Next Monday BBC1

Launching the BBC's biggest and most ambitious season to commemorate the World War One Centenary, Britain's Great War, presented by Jeremy Paxman, and co-produced in partnership with The Open University, is a four-part landmark history series of how the First World War affected the lives of the British people and created what we know as modern Britain.

In the first episode, Jeremy Paxman traces the story of the dramatic early stages of the war: from stunned disbelief to the mass recruitment of volunteer soldiers. Fear of invasion grips the country, Boy Scouts guard bridges and spies are suspected everywhere. For the first time, British civilians are fired on by enemy ships and bombed from the air. Jeremy meets a 105-year-old eyewitness to the shelling of Hartlepool, who describes how she thought the Germans had landed.

The BBC's centenary programming will explain why the First World War happened, commemorate and remember those involved, shine a light on what it was like to live through this cataclysmic event in world history, and interrogate and debate just what its legacy has meant for modern society.