At 2:54 am on 12 October 1984 an IRA bomb exploded in the bathroom of room 629 of the Grand Hotel in Brighton on the final night of the annual Conservative party conference.

The bomb took out a massive section of the hotel and almost killed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet.

By using dramatic documentary reconstruction, archive footage, graphics and interviews with those involved, Extreme Rescue brings to life the dramatic recovery of those trapped in the rubble.

Since the early 1970s the IRA had waged a campaign of violence against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Many people had been killed in strikes in Ireland and mainland Britain but it was the targeting of the annual conference of Britain’s ruling Conservative party and the prime minister in her fifth year at the top that was seen as one of the most audacious attacks by the organisation.

Party members had enjoyed the traditional last night celebrations when the bomb ripped through the hotel.

Hidden behind a bathroom panel, the device left a 12 metre-wide hole in the hotel’s front.

Seconds after the blast the damage got worse as the weakened three-and-a half-metre stack of one of the Grand’s brick chimneys collapsed, crashing through the blast hole and sheering sideways. It took five entire rooms with it to the ground floor where they landed in a heap of wreckage two stories high.

The collapse destroyed or damaged rooms and corridors on every one of the six floors.

As fire crews raced to the scene and details of the attack emerged, it quickly became apparent that people from very different walks of life would come to depend on each other to survive: leading Cabinet minister Norman Tebbit; the conference organiser Harvey Thomas; and Fred Bishop, the East Sussex brigade’s station officer whose men were first on the scene and who would have make the quick decisions on which other people’s lives depended.

As soon as he arrived on the scene Bishop realised that with just seven men to get hundreds of people out of a building seven stories high with 165 bedrooms he was desperately under equipped.

He immediately requested assistance in the form of 10 more fire engines and crews before setting about the rescue operation that would test him and his men to the limits.

Inside the hotel the terrorists had failed to even touch their number one target. The bomb blast had reached Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s suite, but only destroyed the bathroom.

Her armed bodyguards looked for a way out of the shattered building. Gunmen could be waiting outside the front, so they headed for a side exit where they evacuated the Prime Minister by car.

But for one of her closest Cabinet colleagues - Norman Tebbit - the ordeal was just beginning. Buried beneath tons of rubble he would come to rely on the expertise of Bishop and the other firefighters as they set about their Extreme Rescue.

Tuesday 16 October 2007 11:05pm - 12:05am on ITV1.