Rated M, 512 mins

Roadshow (Fremantle Media)

9/10 stars

For all the dappled soft-focus colours of nostalgia, the 1960s was a violent decade.

Revolution was in the air, but it was not the political structures that fell, more the ramparts of suburbia. The lives of women, racial minorities and gays began a radical transformation.

The story is ably told in this mammoth presentation; mammoth though there could have been more. For a start, this is the American 1960s – with foreign entities mainly rendered as the baddies: the Soviets, the Vietnamese communists, the Cubans. No, you won't hear about Australia's role in the Vietnam War.

Tom Hanks is your avuncular part-host, with a few nostalgia-ridden buddies. We happily join them on the track; they don't hog the limelight too much.

JFK dies in Dallas in episode one (a recounting refreshingly clear-headed on the conspiracy nonsense) but reappears throughout, directing America's energies moonwards and against the Soviets.

The Vietnam War episode strips away some of the cinematic chest-beating and reminds us of the tower of official lies that cost so many lives.

Martin Luther King is the centrepiece of the episode on the civil rights movement but in a welcome move, other figures emerges from history's shadows. We see a rare time, 1964-65, when politics and civil movements were in harmony, before Vietnam shattered a hard-won consensus.

And 1968 gets its own segment: the year King and a second Kennedy were shot dead; the year America, as ubiquitous newsman Dan Rather astutely puts it, bent but did not break.

You'll yearn for lighter fare, and it's here: with a fresh look at American Beatlemania and the rise of television as the cornerstone of the entertainment industry. Sneers at the "idiot box" and "boob tube" can't obviate the fact that it offered many gems in a sea of dross; that news reporting came of age on the medium, and that talk-show hosts were more than shills for a star's latest movie.

The "Space Race" bracketed the decade. In July 1969, Neil Armstrong plants the American flag on the moon. After what they'd been through, after what they'd put the rest of the world through, you couldn't decry them this moment.

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