ABC Documentaries

Join Tony Robinson on an archaeological dig unearthing details of Ned Kelly’s infamous last gun battle in 1880. Ned Kelly Uncovered follows the first ever excavation of the Glenrowan Inn site where the iconic Australian bushranger and his gang holed up for a showdown with police. Nearly 130 years later, can a team of archaeologists and historians reveal new insights into Ned Kelly’s final moments of freedom? With expert commentary from Kelly experts Ian Jones and Alex McDermott, this one-hour documentary follows a seven-week dig led by archaeologist Adam Ford. As the archaeologists unearth a host of artefacts including cartridges and bullets, the team conducts tests with fascinating results. Meanwhile, the historians strip back the myth, piecing together the clues to give a detailed new look at an iconic Australian, literally from the ground up.

20 years ago novelist Salman Rushdie was a wanted man with a million pound bounty on his head. His novel The Satanic Verses had sparked riots across the Muslim world. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini invoked a fatwa, effectively sentencing the writer to death. Rushdie was immediately forced into hiding. This film looks back on the extraordinary events which followed the book’s publication and the ten year campaign to have the fatwa lifted. Arguably this was the moment when religious identities, in Britain and abroad, became more important than ethnic and cultural belonging.

To mark the anniversary of JFK's assassination on November 22,1963, hundreds of hours of news footage, radio reports, audio recordings and home movies have been released that captured history as it was chaotically unfolding. This unique eyewitness material was first stored by local news stations in Dallas/Fort Worth and then in the vault of The 6th Floor Museum—which is dedicated to helping others understand the day Kennedy was killed. Now, this rarely seen archival footage that has been digitally captured and assembled into a detailed timeline. Included is footage capturing the real-time horror of parade-goers who witnessed the killing, the out-of- breath local anchors reporting the breaking news bulletin, the priest who describes administering the president's last rites and the ongoing, on-air speculation over who fired the fatal shots.