THE STORY OF COSTUME DRAMA: The Greatest Stories Ever Told

• March 2, 2012

Saturday, March 3 at 9:30 p.m.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

A celebration of 50 years of small-screen historical costume drama — the genre that has brought bans in America and complaints from the Royal Family while creating massive stars in some of the most memorable and best-loved series ever broadcast on PBS — this is a wide-ranging special, covering love and war, birth and death, the rich and the poor. THE STORY OF THE COSTUME DRAMA, narrated by Keeley Hawes, shows the audience how the genre has changed across the decades — from "The Forsyte Saga" to "Upstairs Downstairs," "Brideshead Revisited" to "I, Claudius" — with feature interviews with the stars of the series and the people behind the camera responsible for them, from the writers to the location managers.