Latest Documentaries

Motorway

Hannah takes a drive to the National Highways control centre for the UK’s busiest motorway to meet the team that keep the motorways running 24/7.

S3E5The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2025 • Technology

Doorbell

The rise of the smart doorbell is one of the great tech success stories of the 21st century. Hannah heads to Los Angeles to take a deep dive into doorbell history and talk to market leaders Ring.

S3E4The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2025 • Technology

Rollercoaster

Hannah uncovers the wild origins of the modern-day rollercoaster and gets the inside story on the UK’s newest, tallest and fastest coaster – Thorpe Park's Hyperia.

S3E3The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2025 • Technology

Fridge

Hannah hits the production line with appliance giants Bosch to find the lifeblood at the heart of every fridge and gets a lesson in carrot droop.

S3E2The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2025 • Technology

Aif Fryer

Hannah takes a look at the air fryer – a device that is rapidly taking over people's kitchens, cooking up everything from bread rolls to baked Alaska and almost making ovens obsolete.

S3E1The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2025 • Technology

Lift

Hannah goes behind the scenes to look at the technology behind the lift, entering a 246m high lift shaft to test everything from the brakes to her own fear of heights.

S2E6The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology

Headphones

Headphones: these marvels of miniaturisation are worn by 30 million people in the UK. Hannah Fry visits Bose to find out how the teeny earbud tech works and meets the human testers with ‘golden ears’.

S2E5The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology

Microwave

Hannah Fry discovers the hidden WWII radar technology that heats up baked beans, learns the legend of the melted candy bar in an engineer’s pocket that kick-started a kitchen revolution and puts her life on the line to demonstrate why microwaves zap food but not people!

S2E4The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology

Smartphone

With rare access to electronics giant Samsung, Hannah uncovers the technological game changers that have made the smartphone a reality.

S2E3The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology

Vacuum Cleaner

Hannah takes a look at the vacuum cleaner, going behind the scenes with Dyson and discovering how the motor in their latest vacuum spins nine times faster than that of a Formula One race car.

S2E2The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology

Passport

Hannah gains access to a top-secret site where anonymous staff and the latest tech work to make the British passport one of the most secure documents on the planet.

S2E1The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology

Trainer

Hannah Fry visits eBay’s authentication centre, where they are waging war against fake high-value trainers. She discovers how American breakfast waffles transformed our trainer soles and how an 18th-century tea set led to the use of celebrity endorsement.

S1E6The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2022 • Technology

Recommended Documentaries

Deep Trouble [Extra]

Dr Martha Holmes looks at man's influence on the oceans. Is there a solution so that we can save our seas or is it too late to get us out of Deep Trouble?

Blue Planet I • 2001 • Nature

Rise of the Mammals

This instalment is the first of several to concentrate on mammals. The platypus and the echidna are the only mammals that lay eggs (in much the same manner of reptiles), and it is from such animals that others in the group evolved. Since mammals have warm blood and most have dense fur, they can hunt at night when temperatures drop. It is for this reason that they became more successful than their reptile ancestors, who needed to heat themselves externally. Much of the programme is devoted to marsupials (whose young are partially formed at birth) of which fossils have been found in the Americas dating back 60 million years.

9/13Life on Earth • 1979 • Nature

Mountains

The great mountain ranges are some of the planet's most spectacular landscapes, but they are unforgiving places to live in, and only a few animals have what it takes to live at extreme altitude. Mountain animals are amongst the most elusive in the world, and this film provides unique and intimate glimpses into their secretive lives. Witness the moment four snow leopards come together when a mother and cub become trapped between two rival males. Join grizzly bears as they dance against trees to rub off their winter fur and soar with golden eagles hunting amongst Europe's snow-capped peaks.

S1E2Planet Earth II • 2016 • Nature

End of an Era: The Final Shuttle Launch

"You might have thought, as I did then, that our species would be on Mars before the century was over"

6/10The Sagan Series • 1989 • Astronomy

Venus

We have been mesmerized by Venus since ancient times. Was this a paradise world teeming with life? This film tells the remarkable story of how spacecraft revealed the true nature of Earth’s enigmatic twin, that it’s a lifeless hell – and that the Earth could follow suit.

S1E3Secrets of the Solar System • 2020 • Astronomy

Banat & Crisana

The Banat region borders on Serbia and Hungary, so its capital, Timisoara, is a very multi-cultural, cosmopolitan city, and provides the main social and economic hub for western Romania.

S1E7Flavours of Romania • 2018 • Travel

Technology Documentaries

Food of the Future

This episode will reveal the ways in which our eating habits will be revolutionized: vegetable proteins, urban farming, connected supermarkets, personalized food, new flavour experiences and more.

