Bettany goes way back in time, where myth and historical reality blend - to Sardis and to Gordion, home of King Midas, the man with the golden touch
S1E2 • Dawn of Civilisations • 2026 • History
From Ephesus to Cappadocia, from Ani to Divrigi, and from the world's first societies and weapons to the birth of myths and empires, this is the story of where it all began
S1E1 • Dawn of Civilisations • 2026 • History
Twenty-five years after the 9/11 attacks killed almost 3,000 people, tens of thousands of newly released documents are shedding fresh light on the claim that individuals working for the Saudi government might have been involved. Panorama investigates the role of Omar al-Bayoumi, who helped the first two hijackers after they arrived in America. A US judge has found that he could have been an agent working on the instructions of the Saudi government – something he, and Saudi Arabia, have always denied. After being arrested by British police and held for seven days, al-Bayoumi was released and allowed to return to Saudi Arabia. But Jane McMullen, reporting for Panorama, explores whether UK officers and FBI agents had access to all the available evidence against him. She uncovers never-before-broadcast video footage, hears from people close to the case who have never spoken before and asks why significant evidence remained hidden for so long.
Marc-André Leclerc climbs alone, far from the limelight. The free-spirited 23-year-old makes some of the boldest solo ascents in history. With no cameras and no margin for error, Leclerc's approach is the essence of solo adventure.
2021 • People
We turn the camera on the extraordinary people who are dedicating their lives to helping the animals cope with today's extreme weather.
S1E6 • Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature
New extremes of heat and drought are pushing the extraordinary behavioural and physical adaptations of wombats, leopards and kangaroo rats to their very limits.
S1E5 • Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature
Andrew Lincoln narrates a look at how animals adapted to the cold are struggling in a warming world. A snow leopard in the peaks of the Indian Himalayas is forced from his home by a rival male, while an Arctic ground squirrel in Alaska undertakes the coldest migration of any mammal, and a young Arctic fox in Svalbard must face her first winter alone.
S1E4 • Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature
The world's coastal regions have always been an extreme environment to raise a family, but warming seas are exacerbating the challenges of parenthood. A hurricane hits a flamingo colony while chicks are still on the nest, a sea otter faces a huge winter storm in California, a clownfish on the Great Barrier Reef sees its anemone home bleached, and a little anole lizard clings on during a hurricane.
S1E3 • Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature
As the planet's shifting rain patterns rewrite the rules, survival is no longer about strength alone. From the desert to the jungle, three mothers face the ultimate test of survival as monsoon floodwaters tear through pygmy elephant territory in Borneo, a female platypus in Australia watches a flash flood destroy her home river, and a flood in Africa brings prey to a lone lioness. Andrew Lincoln narrates.
S1E2 • Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature
An owl protects its chicks underground, cheetahs struggle through record floods in Kenya, and a polar bear searches for disappearing Arctic sea ice as extreme weather intensifies across the planet.
S1E1 • Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature
As internal crises, economic strain, and repeated barbarian invasions intensify, the Western Empire fractures and collapses in 476, while the Eastern Empire survives and evolves into the Byzantine state centered on Constantinople.
S1E2 • The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire • 2026 • History
From a small Italian city-state to Mediterranean superpower, this episode traces Rome’s expansion, the transition from Republic to Empire under Augustus, and the stability and prosperity of the Pax Romana that cemented imperial dominance.
S1E1 • The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire • 2026 • History
We all have a food footprint, but what foods create greenhouse gases? Craig Reucassel looks at different carbon footprints of the various foods we eat, and learns about the importance of where our food actually comes from.
S1E3 • Fight For Planet A: Our Climate Challenge • 2020 • Environment
Explores how light, time and gravity affects our perception of the universe.
S1E4 • Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey • 2014 • Astronomy
At the coast, two worlds collide. Coasts is the story of how our Blue Planet’s wildlife survives in this ever changing world. It’s a roller-coaster ride of heart stopping action and epic drama, with characters from beautiful to bizarre. This episode is a rollercoaster ride of heart-stopping action and epic drama, peopled with characters from the beautiful to the bizarre. We meet fish that live on dry land and puffins that must travel 60 miles or more for a single meal, and witness a life-and-death struggle in a technicolour rock pool.
S1E6 • Blue Planet II • 2017 • Nature
The Ship of the Imagination embarks on a journey through space and time to grasp how the autobiography of the Earth is written in its atoms, its oceans, its continents and all living things. Later, American geologist Marie Tharp creates the first true map of Earth's ocean floor, and discovers microscopic life that exists deep beneath the ocean.
S1E9 • Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey • Astronomy
Jim Al-Khalili shows how investigation into the atom unravelled the mystery of creation.
