Inside Story — Season 8

Aired 10 May 1989

Do we have the right to involve animals in our own military destruction? Animal war heroes, such as Rob the parachuting dog, have achieved amazing feats. Animals still play an extraordinary role - the US Navy sent six dolphins to the Gulf War. But they are increasingly exploited on another front line; the military laboratory.

Aired 17 May 1989

A 17-year-old tourist stabbed to death. A young woman taken hostage and raped. Just two of the 16,000 crimes that occurred last year on London's Underground. For the first time, a BBC film crew goes undercover with the 'Moles', a specialist. Underground police unit. Heavily outnumbered, the 'Moles' contend with an army of muggers, pickpockets, molesters, drunks and hooligans. As for the Guardian Angels: 'They've got to be a good idea,' says one detective.

Aired 24 May 1989

'To know is to avert, if you know the future you can change it,' says Hollywood psychic Kebrina Kincade. All over America, from the psychic tearooms of Sunset Strip to the salons of Beverly Hills, more and more people are leaving their psychotherapists and heading for psychics. Some, like Catherine Oxenberg , won't make a move without consulting hers. In this film with the help of Dolphin Man, astrologer Jacqui Stallone , fat Bernice, and Mafu the 1,000-year-old man 'channelled' by Oregon housewife Penny Torres , we look at the 'seekers'; how they are helped or hindered by what the future holds ...

Aired 31 May 1989

A woman is battered in her own home. Trying to escape, she's dragged back by her feet and attacked with an axe. Only a 999 call saves her life. Horrific, but for Police Sergeant Colette Paul and Police Constable Annette O'Reilly , it is tragically familiar. They volunteered to run the first domestic violence unit in a British police station in Tottenham, London, which has since dealt with more than 2,000 local incidents. For Britain's real life 'Cagney and Lacey' the violence never seems to end.

Aired 7 June 1989

The Americans have just finished an experiment which allowed television networks to plug into criminal courts. The test case was the trial of Joel B. Steinberg , a wealthy Manhattan lawyer accused of murder. The only witness was his live-in lover, Hedda Nussbaum , a children's book editor who had been battered by Steinberg over 12 years. Some stations took off soaps and game shows to run Nussbaum's testimony live. It raised important social issues, and put the cameras themselves on trial....

Aired 14 June 1989 • 50 min

In the last year there has been another wave of executions of political prisoners in Iran's prisons. How can a revolution have come to this? In The Road to Terror, revolutionaries tell how their dream descended into a nightmare of terror and execution. They speak as exiles in Paris, a city preparing to celebrate the glories of the first mass revolution of 1789. Behind its strange images, the struggle for power in the Iranian revolution has followed a pattern uncannily similar to many of the great revolutions of the past. Just like 200 years ago in France, the Iranian revolution has gone down the old road from liberation to repression, the road to terror.

Aired 21 June 1989

Documentary that reviews the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the U.S. Marine physician who was convicted of the 1970 murder of his wife and two young daughters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Aired 30 August 1989

Over ten years, the secret intelligence service MI6 infiltrated about 30 British agents into the Soviet Union to operate with anti-Communist partisans. By 1954, Harry Carr, MI6 chief, believed that his spy network stretched from the Baltic States to Siberia. Then Carr discovered that MI6 was the victim of an astonishing sting organised and orchestrated by the KGB. Not surprisingly, the disaster was covered up and the blame erroneously placed upon the traitor, Kim Philby. For the first time, the inside story of an MI6 operation is told by MI6's officers and agents and, uniquely, by those on the other side of the Iron Curtain - the KGB officers who deceived Britain's pride - the Secret Intelligence Service.

Aired 6 September 1989

'I'm probably one of the last bounty hunters left in America,' says Leonard Padilla , a gun-toting Mexican with a black sombrero. Padilla and his two sidekicks go after fugitives who've jumped bail - and they boast a 100 per cent success rate. Are they romantic leftovers from the wild west, or villains running roughshod over citizens' rights? This film follows them in the pursuit and dramatic capture of an armed drug-dealer.

Aired 13 September 1989

Why do radishes weep and cabbages demonstrate with Placards? What's it like to fly through the air on a large pink pig or watch your father dancing on a wardrobe in a frilly ballerina's tutu? What do you feel like when you fall off a cliff - and how do you stop the nightmares that come after you have watched as masked men shoot your grandfather? Find out in tonight's Inside Story, as dream counsellor Brenda Mallon talks to the children of Belfast, Manchester and Cambridgeshire.

Aired 20 September 1989

In a country where cosmetics, condoms, tights, tissues and tampons are largely unavailable, and where alcoholism and abortion are commonplace, some Soviet women doubt whether a beauty competition would improve their way of life. This doesn't stop 'pretty girls' from all over the USSR converging on Moscow. Their hopes, dreams and disillusionment are the inside story of Miss USSR.

Aired 27 September 1989

At 6.01pm on 4 April 1968, Dr Martin Luther King was shot dead by a sniper in Memphis, Tennessee. Who fired that shot and why? For more than 20 years, the man convicted of King's murder, James Earl Ray, has protested his innocence. He says he was framed. Now Inside Story's dramatic new investigation closely examines the evidence and seriously questions whether Ray actually pulled the trigger. After an extensive inquiry in America, the film tracks down key witnesses, who provide startling new allegations about the conspiracy to kill Dr King.

Aired 4 October 1989

During the years 1939 to 1945, more than a quarter of a million European gypsies were rounded up and deported to ghettos and concentration camps, where they were gassed or starved to death. Through the moving testimony of gypsy survivors from Auschwitz and other camps, Inside Story tells for the first time on television how the Nazis planned the systematic genocide of the gypsy race. Filmed in Poland, Hungary, Austria, Belgium, Holland and Germany, their story is the Forgotten Holocaust.

Aired 29 November 1989

Aired 29 November 1989