S1E8Dream the Future • 2017 • Technology

The Internets Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

The story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz's help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz's groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Aaron's story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties

2014 • Technology

Microwave

Hannah Fry discovers the hidden WWII radar technology that heats up baked beans, learns the legend of the melted candy bar in an engineer’s pocket that kick-started a kitchen revolution and puts her life on the line to demonstrate why microwaves zap food but not people!

S2E4The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology

Part 2: Think NASA is Only for the Stars?

Think NASA's only for the stars? Think again. The space race has played a colossal part in our daily lives. From online dating to the freshness of the food we consume. The quest for the stars has created tech so woven into our everyday existence, without it, the world would simply unimaginable.

S1E2A World Without NASA • 2019 • Technology

The Joy of AI

Professor Jim Al-Khalili looks at how we have created machines that can simulate, augment, and even outperform the human mind - and why we shouldn't let this spook us. He reveals the story of the pursuit of AI, the emergence of machine learning and the recent breakthroughs brought about by artificial neural networks. He shows how AI is not only changing our world but also challenging our very ideas of intelligence and consciousness. Along the way, we'll investigate spam filters, meet a cutting-edge chatbot, look at why a few altered pixels makes a computer think it's looking at a trombone rather than a dog and talk to Demis Hassabis, who heads DeepMind and whose stated mission is to 'solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else'. Stephen Hawking remarked 'AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. Or the worst'. Jim argues that AI is a potent new tool that should enhance our lives, not replace us.

2018 • Technology

Lift

Hannah goes behind the scenes to look at the technology behind the lift, entering a 246m high lift shaft to test everything from the brakes to her own fear of heights.

S2E6The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology

Lifehack Documentaries

Apologies

Apologizing is tough, and in this era of public mea culpas, forgiveness isn't guaranteed. What makes for a good apology, and why does it hold such power?

S3E8Explained • 2021 • Lifehack

Live to Learn

These 9 life lessons from comedian Tim Minchin will make you laugh -- and learn

2017 • Lifehack

Dirt Poor is Bad

This episode looks at the effects of modern life and aging , how excessive cleanliness affects asthma & allergies, how poverty gets under the skin to cause lifelong damage, the physical effects of social isolation, and predicting mental illness and Alzheimer's by just looking at the back of people's eyes. Plus the latest research and where the research is going next.

S1E4Predict my Future: The Science of Us • 2016 • Lifehack

8 traits of successful people

Ten years of research and 500 face-to-face-interviews led Richard St. John to a collection of eight common traits in successful leaders around the world.

TED-EdLifehack

How to Find Love Online

Dr Xand Van Tulleken is single and looking for love. Mathematician Dr Hannah Fry wants to use him as her guinea pig to test whether the algorithms that dating sites use to match people actually work. While Hannah builds a dating site, Xand meets the scientists investigating online dating - and learns what pictures to use and what to write in his profile. He tries out a 'bot' that has automated a swiping app and has an MRI scan to find out whether his brain is equipped for love. 50 members of the public take part in some mini experiments at a date night - and Xand goes on various dates to test whether the algorithm is better than him choosing randomly.

Horizon • 2016 • Lifehack

Why it pays to work hard

Nothing comes easy, and behind every success are hours of plain hard work. Sounds intimidating, but Richard St. John proposes a simple shift in attitude to turn mediocre into incredible.

Lifehack

Random! Documentaries

The Road to Stalingrad/Leviathan Wakes

A look at how Hitler calculated that to fight on long enough to fulfil his aim of eradicating Europe's Jews he needed to capture the Caucasus, and to do that he had to take Stalingrad. There is also a look at how the US rebuilt its navy and took itself from the 18th-ranked army in the world to be second only to the Soviet Union, a tale of ingenuity and enterprise that turned the vast resources of America into the numbers that could win a war.

S1E3World War II in Numbers • 2019 • History

Invisible Hands

'Invisible Hands' is the first feature documentary that exposes child labor and child trafficking within the supply chains of the world's biggest corporations.

2018 • Economics

Episode 1

From St Abbs in Scotland, Steve reveals how ocean plastic rubbish is turned into kayaks that clean up our seas, Gillian goes oyster fishing in Cornwall and Chris meets author Philip Hoare who thinks we should all take a daily dip in the sea.

S1E1Blue Planet UK • 2019 • Nature

There Was No First Human

If you traced your family tree back 185 million generations, you wouldn't be looking at a human, a primate, or even a mammal. You'd be looking at a fish. So where along that line does the first human show up? The answer may surprise you.

Nature

Looking Forward

Come see how an organization founded by 50 street beggars is now building a brand new town in Kenya.

S1E4Design with the Other 90 Percent • 2011 • Design

Part 2

Life and Death

S1E2Human • 2015 • People