Europe's single currency began as a political dream and nearly ended as a financial catastrophe. BBC business editor Robert Peston traces that arc from Winston Churchill's postwar vision of a United States of Europe through the euro's launch to the bailouts of Greece, Portugal, and Ireland, talking to historians, economists, and the politicians who built and later had to rescue the project. He puts faces on the abstraction: an Irish property developer sitting on empty housing stock, a Rome taxi driver absorbing austerity, a German manufacturing worker whose taxes are underwriting bailouts he never voted for. The film reconstructs how close European banks came to a full meltdown and weighs what a euro collapse would mean for Britain, whose financial sector is deeply exposed to it. Peston's argument is blunt: the price of saving the currency has been high for ordinary workers, but he lays out why the alternative, unraveling monetary union altogether, could mean a return to 1930s-style economic chaos.