Dominic Sandbrook

And secondly, and I know this is something that you find fascinating, Tom, this is the story of the Islamic Revolution.

Arguably, I would say the only global revolution comparable with the French and the Russian revolutions in terms of its dramatic cultural and political consequences.

I would say definitely.

So a lot to talk about.

But let's start with those two men in Tehran on New Year's Eve 1977.

So they are in the Niavaran Palace, which is in the northern foothills on the edge of Tehran.

And Tehran, to give people a sense, it's the capital of Iran.

It's a city that had changed enormously in the 20 years before Jimmy Carter visited.

So it had been transformed by billions of dollars in new oil money, new housing blocks, new factories, and above all, new people.

So in the 1940s, the end of the Second World War, Tehran had half a million people.

In 1977, when Carter went, it had almost five million people.

And that stratospheric growth, that single fact, in some ways lies at the heart of today's episode, the extraordinary change in the kind of social and economic makeup of Tehran and indeed of Iran generally.

Exactly, which we'll come to.

So of all the people in Tehran in 1977, the most celebrated and powerful was the man that Carter was toasting that night, the host.

And that's Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who is the king of kings and light of the Aryans, the Shah of Iran.

And let's give people a sense of his character.

He was born in 1919 to an army officer called Rizar Pahlavi in a land that was then called in the West, Persia.

Persia, of course, a very ancient country, not so much a nation as a civilization in itself, multi-ethnic, multilingual.

Of course, the one thing that people get wrong about Persia and Iran is they think that they, I mean, people would often call them Arabs.

They're not Arabs.