Channel 4 Making Secret History Recent with New Commissions

Channel 4 today announces four bold new programme announcements which represent the new direction of the Secret History strand on the channel. Channel 4 Specialist Factual Commissioning Editor Rob Coldstream is shifting the focus to extraordinary events and untold stories of recent decades.

Saddam Goes to Hollywood reveals the extraordinary story of Saddam Hussein's farcical venture into the movie business, how he bankrolled an epic action movie, with a multimillion pound budget which cast notorious hell-raiser Oliver Reed in the lead.

Britain's most prolific police marksman Tony Long speaks out for the first time In Secrets of a Police Marksman (w/t). Deployed on hundreds of dangerous operations to bring down terrorists, armed robbers and hostage takers, he has been behind some of the UK's most controversial police shootings. In 2015 he found himself in the dock on trial  for murder in the controversial killing of gang member Azelle Rodney.

Surrounded by the Taliban (w/t) reveals, for the first time, how a company of British soldiers came under siege for more than 50 days in a remote desert town in Afghanistan in 2006. Trapped in a small compound, outgunned, outnumbered, and at the mercy of the Taliban, the fight to hold Musa Quala became one of the most famous last stands in British history - a quarter of all the ammunition used by the British Army in the whole of 2006 was fired in less than two months. For the first time, surviving ex-soldiers tell their story and share the footage they captured.

The Good Terrorist (w/t) follows the story  of John Harris, the one white political prisoner executed by South Africa’s Apartheid state. Harris, a prominent anti-apartheid activist, shocked his county in the 1960s by placing a bomb in Johannesburg train station. Though warnings were given, the bomb exploded with devastating consequences.

All four films are 60 minute one-offs and will air as Secret Histories between July and September.

Coldstream says: "These programmes all revisit but also, crucially, shed new light on significant moments in our recent history. Like Interview with a Murderer, which engaged 1.7 million viewers with one of Britain's most infamous unsolved child murders and miscarriages of justice, these films are full of drama and pack a big emotional punch, whilst also providing timely new insights into the big events which helped form the world we live in today."