Brian believes we are at the start of a new age of space travel, where space flight is on the verge of becoming routine. In this episode, he explores the latest science and takes a new look at his old films and asks: how far can we go in our exploration of the cosmos?
S1E1 • Brian Cox's Adventures in Space and Time • 2021 • Science
If this episode teaches us anything it’s that revolutionaries come in many different forms. All thirteen of our subjects have been pioneers and leaders in their fields and have changed everything, from the way we watch films to how we connect and work. For some the word revolutionary might only be a title but for others, such as Castro and Ghandi, it is far more real. This episode of heroes and villains features some of the most famous and infamous faces of the twentieth century.
S1E5 • The 101 People who Made the 20th Century • 2016 • People
Professor Andre Geim is a condensed matter physicist at the University of Manchester. His life's work has been to gain a better understanding of the materials that make up the world around us. While just one subject can be a scientist's life's work, Andre has made switching fields a feature of his career. But while straying from the conventional path can be risky for a scientist, Andre has repeatedly turned it to his advantage. His "let's try it and see" approach means he's the only individual winner of the both the Nobel and the more light hearted Ig Nobel Prizes. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 for uncovering the extraordinary properties of a material called graphene, but Geim can also lay claim to seeding two other new areas of physics research--levitation and gecko tape.
S2E2 • Beautiful Minds • 2012 • People
Exposing the truth about our corrupt world. My name is Spencer Cathcart and this is a short documentary film I made & wrote. In the video I question our freedom, the education system, corporations, money, the American capitalist system, the US government, world collapse, the environment, climate change, genetically modified food, and our treatment of animals.
Salvador Magluta and Augusto Falcon are indicted by a grand jury in April 1991 on a variety of crimes. However, after a lengthy trial, Judge Federico Moreno found the two accused not guilty. In the wake of a stunning verdict, questions arise about the jury's credibility, and a subsequent investigation into Magluta and Falcon's finances reveals that they bribed several senior judges, and one juror in particular soon adopts a very creative legal defense.
S1E4 • Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami • 2021 • People
The first world power goes to war against drugs: the United States strikes hard. But the drug trade never dies. It moves, transforms, adapts. As the war on drugs progresses around the world, a new generation of drug lords emerged at the end of the 1970s, more powerful than ever. These criminals were not only in it for the money; they also wanted power. Pablo Escobar was the most notorious, but there was also Toto Riina in Sicily, Khun Sa in the Golden Triangle, and Felix Gallardo in Mexico, all of whom changed the destinies of their respective territories by taking drug trafficking to a global scale. They defied states and threatened the powers-that-be. It took almost 20 years for states to get organized and come up with strategies to bring down the drug barons.
S1E2 • The Story of Drug Trafficking • 2020 • People
What makes us good or evil? It's a simple but deeply unsettling question. One that scientists are now starting to answer. Horizon meets the researchers who have studied some of the most terrifying people behind bars - psychopathic killers. But there was a shock in store for one of these scientists, Professor Jim Fallon, when he discovered that he had the profile of a psychopath. And the reason he didn't turn out to be a killer holds important lessons for all of us. We meet the scientist who believes he has found the moral molecule and the man who is using this new understanding to rewrite our ideas of crime and punishment.
Professor Jim Al-Khalili shows how chaos theory can answer a question that mankind has asked for millennia - how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? It's a mindbending, counterintuitive and for many people a troubling idea.
One deck. Fifty-two cards. How many arrangements? Let's put it this way: Any time you pick up a well shuffled deck, you are almost certainly holding an arrangement of cards that has never before existed and might not exist again. Yannay Khaikin explains how factorials allow us to pinpoint the exact (very large) number of permutations in a standard deck of cards.
Documentary that reveals the secret story behind one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II, a feat that gave birth to the digital age. In 1943 a 24-year-old maths student and a GPO engineer combined to hack into Hitler's personal super code machine - not Enigma but an even tougher system, which he called his 'secrets writer'. Their break turned the Battle of Kursk, powered the D-day landings and orchestrated the end of the conflict in Europe. But it was also to be used during the Cold War - which meant both men's achievements were hushed up and never officially recognised.
