Churchill - First Season

Winston Churchill - a giant of history,

famous for his inspiring leadership.

Advance, Britannia. Long live the cause of freedom.

But behind the legend lies a complicated character.

People tend to see Churchill, the icon,

Churchill, the bulldog warrior.

And, of course, that's not the whole story.

He was an aristocrat and a man of the people.

It says a lot for his charisma and his humility

that he was accepted and liked.

A trailblazer, who also had questionable beliefs.

He is an old-school imperialist.

He calls Indian people "the dusky nation".

This is the story of the man behind the myth,

using rarely seen footage, personal photographs

and told by those who knew him well.

When my grandfather was at home, everything revolved around him.

Seemed to be a natural way of life.

This is the real Churchill.

This time, it's 1945 and the last summer of the Second World War.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill has led Britain to the brink

of victory, but he's far from done.

He's absolutely desperate to carry on and doesn't believe that anyone

could do what he could do.

Churchill calls a general election.

He expects voters will give him another five years at Number Ten.

It never crossed their mind that the election was going to be lost.

Churchill is in for a shock.

It's VE Day, 1945.

After five years of war, all over Britain,

people are partying in the streets

because Nazi Germany has just surrendered.

With Japan still fighting,

the Second World War is far from over.

But victory in Europe is huge.

VE Day is a day of national celebration, so you can see

from all the newsreel footage

what a tremendous outpouring of emotion and relief there is.

In central London, the streets are taken over

by hundreds of thousands of people.

They all have one thing in mind.

There is one man who's like

a lightning conductor for all this emotion,

one man that the people want to see, even above and beyond the king

on that day. It's Winston Churchill who seems, for so many people,

to have personified this tremendous effort

to escape from the clutches of a very, very grave threat

to national existence.

Churchill leaves Buckingham Palace and joins the throng.

Whenever he tries to go anywhere in his open-top car,

he is absolutely mobbed and people

are just so excited and happy to see him.

The climax of this adoration of Churchill comes late that afternoon.

He's at this government building overlooking Parliament Square.

He emerges onto the balcony here

to give a short speech to the crowd below.

And when there is that wonderful moment, where he opens with,

"This is your victory," and the crowd immediately roars back,

"No, it is yours," you can sense just how much of a sense

of gratitude and appreciation there is towards Winston Churchill,

who is quite clearly, on that day, being seen

as the architect of victory.

Churchill returns to Downing Street.

He earlier made sure the capital won't run out of beer

and outside his front door,

the street party continues deep into the night.

But Churchill is hard at work,

dealing with his usual evening correspondence -

a pile of urgent telegrams, six inches high.

Tonight, many are congratulatory.

One, from a close associate, seems to sum up the nation's feelings.

"It is you who have led, uplifted and inspired us"

"through the worst days."

"Without you, this day would not have been."

He was the hero of the whole country.

People were shouting and cheering at my grandfather.

It was an extraordinary day.

He was almost all-powerful.

The man was now a legend.

I think you can go even further than that.

He's almost seen like a Christ-like figure, a man who'd,

kind of, taken the nation's sufferings on his own shoulder

and had walked the nation through those dark days

and inspired courage and confidence.

Churchill is also a broken man.

If you see any footage of Churchill during May 1945,

when the war is over,

here's another thing. He looks knackered.

He looks absolutely worn out.

Was in his 71st year,

and he was physically

far from his old self.

The fact was that he was exhausted.

He was a man of astonishing resilience, but he was not young.

I think it's interesting to juxtapose

this image of Churchill in May 1945

with some of the images that we've seen of him

entering Downing Street in May 1940.

The figure is still ostensibly the same -

you've got the same dress, you've got the same bow tie,

you've got the omnipresent cigar -

but you can see the ravages of the war

and the result of the premiership on his face and in his bearing.

He looks less steady, less confident

than he did five years before.

He was exhausted.

The stress level must have been terrific,

but he kept going, and so by the time they got to VE Day,

if you imagine when you've run a double marathon and you stop,

you want to collapse.

And I'm sure at the end of the war, he wanted to collapse.

Throughout the five years he's been Britain's war leader,

Churchill has pushed his body to the limits.

He suffered a suspected heart attack and three bouts of pneumonia.

He's having to be carried out of key meetings

in the underground cabinet war rooms

by groups of Marines because he's no longer capable

of getting up the steep stairs.

His wife, Clementine, is so worried about his health,

she thinks it's time for drastic action.

She wants him to retire.

He has done his duty for his country.

He's done it brilliantly.

Now is the time to step back and do other things, enjoy himself,

not put himself under such pressure.

And she's worried that otherwise his health will give way completely

and that this might be the only way that he can extend his life.

Of course, she suspects he might not have much time left.

Despite his exhaustion, Churchill does not agree with his wife

about giving up his premiership.

He's absolutely desperate to carry on.

Churchill really thinks that he is, kind of, THE key

to the post-war era.

He has a huge appreciation of his own role and doesn't believe

that anyone could do what he could do.

Churchill's first plan for staying in power

is to keep everything as it is.

Throughout the war, parliamentary rivalries

and general elections have been set aside.

And though Churchill is a Conservative,

his government is not.

He's invited leading figures from all the parties

to serve in his war cabinet.

And it's a real testament to the political skill of Churchill

that they've managed to keep this show on the road

for such a long time.

When we think of Winston Churchill now, we tend to think of him

as this, sort of, bulldog warrior -

very obstinate, set on getting his own way, stubborn.

The truth was that he could often be

far more consultative and collaborative.

Even though Germany is now defeated,

Churchill wants to keep his all-party government going.

This is a way that he would, kind of, guarantee that he would maintain

his position in Downing Street.

He's been very successful at playing the three main parties

off against one another

and making sure that he's indispensable in the middle.

Two weeks after VE Day, Churchill gets a phone call with bad news.

It's from Blackpool,

where the Labour Party is having their annual conference.

They've decided to pull out of the war cabinet,

and so end Churchill's all-party government.

Churchill is rather crestfallen by this

and wanted to keep things going,

but Churchill's desire is simply not going to be fulfilled.

There is now only one way Churchill can stay in power.

Even though the war is still going on,

he'll have to call a general election.

Churchill asks his colleagues if he'll win.

According to the experts around Churchill,

Churchill's own towering personal popularity,

allied to the VE Day feelgood factor -

well, there's a sense in which those two things might well deliver

to the Conservatives a pretty decent victory.

Churchill is told he'll get a majority of at least 60.

He expected victory because this is what all the most expert observers

had told him was to be expected.

Even the Labour Party experts predict Churchill will win.

But experts can be wrong.

It's a few days since Churchill's all-party government collapsed.

In the gardens at Number Ten,

the men who served in it are having a last get-together.

These are the politicians from all parties who've helped

Churchill defeat Nazi Germany.

And there is a good bit of alcohol taken.

There's a lot of backslapping.

They're quaffing a glass or two together and reminiscing.

Churchill can be seen here walking beside Labour leader Clement Attlee.

These two men should be political enemies, but they've worked together

for five difficult years and they've become close.

Attlee certainly as a huge degree of reverence for Churchill.

And he's really in awe of Churchill's rhetorical ability.

And, of course, he's seen Churchill up close and personal

for the last five years.

He's seen the weight of decisions that have been on his shoulders.

There's a definite kind of chalk-and-cheese aspect

of their personalities.

But I would say it's a relationship of mutual respect.

Having welcomed Attlee and his colleagues,