The final bonus episode to accompany this political films series also happens to be David’s favourite political film (if favourite means comfort-viewing!): Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop (2009). A biting satire of British and American politics in the run-up to the Iraq war, it’s also hilarious, affectionate, and very, very sweary. No swearing in this episode, but plenty of talk about what makes it so funny. Plus: how does this version of New Labour politics c.2003 match up to the real thing?

The second of our two bonus episodes on Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah (1985) explores the testimony of those who saw what was happening in Treblinka, Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto. How did they bear it? How did they live to tell the tale? When did the certainty of death change the calculus of resistance? And what does this film’s story-telling succeed in preserving when all else is lost?

The first of two bonus episodes about Claude Lanzmann’s epic 9-hour documentary Shoah (1985) recording eye-witness testimony from survivors of, bystanders to and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Part one explores how the extermination of the Jews became a reality for those who experienced it first-hand. How did something unimaginable become something unavoidable? When did the unfathomable truth of what was happening hit home? And how on earth did Lanzmann get his witnesses to talk?

This bonus episode for PPF+ to accompany our bad ideas series is about what’s gone wrong with the idea of sovereignty. David talks to historian of ideas Lucia Rubinelli about how a seventeenth-century vision of politics still exerts its grip in the twenty-first century. Why does political authority have to have a single source? What are the alternatives? And did Brexit really give the UK its sovereignty back?

David talks to Helen Thompson about Francis Ford Coppola’s manic masterpiece of the Vietnam War Apocalypse Now (1979), a film that almost destroyed its director and some of its cast. What is its relationship to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? What is it trying to say about American culture and American power? And is its subject in the end the madness of movie-making itself?

Why do so many American presidents say that Westerns are their favourite movies in general and Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) is their favourite in particular? David looks at how the story of Marshal Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper, chimes with many politicians’ experiences of high office. Let down by his deputy, his predecessor, the mayor, the judge and the people, he has to go it alone to get the job done. Is this how presidents see themselves? Are they right or are they kidding themselves?