The massacre in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 was one of the defining moments of world history – not just Chinese. So it’s maybe not too much to ask of a viewer to spend an hour and a half parked in front of a TV watching Storyville (BBC4) in order to learn a bit more about it. Certainly if you want to understand what is happening in Hong Kong today, it is essential viewing.

It is quite an investment, admittedly, though no longer than what you’d spend watching a football match. Anyway, I am glad that I did so. It is by turns moving, informative, intriguing and thought-provoking; the rough equivalent of the now fashionable “long reads” in the papers and on websites, and perhaps we will also see more TV such as this, co-existing with the social media-friendly YouTube clips, valuable as they are.

For so many, the massacre is remembered in a memorable news clip. There is that iconic image of a lone protester standing defiantly in front of a tank, before the picture then fades to black (we assume because he was then horribly killed). The clip is replayed endlessly in the TV news packages, a simple powerful summary: Students protest for democracy; vicious Chinese dictatorship crushes them.

Well, this excellent Storyville treatment tells us exactly how much more there is to this, and the rest of the Tiananmen Square crisis.

Thus, as we see in the extended footage in the documentary, that iconic lone protester didn’t get run over, but clambered up on the tank and danced around for a bit, before being taken away by his friends to safety (and a surprisingly durable anonymity ever since). He was also not the first of the protesters, at the start of the massacre, but in fact, the very last, after thousands had been shot and mown down by the armoured vehicles.

30 times things went wrong on film and TV sets Show all 30 1 /30 30 times things went wrong on film and TV sets 30 times things went wrong on film and TV sets Margot Robbie – The Wolf of Wall Street The actor says that acting in the scene where she has sex with Leonardo DiCaprio on a bed of money was really painful in The Wolf of Wall Street. “I got a million paper cuts on my back from all that money! It's not as glamorous as it sounds,” she said. “If anyone is ever planning on having sex on top of a pile of cash: don't. Or maybe real money is a bit softer, but the fake money is like paper, and when I got up off the bed, I turned around to get my robe and everyone gasped. I said, 'What is it?' And they said, 'You look like you've been whipped a million times. 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He said: “I knew instantly my ankle was broken and I really didn’t want to do it again so just got up and carried on with the take. I said, ‘It’s broken. That’s a wrap. Take me to hospital’ and then everyone got on the phone and made their vacation arrangement.” PA 30 times things went wrong on film and TV sets Lizzy Caplan and Michael Sheen – Masters of Sex Caplan was nervous when she had to take her clothes off in front of co-star Sheen in the TV series. It made her feel better that they were both shaky. But then disaster struck. “And we complete the scene, I place the hand on my breast and they yell “Cut” and he immediately walks over to a garbage can and throws up.“ Turns out Sheen had eaten something that upset his stomach, but Caplan didn't know that. 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The valuable guitar was meant to be swapped over with a replica prop when he snatched it from her. Russell had not read the memo, though, and smashed the antique guitar against a wall, while shouting “Music time is over”. As a result, the Martin Museum – which called the guitar a "priceless, irreplaceable artefact" – vowed never to loan guitars out to movies again. Moviestore Collection 30 times things went wrong on film and TV sets Robert Pattinson and Julianne Moore – Maps to the Stars The Twilight and Lost City of Z actor played Jerome, a limousine driver and struggling actor, in David Cronenberg’s acerbic Hollywood satire. It was while he got intimate in the back of a car with Moore’s character, a washed-up actress, that he ran into problems and started sweating profusely. “I sweat like a f***ing crazy person,” he said. “I was trying to literally catch drops of sweat to stop them hitting her back. Afterwards she was like, 'Are you having a panic attack?' It was so embarrassing.” 30 times things went wrong on film and TV sets Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal - Love and other Drugs Hathaway accidentally stripped off too soon when she thought cameras were rolling during the filming of Love and other Drugs. She stars alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in the erotic film based on the non-fiction book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman by Jamie Reidy. “I have to remove my trench coat and be nude underneath, and I thought we were filming,” she said. “But it turned out we were just rehearsing and I got unnecessarily naked in front of a lot of people!” Getty Images 30 times things went wrong on film and TV sets Edward James Olmos - Battlestar Galactica In a 2007 episode of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica TV series, Olmos’s character William Adama, the commanding officer of BS Galactica, is playing around with a model ship when he gets carried away by improvising and smashes it to smithereens. 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Metcalfe, who played John Rowland, experienced the same issue during his first onscreen sex scene with Eva Longoria’s Gabrielle Solis. He said: “We were rehearsing and then the director was like, 'OK, get out of bed, we have to reset the set', and I was like, 'I need a minute.'“ He added: “It doesn't happen that frequently” because ”there are a lot of people on set, and it can be very technical, but it happens from time to time." 30 times things went wrong on film and TV sets Christopher Guest and Cary Elwes – The Princess Bride When you see the dashing Westley (Cary Elwes) fall to the ground unconscious during a fight scene in Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride, it really happened. Christopher Guest, who was playing Count Tyrone Rugen, knocked Elwes out by accident, when he hit him on the head with the butt of his sword. Elwes also broke his toe during the first week of filming when he was “messing around” between scenes on co-star Andre the Giant’s all-terrain vehicle. 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Universal Pictures 30 times things went wrong on film and TV sets Viggo Mortensen – The Lord of the Rings When Aragon (Mortensen) thinks that two of the hobbits are dead in a scene in The Two Towers, he lets out a gigantic primeval cry as he kicks his helmet in anger and falls to the floor. This behaviour would seem like an appropriate response to the grief his character feels but in reality, the actor had actually broken two toes while kicking his helmet. Rex 30 times things went wrong on film and TV sets The entire cast of Roar But whatever the mishap, nothing can surely be as bad as it was on set for director Noel Marshall’s family, who were cast in his 1981 adventure comedy film Roar? During filming, his then wife Tippi Hendren and her daughter Melanie Griffith, as well as his two sons, John and Jerry, were mauled by lions. Heddren suffered multiple scalp wounds while Marshall was bitten so many times, he ended up hospitalised with gangrene.

