Episodes

Rerun. Soviet naval officer Vasili Arkhipov may not have the name recognition of Castro, Kruschev and Kennedy – but his actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis on 27th October, 1962 almost certainly prevented World War Three from erupting.  On-board a sweltering Russian submarine, he talked Captain valentyn Savitsky down from firing a nuclear torpedo at […]

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral – a 30-second shootout between lawmen and outlaws – occurred on October 26, 1881, in the small US mining town of Tombstone. When the smoke cleared, three people lay dead.  The gunfight might have remained little more than a minor footnote in the history of the Old West, except

On 25th October, 1668, Elizabeth Pepys walked in on her maid and her husband – the inveterate restoration shagger Samuel Pepys – in a position so compromising that Samuel himself could only bear to describe it using a mixture of French and Latin. And even though Pepys charted a period that included the Great Fire

Mr Blobby made his anarchic television debut on 24th October, 1992, in a new segment called “Gotcha” on the hugely popular BBC show Noel’s House Party. The googly eyed, perma-grinning, yellow and pink character was an immediate hit, selling masses of merchandise to British kids and adults alike. At the height of Blobbymania, Mr Blobby

Frank Lloyd Wright’s extraordinary Guggenheim building finally flung open its doors on 21st October, 1959, after a gestation period of two decades – during which time both Wright, and Solomon Guggenheim himself, had died. The reaction was mixed. Art critics panned the design, likening it to “a washing machine”, an “inverted oatmeal bowl”, and an

Rerun. William Alnutt tipped arsenic into the family sugar bowl on 20th October, 1847 – and five days later, the 12 year-old’s sweet-toothed grandfather, Samuel Nelme, was dead.  It was the second time the deeply troubled Alnutt had attempt to murder to his grandfather, after a failed plot to shoot him with a pistol in

Richard Bacon was sacked from Blue Peter after The News of the World revealed he had taken cocaine; an event which was explained to the show’s young viewers by Lorraine Heggessy, then head of Children’s BBC, on 19th October, 1998. The escapade came to light after Bacon’s best friend sold the story via Max Clifford;

The East Java Ninja Scare – an outbreak of mass hysteria in East Java, Indonesia that led to hundreds of deaths – reached its peak with a massacre of suspected ‘sorcerers’ on 18th October, 1998. Essentially a witch-hunt in which vulnerable misfits were targeted for slaughter by superstitious vigilante mobs, the violence nonetheless had its

The London Beer Flood, which created a 15ft-high wave of booze, and claimed the lives of eight people, began on 17th October, 1814 – when an iron hoop came loose on a giant barrel at Meux’s famous Horse Shoe Brewery. The barrel, in which over a million pints of fermenting porter were brewing, exploded –

Henry Blair, the only inventor ever denoted as a ‘colored man’ in the records of US Patent Office, received a patent for his invention of a mechanical corn planter on 14th October, 1834. For decades, it was believed this was the first example of an African-American inventor receiving a US patent. The truth turns out