If you’ve saved your country what do you do for an encore? That was the question facing Winston Churchill in 1945. This film provides a distinctive new take on what drove this immense, difficult personality as he continued striving for power and reputation right into his eighties… Presented by leading Churchill expert, Professor David Reynolds of Cambridge University, the film combines in-depth analysis from David in evocative locations in the USA, Europe and Britain, powerful insights in interviews from surviving family, staff and political colleagues and revealing new archive footage which gets us closer to the real man behind the national icon we think we know. The aim is not to debunk Churchill but to show the hero as the rich three-dimensional character he really was - with superhuman energies and very human frailties. To understand the character of the man people have voted the ‘Greatest Briton’, we need to examine his last twenty years… Churchill refused to wither gracefully into a peaceful old age. Almost written off in 1945, he forced his way back on to the stage as a world statesman. Stinging from electoral defeat and criticism, he quite deliberately went about sealing his own place in history. Despite ill health including several strokes, he struggled back to the Prime Ministership, and reinvented himself as a man of peace. Here was an old man determined to control a reputation that others were already beginning to chip away. A man who, despite his failing health, remained busy - desperately busy - in order to stave off chronic depression. And in the process, as this programme reveals for the first time, he neglected his increasingly dysfunctional family life - with tragic consequences.