One of the remarkable things about Tiananmen is just how much footage and media coverage, such as this, has survived. Even by 1989, China had opened up to the west sufficiently to allow students to be equipped with video cameras, as well as foreign news crews, who were all free to move around central Beijing to capture the scenes and interview people.

There is an extensive record of it – one that cannot be propagandised out of existence. It is also very handy for filmmakers trying to fill a 90-minute slot, and the producers, Emma Parkins and Ed Stobart, make the best of it telling the long story of the occupation of the square.

As with the events themselves, the film’s long lead-up is a fairly sedate affair, before a sudden overnight outbreak of indiscriminate murder. To witness it unfolding here, in a sort of scaled-down version of the real thing, somehow makes the bloody end all the more upsetting. The feeling of the tragedy and futility of the thousands of deaths is amplified.

It took some seven weeks from the first minor protests to the bloody massacre that made the name of Tiananmen Square synonymous with state terror. Step by step, event by event, the documentary tells us precisely what goes wrong: how the students and the Chinese leadership misunderstand one another and how each underestimates the other’s determination.

There is, for example, an editorial in the People’s Daily (official government paper) in April that condemns the protest as “counter-revolutionary”, but which merely brings more people to the Square. Then there is a declaration of martial law, as early as 19 May – surely a signal for the students to take an offer of “dialogue” (even if bogus) and withdraw. And later, the election of a student committee – with its leaders – who disastrously overplay their hand. The film uses a trove of recently leaked Politburo documents to reveal what was going through the leadership’s mind, and how frightened they are of revolution.

By the end, protestors are too emboldened. So far from being a purely student protest, as the survivors tell us here, many other groups also came out to identify with them – workers, nurses, police. There is a “Citizens Dare-to-Die Corps” of labourers, for example, and, apparently, even the thieves went on strike to show solidarity. “China’s Woodstock”, as one says, but with mass support. I was not convinced by that and we see little of how the vast rural populace reacted to the events, if they even knew of them.

The students comprehended too little about the power struggles going on within the government. The first of the demonstrations were an act of mourning for the (natural) death of a reformist ally of the students, Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. In the subsequent succession struggle, the students’ actions were actually used against them by the forces of conservatism – being portrayed as a threat to the unity and stability of the People’s Republic. The interviews with the protest survivors, now in their fifties and in exile, shows how little they then knew about the country they lived in. With their hunger strikes and “goddess of democracy” sculpture pointed provocatively at the massive portrait of Mao, they were brave and idealistic, but painfully naïve. The anger of the likes of writer and activist Rose Tang is loud and acute, and deeply affecting, but the fact is, she and the others did get things wrong.

The students in Tiananmen Square made other mistakes. They rejected any compromises with the government and demanded it stand down in the name of democracy, immediately – an absurdity. So the regime tried repression and it worked. Except that the summary use of live ammunition, and with little warning, was far too rapid an escalation, as far as China’s image is concerned. It left an indelible stain on the reputation of the party and the country and injected some caution into its responses to unrest. Today, in Hong Kong, it would seem at least some of the lessons of 1989 have been learned, and others neglected.