Documentary / Drama / War & Politics
One month after the outbreak of World War I, Paris is bombarded by German airplanes. Parisians witness a whole new type of warfare. Five pilots from France, Germany, and Britain take us into the world of the greatest "flying aces" of the First World War.


The popular stars of the time go by names such as Richthofen, Guynemer, Fonck, Udet, and Mannock. These flying aces are shaping the course of the First World War. Planes are getting better and kill counts are going up. But fame and success are starting to wear on these pilots. With strategies still not coordinated, they draw resentment from foot soldiers who are dying by the thousands each day.

World War I is the mark of a major new innovation in warfare: airplanes capable of high speed raids, bombing and shooting from the air, spying, and backing up ground troops. But the planes of that era were flown with little in the way of instrumentation. Brave and daring men flew them, often to the point of recklessness. This episode introduces us to the great flying aces of World War I.

Ernst Udet
René Fonck

Georges Guynemer
Manfred von Richthofen

Edward 'Mick' Mannock

Hannay is a 1988 spin-off prequel series to the 1978 film adaptation of John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps which stars Robert Powell as Richard Hannay, a role which he reprises in the series, an Edwardian mining engineer from Rhodesia of Scottish origin. It features his adventures in pre-World War I Great Britain. These stories had little in common with Buchan's novels about the character, although some names are taken from his other novels.

This three-part political thriller follows the catastrophic chain of events leading up to World War I from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 to Britain's declaration of war on Germany 37 days later. This tense and gripping miniseries set among the corridors of power in Whitehall and Berlin tracks the unfolding crisis through the eyes of leading politicians and civil servants struggling to prevent the world's first global war. 37 Days unlocks the mystery of the war s origins, overturning assumptions about its inevitability, demonstrating that World War One was neither a chance happening nor was it a foregone conclusion.

A group of young men and women in Dublin in 1916 are embroiled in a fight for independence during the Easter Rising. The story begins with the outbreak of World War I. As expectations of a short and glorious campaign are dashed, social stability is eroded and Irish nationalism comes to the fore. The tumultuous events that follow are seen through the eyes of a group of friends from Dublin, Belfast and London as they play vital and conflicting roles in the narrative of Ireland's independence.