Millions expecting to watch world sports final on TV, instead saw this
On May 5, 1980, millions of sport fans were watching on TV the world snooker championships when the BBC unexpectedly cut its coverage to beam live from central London.
Instead of snooker, viewers were thrown into a real-life action drama showing elite British soldiers storming the Iranian embassy.
Images of black-clad men carrying assault rifles abseiling down the walls of the embassy and braving flames to storm the building's front would be like nothing Britons had witnessed on their own soil.
Events had begun on April 30, 1980, when six armed gunmen burst into the embassy in Prince's Gate, London, easily overpowering the sole British police guard. The group demanded the release of 91 prisoners from Iran and the guarantee of safe exit from the UK.
Hopes for a peaceful end to the siege evaporated on May 5 when the kidnappers shot dead a hostage.
Music superstar Adele was born in London on May 5, 1988.
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins began singing aged four, the start of a lifelong passion for music. She left school at 14 but continued making music and in 2006 landed a record deal after executives found her music on MySpace.
Her debut album, 19, was a hit in the UK, and in 2008, she won the prestigious Critics' Choice at the Brit Awards.
On May 5, 1981, hunger striker and terrorist Bobby Sands died in a Northern Ireland prison 66 days after first refusing to eat.
He was the first of 10 IRA prisoners to die after hunger strikes at the Maze Prison during The Troubles.
More than 60 civilians, police and soldiers also died in violence directly attributable to the hunger strikes.
Rock and roll star Elvis Presley achieved his first US single with Heartbreak Hotel on May 5, 1956.
Recorded in Nashville with Presley's band The Blue Moon Boys, the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks.
It later became the singer's first single to reach a million sales.
Legendary French fashion designer Coco Chanel launched her famous perfume Chanel No. 5 on May 5, 1921.
A year before, so the legend goes, she had challenged French-Russian perfumer Ernest Beaux to create a scent that would make its wearer "smell like a woman, and not like a rose."
"It was what I was waiting for," Chanel later said. "A perfume like nothing else. A woman's perfume, with the scent of a woman."
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