On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, will go back in time to examine his reports on one of the most defining moments of the 20th century. As he examines the BBC’s extensive archive he will consider why history has not turned out quite the way he hoped, and why global politics now is in fact even more complex and worrying now than it was then. On 9 November 1989, as the Berlin Wall’s check points opened up, Simpson rushed to Berlin to cover this incredible event which he thought, like many others, would change the world for the better. Three decades on, Simpson wonders if he was wrong to be so optimistic and talks with historians and other experts to try and understand just how accurate his reporting was. He’ll examine why the Cold War battle that built the Berlin Wall was replaced with other destabilising global power-struggles, why he didn’t predict that the pace of change across Europe would lead to the terrible war in Yugoslavia, and why Russia would find a new guise in which to become a bitter enemy to the West. At the heart of the film is an intense and personal interview where he describes how he grew up in the shadow of the Cold War power battle between the capitalist West and the communist East and how he never thought the Berlin Wall would fall in his lifetime. He believed, like everybody else, this global stand-off would continue for many more decades, ending sooner or later in nuclear war.