2011 • Math
Dr Hannah Fry reveals how data-gobbling algorithms have taken over our lives and now control almost everything we do, without us being aware of it. Pitching the UK speed-cubing champion against a machine in the opening seconds of the lecture, Hannah sets the pace for a rapid voyage through this superhuman world. Hannah teams up with famed YouTuber Tom Scott to create a viral video and decipher YouTube's secret algorithm, comes face to face with four-legged guests to put animal image recognition machines to the test, and reveals how the NHS is matching organ donors in chains across the country to save hundreds of lives. But the breakthroughs are not restricted to the real world. Bafta award-winning special guests reveal the secrets of CGI in films such as The Avengers and Lord of the Rings, and supersized laser illusions bring the Royal Institution to life. An unexpected feathery guest opens our eyes to a new type of coding, where computers can be trained like animals using tasty rewards, with maths comedian Matt Parker and computing expert Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon bringing the topic to life. Finally, Hannah reveals how we've all been training up Google's AI in this way for years without realising it, and discovers how Google Health is using big data to give doctors a helping hand. The power of algorithms is undeniable. Hannah ultimately discovers how we can bend the world to our will and make anything possible, with a bit of mathematical thinking.
S1E2 • Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Secrets and Lies - The Hidden Power of Maths • 2019 • Math
Hannah travels down the fastest zip wire in the world to learn more about Newton's ideas on gravity. His discoveries revealed the movement of the planets was regular and predictable. James Clerk Maxwell unified the ideas of electricity and magnetism, and explained what light was. As if that wasn't enough, he also predicted the existence of radio waves. His tools of the trade were nothing more than pure mathematics. All strong evidence for maths being discovered. But in the 19th century, maths is turned on its head when new types of geometry are invented. No longer is the kind of geometry we learned in school the final say on the subject. If maths is more like a game, albeit a complicated one, where we can change the rules, surely this points to maths being something we invent - a product of the human mind. To try and answer this question, Hannah travels to Halle in Germany on the trail of perhaps one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Georg Cantor. He showed that infinity, far from being infinitely big, actually comes in different sizes, some bigger than others. This increasingly weird world is feeling more and more like something we've invented. But if that's the case, why is maths so uncannily good at predicting the world around us? Invented or discovered, this question just got a lot harder to answer.
S1E2 • Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry's Mysterious World of Maths • 2018 • Math
Why are most manhole covers round? Sure it makes them easy to roll, and slide into place in any alignment. But there’s another, more compelling reason, involving a peculiar geometric property of circles and other shapes. Marc Chamberland explains curves of constant width and Barbier’s theorem.
Hannah explores a paradox at the heart of modern maths, discovered by Bertrand Russell, which undermines the very foundations of logic that all of maths is built on. These flaws suggest that maths isn't a true part of the universe but might just be a human language - fallible and imprecise. However, Hannah argues that Einstein's theoretical equations, such as E=mc2 and his theory of general relativity, are so good at predicting the universe that they must be reflecting some basic structure in it. This idea is supported by Kurt Godel, who proved that there are parts of maths that we have to take on faith. Hannah then explores what maths can reveal about the fundamental building blocks of the universe - the subatomic, quantum world. The maths tells us that particles can exist in two states at once, and yet quantum physics is at the core of photosynthesis and therefore fundamental to most of life on earth - more evidence of discovering mathematical rules in nature. But if we accept that maths is part of the structure of the universe, there are two main problems: firstly, the two main theories that predict and describe the universe - quantum physics and general relativity - are actually incompatible; and secondly, most of the maths behind them suggests the likelihood of something even stranger - multiple universes. We may just have to accept that the world really is weirder than we thought, and Hannah concludes that while we have invented the language of maths, the structure behind it all is something we discover. And beyond that, it is the debate about the origins of maths that has had the most profound consequences: it has truly transformed the human experience, giving us powerful new number systems and an understanding that now underpins the modern world.
S1E3 • Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry's Mysterious World of Maths • 2018 • Math
This episode details the relationship between flowers and insects. There are some one million classified species of insect, and two or three times as many that are yet to be labelled. Around 300 million years ago, plants began to enlist insects to help with their reproduction, and they did so with flowers. Although the magnolia, for instance, contains male and female cells, pollination from another plant is preferable as it ensures greater variation and thus evolution. Flowers advertise themselves by either scent or display. Some evolved to produce sweet-smelling nectar and in turn, several insects developed their mouth parts into feeding tubes in order to reach it.
4/13 • Life on Earth • 1979 • Nature
The story of Nazi engineers tasked with fulfilling Hitler's megalomaniac demand for the construction of a land battleship weighing 1,000 tons.
S1E4 • Nazi Megastructures • 2013 • Technology
Looking at the planet's top predators through the eyes of scientists trying to save them.
We look at the ways in which plants have adapted to survive in the harshest climates on Earth. Whether in the driest, hottest deserts or the coldest Arctic wastes, plants have come up with some ingenious ways of surviving, including eating animals and actually caring for their offspring.
S1E6 • Private Life of Plants • 1995 • Nature
