The Gunpowder Plot: Exploding the Legend
Four hundred years after Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the House of Lords, an ambitious ITV experiment hopes to reveal what would have happened if he had got away with his plot. The story is known to every British schoolchild. On the 5th November 1605 Guy Fawkes was poised to blow up Parliament and murder the King. His plan failed when he was dramatically discovered holding the fuse, and bonfires have been lit ever since. But one big question still remains…Would his plot have worked had he not been caught. To coincide with the 400th anniversary of the original gunpowder plot ITV is going to go a step further than Fawkes to answer that all important question. Presenter Richard Hammond will mount the biggest historical and scientific experiment ever seen on television: he will search out the 17th century gunpowder recipe used by Fawkes and his fellow conspirators before detonating 36 barrels of the explosive in a full-sized replica of the original House of Lords. Based on expert designs, the basement where the gunpowder was hidden will be structurally exact and with the same ballistic characteristics as the original, while the Lord’s Chamber above will be laden with perishable cameras, sensors and crash test dummies to represent the King and members of Parliament. Could any of England’s 150 most rich and powerful have survived the blast? How much of Westminster village would have been destroyed? What would London have looked like post detonation.
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