Based on a true story

A good number of the answers did not come from a screenwriter's imagination. They happened, and the films and series built around them are some of the strongest in the back catalogue. Here they are by number.

#0047, from 2023, is a three-hour biographical drama about the theoretical physicist who ran the Manhattan Project and oversaw the building of the first atomic bomb, then argued against the hydrogen bomb and was stripped of his security clearance for it at a 1954 hearing. Christopher Nolan wrote and directed it, adapting the biography American Prometheus. He tells it along two tracks, the physicist's own story in colour and the later hearing of the official who turned on him in black and white, and he shot the whole film on large-format stock, recreating the first test detonation with practical effects instead of computer graphics. After more than a decade of nominations, Nolan won his first Best Director Oscar. Cillian Murphy won Best Actor in the lead, and Robert Downey Jr won Best Supporting Actor as Lewis Strauss, the official behind the hearing. Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Florence Pugh are in the cast too. The film took seven Oscars including Best Picture and grossed more than 950 million dollars, a huge figure for a dense, dialogue-driven historical drama, helped by opening against a very different blockbuster the same weekend.

#0007 is a five-part series set in the Cold War Soviet Union, and it tells the story of the most infamous nuclear disaster in history. Told with a cold, procedural precision, and through the bleak, brutalist lens of the 1980s USSR, the episodes cover not only the disaster itself but the aftermath. The director, Johan Renck, draws out the contrast between the heroism and sacrifice of those sent to clean up the fallout and the cowardice of the superiors who sent them. Jared Harris stars as the Soviet scientist brought in to aid the clean-up effort. Harris's portrayal of the tortured scientist, a man so haunted by the disaster that he would take his own life just two years afterwards, earned him the BAFTA for Best Actor. The series, written by Craig Mazin, also took Best Mini-Series that year, part of a haul of nine BAFTAs that made it the most awarded British series ever.

#0024, from 2017, is another Christopher Nolan film, a recreation of the 1940 evacuation of around 338,000 Allied soldiers from an exposed French beach as the German army advanced. Nolan leaves out most of the usual war-film conventions. There are no generals at maps, almost no dialogue, and the enemy is barely seen. He runs three timelines at different speeds, a week of the men waiting on the beach, a single day of a civilian boat crossing to reach them, and an hour of a Spitfire pilot overhead, and he cuts between them so they meet at the end. Hans Zimmer's score is built around the sound of a ticking watch. The cast ranges from the then-unknown Fionn Whitehead to Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh, and includes the singer Harry Styles in his first film role. It won three Oscars, for film editing and for sound.

#0004 is a ten-part series from 2001, the most expensive television production of its time, made by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks straight after their war film Saving Private Ryan and carrying the same level of combat realism to television. It is adapted from the historian Stephen Ambrose's book, and follows a single unit, Easy Company of the 101st Airborne, from their training under a resented commanding officer, through the D-Day parachute drop into Normandy and on to the end of the war in Europe. There is no single lead; the focus moves from soldier to soldier across the episodes, though Damian Lewis, then unknown, plays the officer who commands the company for much of it. Many of the young cast went on to substantial careers. It won the Emmy for Outstanding Miniseries and a Golden Globe, and is still regarded as one of the best dramatisations of the Second World War made for television.

#0037, from 2010, is the exception here: it is not about combat at all. It is about George VI, the second son who unexpectedly became British monarch in 1936 when his older brother abdicated, and his lifelong stammer, which became a serious problem once radio made the monarch's voice a matter of state and war with Germany approached. Colin Firth won Best Actor as the stammering monarch. Geoffrey Rush plays Lionel Logue, the Australian actor turned unorthodox therapist who treats him, and Helena Bonham Carter plays his wife. Tom Hooper directed and won Best Director, and David Seidler, who had stammered himself as a child, won Best Original Screenplay for a script he had wanted to write for decades. The film also won Best Picture, four Oscars in all, beating several larger productions to it.

None of this was invented, which is part of the appeal. When a clue points to a real date or a real place, it is usually worth trusting, and it will often get you to the answer before the cast even appears.