Hello, it's another installment of our experiment, old newscast, where we take what we do every day on newscast with the day's news, but apply it to a day from the recent past. And we had lots of requests for this one, the 9th of November, 1989, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

So if you suggested that, thank you very much. It's been absolutely fascinating.

But before we dive into what happened that night, a little quick bit of geography.

So it's the end of the Second World War. Germany gets divided in two.

West Germany has a market economy

and democracy. East Germany is allied with the Soviet Union, run on communist lines, and there's

no real democracy to speak of. Slap bang in the middle of East Germany, though, is the city of

Berlin. And that has been split in two. East Berlin

is fully part of East Germany. West Berlin is basically a little bit of West Germany, but stuck

in the middle of East Germany. And it's administered by the United States, Great Britain, and France.

There are very strict rules about who can cross

from East Berlin to West Berlin. And then in 1961, that became a physical thing, not just a

rule, because a wall was built. And over the years, that wall got higher and thicker and more

and more fortified.

And then one night in November 1989, for a whole load of fascinating reasons, the wall was breached.

What happened? Why? And what happened next?

We will discuss in the next couple of episodes of all newscast.

Newscast from the BBC.

Mr Gorbachev tear down this wall.

The border was no longer sacrosanct and its guardians were flabbergasted.

I watched the scenes on television last night and again this morning.

I can hear him in order there's somebody having a crack at the wall with a hammer, it's quite

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