This documentary drama describes what happened during a secret meeting of 15 top-ranking Nazi officials in a villa at Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin, on January 20, 1942. SS general Reinhard Heydrich convened the meeting to ensure the implementation of the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish “problem”. By this time, Jews were being transported to Eastern Europe, and some of them killed. Heydrich presented the members of the SS and the German government directly involved with the fact that what was planned was nothing less than the systematic extermination of European Jewry.

Starring Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich, the play is based on the one surviving record of the meeting, found after the war in the files of the German foreign ministry. It gives a chilling insight into the mentality of the men as they moved from the persecution of Jews to elimination, and passed from considering the legality of what was proposed to the practicality of mass murder on such a scale. The result is a compelling drama about the banality of evil and a useful aid to understanding the history of the Second World War.

BEST FOR SCHOOLS

Animated Tales of the World C4, Mondays, 9.45-10am

A further series of these delightful animated films opens with a tale from Australia, followed in successive weeks by others from Burkina Faso, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece and the Gulf states. Designed chiefly for seven to 11-year-olds, they can be used as the starting point for work on literacy, geography, history, storytelling and art.

BEST OF THE REST

How to Build a Human BBC2, Sunday, 9-9.50pm

Gender is the main topic of this third programme in the series, in particular the hormones that determine masculinity and femininity - and what differences they make. Do men and women think in different ways? The film follows an Israeli woman as she is treated with testosterone so that she can change sex, and discovers how this affects herhis reaction times and other responses to set tests as the treatment proceeds.

One expert claims to be able to predict which of five athletes will win a race by measuring the length of their fingers (an indication of how much testosterone they received before birth). Will he be proved right? (Would they show the experiment if he were wrong?) Civil War BBC2, Monday, January 28, 8.30-9pm

Charles I was beheaded on January 30, 1649, and his arrest, trial and execution form the chief subject of this final part in Dr Tristram Hunt’s series. Even after more than 350 years, it is easy to understand what a dramatic step it was for Parliament to put a king on trial for his life, and how radical were the debates in the New Model Army on religion, society and politics. No wonder the period still exercises a fascination for historians, even though the Commonwealth was to last for a mere 10 years after Charles’s death and the form of monarchy restored in 1660 would prove more durable than most of those elsewhere in Europe.

ROBIN BUSS

Full educational programme schedules can be found online at www.bbc.co.ukeducationlzone sched.shtmlwww.4learning.co.uk programmesspring2002.cfm