As an impoverished survivor of the Holocaust, Robert Maxwell came from humble beginnings.

After serving the British Army in World War II he started working in publishing, building up Pergamon Press to a major publishing house before buying multiple competitors.

Robert’s alleged accidental death in 1991 triggered the collapse of his publishing empire and led to revelations of fraud on a grand scale.

His daughter Ghislaine would herself be mired in scandal thirty years later, implicated in the grooming of underage victims, having been associated with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein since the early 1990s.

Through intimate testimony and never-before-seen archive footage, the three-part series tells the extraordinary tale of the first major modern media mogul and the unravelling of his deeply troubled family.

Colin Barr, executive producer of the series and Creative Director of Factual and Factual Drama at Expectation, said: “It’s hard to imagine a story with a more dramatic rise or disastrous fall than the story of the Maxwell family. It’s a story that is both intimate and epic and one which speaks to half a century of business, politics and celebrity.

“This is a true-life family drama on an extraordinary scale, and we’re incredibly privileged to be producing it for BBC Two.”