Richard Helms

The Watergate Caper is an archival documentary, narrated by Harry Shearer (This is Spinal Tap), tracing the rise and fall of Nixon from the presidential primaries of 1968 through the Watergate break-in of June 1972 to his resignation two years later, killing trust in the political process and the American presidency in the wake of the Vietnam War. The film draws on hundreds of hours of TV news taped off-air by the Nixon White House to tell the untold story of the Watergate burglars. How did tapping the wrong phone with a bug that didn't work lead to their arrests and Nixon's resignation? It also explores representations of the Nixon years in popular culture, using the music, commercials, and cinema of the era to evoke a fevered political landscape of culture wars, dirty tricks, paranoia and assassination.

World in Action was Granada Television’s flagship ITV current affairs series, running from 7 Jan 1963 to 7 Dec 1998, and built a reputation for film-led investigative reporting and a forceful editorial stance. Its journalism produced major public and political repercussions—including investigations associated with miscarriages of justice such as the Birmingham Six—and it also served as a platform for landmark documentary projects, including the first broadcast of “Seven Up!” as part of the strand in 1964.