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Pearse invited me back onto his new radio show to discuss my recent piece on Three Days of the Condor and some of the alternative history of Watergate.

Tron is a classic piece of transhumanist cinema and the first of a string of films where someone is sucked into a digital realm and has to battle it out with computer programs in order to save the day (the Matrix trilogy being the most popular examples). It was also a curious departure for Disney from working primarily on animations and other fantasy films explicitly aimed at children into more teen- or adult-oriented science fiction.

The International Spy Museum is a privately owned museum that hosts exhibits and other events on the history of spies, spying, intelligence tradecraft and so on. Conceived in 1996 - coincidentally just as the CIA adopted a more overt approach to domestic propaganda - and opened in 2002 - coincidentally a crucial year for CIA domestic propaganda - it has grown a strong reputation for itself in the years since then.

In February 1975 the director of conspiracy classic Three Days of the Condor Sidney Pollack invited Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, to visit the set while they were shooting in New York. Helms went along for a day and acted as a consultant to Robert Redford, as depicted in this infamous picture. Though Helms had left the Agency, three documents from the CIA's open source monitoring of media coverage show they were keeping an eye on developments.

I was recently a guest on Uncle the Podcast - my favourite up and coming comedy podcast - to discuss the 1980s arm wrestling movie Over the Top, starring Sylvester Stallone. The film is about a father who is estranged from his young son but due to the mother's illness they are thrown back together.

Adding to the British government departments who have provided assistance to the James Bond franchise, the now defunct Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) have released documents on the filming of a scene for Skyfall at their headquarters in Whitehall. The Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and MI6 themselves have all aided the Bond film series in one way or another over the decades, and though it only existed for 8 years the DECC can now be added to that illustrious list.

Today we take a look at the documentary series A Very Heavy Agenda by Robbie Martin, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. This is a very in depth conversation where we get into numerous elements covered in Robbie's documentary including: the Kagan family, what the neocons have been up to during the Obama administration and leading into the current presidential election, the philosophy and strategy of neoconservatism and the geopolitics of NATO and Russia.

The Battle of Algiers was a groundbreaking film when it came out in 1966, not just for its depiction of the Algerian War against French occupation but for its quasi-documentary realism and its morally neutral approach, showing both sides committing atrocities. Because of this realism it is a cinematic training manual in guerilla warfare including terrorist tactics and in state repression including torture.

Richard Klein is one of the most important people in the entertainment industry that you have never heard of - a former State Department employee who now works for McLarty Associates - an elite Washington DC law firm - as their liaison to Hollywood. Klein has worked with most of the major studios on some of the biggest film series, from Transformers to James Bond to Fast & Furious, alongside government agencies on both sides of the Atlantic including the CIA.

Rounding off this second season we take a look at SALT, the 2010 action thriller starring Angelina Jolie as a CIA officer accused of being a Russian sleeper agent. SALT is one of the less well known CIA-assisted productions, but along with technical advice from former CIA officer Melissa Boyle Mahle the producers also consulted with the CIA themselves in a video conference. There is also a very weird story involving one of the extras in the opening sequence in North Korea.