Jeremy Clarkson left Top Gear behind to present the second world war documentary PQ17: An Arctic Convoy Disaster, which was watched by 2.3 million viewers, a 9.1% share, between 9pm and 10pm.
In the absence of a Top Gear Christmas special, BBC2 will have Jeremy Clarkson telling the story of the Arctic convoys of the second world war in PQ17: an Arctic Convoy Disaster, and his Top Gear colleague James May will attempt to build a motorbike and sidecar entirely out of Meccano to race on the TT circuit on the Isle of Man.
Also in the 9pm hour, Channel 5's Celebrity Big Brother pulled in 2.4 million viewers and a 9.7% share; while BBC2's fast repeat of Jeremy Clarkson documentary PQ17: an Arctic Convoy Disaster, first broadcast last Thursday, drew 1.1 million and 5%.
The Dutch navy, sorely neglected for more than a half century, was utterly unprepared to battle the powerful British fleet, and the Dutch fleet's attempts to convoy their merchantmen brought only disaster.
After the disaster of the June convoy, Mr. Khan, the political agent, said he had a new plan to try to persuade moderate tribesmen, both Sunni and Shiite, who were now weary of the violence, to allow the opening of the 45-mile road that runs from the town of Thal along a deep, wide valley up to Parachinar.
What is different about this story is that there are no scenes of disaster to show, no military convoys to follow, no shameful confessions to broadcast, little actual news to report.
After the visit to the airport, Mr. Bush's motorcade drove a few miles through throngs of friendly onlookers to a Red Cross disaster center, where a truck labeled "Convoy of Hope," representing a religious relief group from Springfield, Mo., was parked outside.
Elsewhere, on the roads between the disaster areas and Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, convoys of ambulances, army trucks and civilian cars carrying aid supplies roared up and down.
Well-documented disasters such as the 2013 bombing of a wedding convoy in Yemen have led Human Rights Watch and others to call for the US to launch official investigations into particular strikes.
Instead, the report is a straightforward narrative of what went wrong for the 33 soldiers in the 18-vehicle convoy that became separated from the main Army column rolling north and inadvertently drove into disaster in Nasiriya, a city on the banks of Euphrates River.
During Fidel's funeral and funeral convoy across the island, there were few published accounts in the US of the disasters the Castros visited on Cuba's economy.
