BBC buys Martin Luther King doc for anniversary tribute

The BBC has acquired one-off doc MLK: The Assassination Tapes, a one-off documentary about iconic US civil rights activist Martin Luther King Junior.

The UK public broadcaster will air the 1x60mins doc as part of its 50th anniversary programming commemorating Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech.

The Peabody Award-winning film will go out on arts and culture channel BBC4 in August.

It was originally produced for the US factual channel Smithsonian by Tom Jennings’ 1895 Films and shows events leading up to the civil rights leader’s death using archive TV footage and radio recordings not seen or heard since the late 1960s.

BB4 bought the doc from distributor Off the Fence.

Separately, the distributor said it had sold a 24-hour package of docs to the UK pay TV version of US public broadcaster PBS, PBS America. Titles include Smithsonian shows Aerial America and History in HD: Shooting Iwo Jima.