Historian Dominic Sandbrook takes us back to the strange years of the Cold War. For Sandbrook these are the years in which we were both more secure and prosperous that we had ever been - and at the same time, lived everyday with the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation. This is not just a story of the superpower arms race or daring spies, real and fictional, it is a story in which all we played a crucial part.

In the first episode, Dominic brings his trademark mix of great archive and surprising storytelling to the first chilling years of the conflict, when the great stand-off between Western capitalism and Soviet communism began.

In the second episode, Dominic looks at the frontline of the conflict as a newly prosperous Britain of consumerism was pitched against the Soviet ideal of communism.

Historian Dominic Sandbrook concludes his lively and surprising history of Britain during the years of the Cold War.

He plunders the archive and music of the late 1970s and the 1980s to bring to life an era in which the end of the world seemed a very real possibility, years in which our leaders crusaded as never before against a struggling Soviet empire and everything from sport to shopping to British pop music became potent weapons in the life and death struggle with communism.