Two Documentaries worth a watch on BBC iPlayer.
The Bank That Almost Broke Britain which has everything you could not make up in any movie. Corruption, greed, financial ruin, megalomania and of course you and I bailing the banks out to the tune of a £Trillion, which of course we will never see again.
Ten years on from the global financial crash, this documentary tells the extraordinary story of how a small Scottish bank briefly grew to become the biggest in the world before collapsing and triggering the largest financial bail-out in British history. It focuses on a single day, 7 October 2008, when the Royal Bank of Scotland collapsed and almost took the entire UK banking system down with it. This dramatic financial thriller, set over 24 hours, is intercut with the story of the amazing rise and shocking fall of RBS.
The film reveals how much of RBS's growth lay in the lucrative American subprime market and acquisitions of banks like Greenwich Capital, which were using CDOs to generate huge profits. And as RBS's profits grew spectacularly, so did its lavish spending. Goodwin flew in private RBS jets and commissioned a new £350m HQ on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Never-before-seen footage reveals the spectacular opening party at Gogarburn, attended by the Queen and the cream of Scottish society. But less than three years later, thanks largely to the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the US, Goodwin's bank was on its knees, and those charged with protecting the British economy were faced with a stark choice - save RBS or risk the country's banking system being taken down by its collapse. Alistair Darling and the team reveal what it was like to have just 24 hours to come up with a plan and strike a deal with all of Britain's major banks, with the nation's economy at stake. In all, the bailout was to cost the taxpayer well over a trillion pounds and would effectively take RBS into public ownership. Fred Goodwin was forced to leave the bank that he had run for eight extraordinary years, but public anger centred on the fact that he hung on to most of his huge RBS pension and that no further action was taken against him, his team or the board of RBS. However, in 2012 he was stripped of his knighthood.
Ten years on since that dramatic collapse and bailout, the film finally explores the widespread sense of injustice that 'over many years the gains were privatised to the bankers', but in the last decade all the pain had been 'nationalised' to the ordinary people of the UK, and asks how much of the political turmoil we now find ourselves in can be traced directly back to the bailout of the bank that almost broke Britain.
The second is The Flu That killed 50 Million although as it said that could have been up to 100 Million. Unfortunately perhaps the greatest Hibernian of all time Dan McMichael succumbed to this in 1919.
Contains some upsetting scenes.
It is 1918 and the end of WWI. Millions have died, and the world is exhausted by war. But soon a new horror is sweeping the world, a terrifying virus that will kill more than fifty million people - the Spanish flu. Using dramatic reconstruction and eyewitness testimony from doctors, soldiers, civilians and politicians, this one-off special brings to life the onslaught of the disease, the horrors of those who lived through it and the efforts of the pioneering scientists desperately looking for the cure.
Narrated by Christopher Eccleston, the film also asks whether, a century later, the lessons learnt in 1918 might help us fight a future global flu pandemic.
Both are brilliant in different ways.
BIG G
