Edwardian Britain in the years before 1914, as Andrew Marr traces the forces pulling the country toward war and toward a version of itself we would recognize today. He follows the suffragette campaign as it turns from petitions to window-smashing and hunger strikes, and sits with the docker and miner strikes that shut down ports and coalfields over pay and conditions. Ireland's push for home rule runs alongside these fights, building toward a rupture with the Empire. In Whitehall, Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George work through naval and military strategy as the prospect of a European war becomes harder to ignore. Marr breaks up the political narrative with lighter footage of early aviators taking to the skies in flimsy biplanes, and with Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel touring the same music hall circuit before either reached Hollywood. Marr narrates throughout, using period footage and photographs to connect these separate stories into one account of a country reshaping its politics, its class relations, and its empire in the run-up to the First World War.