Disney's iconic fable about a year in the life of a fawn may have been made for kids, but that doesn't mean it pulls any punches in telling children how life is. Birth, death and man's inhumanity to animals are all present on screen as the young deer tries to survive in the forest. The moment that has traumatised millions of children, and adults, around the world comes after a forest fire, when Bambi realises his mummy isn't coming back.

Gary Marshall's 1980s chick flick is as shamelessly entertaining as it is mushy. Two girls, one a privileged rich kid, one from the wrong side of the tracks, forge a lifelong friendship one summer, fall out and make up endlessly until the inevitable disease-of-the-week plot happens along. The tears will be welling up when the two friends sit on the beach for the last time together to the strains of Wind Beneath My Wings.

Billie Holliday remains (four decades after her death) the most famous of all jazz singers. During her early career she was better known for songs about love and romance, but a protest song called Strange Fruit would become her signature song. Dealing with the lynching of black men in America's deep south, Holliday could rarely ever sing the song without crying. Her performance of Strange Fruit on Granada's Chelsea At Nine show in 1959, was made all the more emotional to audiences by the fact that her health was failing. Holliday died less than six months later on 17 July 1959.

Blackadder had been one of Britain's most successful ever comedies, but its final series set during the First World War managed to elicit genuine affection from the audience. Rowan Atkinson's Captain Blackadder fails in his quest to get out of the trenches and is sent 'over the top' in the last ever episode. This grim image, the frame frozen which then dissolves into one depicting the same field now full of poppies, memorably ended the series on a note of dark satire.

And here's one we made earlier. Blue Peter is the stuff of children's TV legend and began being broadcast in 1958. Presenters have come and gone, but it's the animals that cause the most grief to the show's producers in terms of upsetting the kids. Most famous, is the story of the first Blue Peter pet Petra, a mongrel puppy introduced on the show wrapped in Christmas paper in 1962. Unfortunately, the dog died two days later, leaving the producers scrambling around trying to find an identical dog, so as not to upset viewers. Petra II fooled the kids and stayed on the show until 1977. On Petra's death, the grief among the nation's school children was so overwhelming that a bronze statue of the dog was put up at the front of the BBC.