Airdate: Jesus: Countdown to Calvary

ABC will screen the doco Jesus: Countdown to Calvary presented by Hugh Bonneville ahead of Easter.

This is billed as a Compass special but will screen in a Tuesday night slot.

Hugh Bonneville reveals how a perfect storm of political intrigue, power struggles and clashing religious passions combined, in a single week, to cause the event that changed the world: the killing of Jesus.

This brand new Compass special offers a revolutionary new telling of “the greatest story ever told” – the story of an itinerant Jewish healer and preacher, who went from hero to victim in a single week, 2000 years ago, and ended up dead on a cross.

For the first time on television, world-renowned actor and Cambridge theology graduate, Hugh Bonneville, sets out to discover why that one execution, in a century when as many as 500 people a day were crucified by the Romans, had such seismic, lasting, and global impact, for better and for worse.

He uses all the investigative and storytelling tools at his disposal to reveal the context, characters, and chain of events behind the week that changed the world. In the process, he finds that this is no dusty religious story, but a political thriller – a whodunnit, even – shot through with intrigue, spin, conspiracy, power battles, betrayal and terror.

Tuesday 27 March 9.30pm on ABC.