignation of Nixon

11) Marconi’s First Radio Transmission/Concorde’s First Transatlantic Flight

12) Chuck Yeager & Bluebird

 

 

The contrasts are at least interesting, but not as intriguing all the time as the titles suggest.  Still, some history is better than none and this is at least a half-decent introductory series to the history discussed.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is good and clean, if not spectacular and has detail limits in what looks like an early HD shoot.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo is without surrounds, but is a more recent recording and fine for such a simple show.  There are no extras.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo