Surviving Disaster
UKTV History, 4pm/9pm
The third film this week recounting the Munich air disaster of 50 years ago today that killed eight of Busby’s Babes.
Summits
BBC Four, 9pm
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Professor David Reynolds’s fascinating series continues with the fateful meeting between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 1961. Reynolds’s painstaking setting of the scene and psychological profiling of the two men provide convincing explanations for what happened and how. Khrushchev couldn’t help seeing his own, no-good son in JFK. The President, pumped up on drugs for a bad back, couldn’t resist dangerous theoretical arguments. No peace was made and the meeting brought about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a “disastrous duel,” says Reynolds, that should never have happened.
Kelsey Grammer
Biography, 9pm
Kelsey Grammer’s father and sister were murdered, and his beloved grandfather died when he was only 12. Here, entertainment hacks explain how he channelled his pain into his acting - creating the character of Frasier Crane - and masked it off-stage with alcoholism and drug abuse. Maybe that’s why there are no celebrity friends here to tell his story.
Blitz: London’s Firestorm
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Discovery, 10pm
Another chance to see this Channel 4 documentary, broadcast in two parts. It describes the German bombing raid on December 29, 1940, which ringed St Paul’s in flames. “You could see the dome floating,” one witness recalls, “almost as if it was rising above the sea.” Eyewitnesses describe the smell, heat and noise of the inferno, illustrated with footage shot by the Fire Brigade Film Unit.