Latest Documentaries

Will You Get Dementia

Dr Claire Taylor learns more about the the UK's fastest growing health condition, she meets patients living with dementia, as well as scientists and experts working in the field. The GP puts herself through innovative tests to find out how to spot the earliest signs and learns about different types of the disease. Plus, Claire investigates cutting edge treatments and asks what can be done to prevent dementia developing.

2025 • Health

The Space Race in Colour

A two-part documentary recounting the Cold War space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Through newly colorized archival footage and firsthand accounts, it follows the rivalry from early satellites and rocket development to espionage, surveillance, and the Apollo Moon landings.

2026 • Astronomy

Science and Survival

Explores the ever-present dangers faced by astronauts on the ISS, ranging from meteor strikes and docking disasters to the entire station backflipping out of control.

S1E2 • Terror on the Space Station • 2025 • Astronomy

High-Risk Build

Explores the danger and ambition of building the International Space Station in space, where a single mistake could prove fatal.

S1E1 • Terror on the Space Station • 2025 • Astronomy

Witnesses for Eternity

How did Stone Age communities build enormous burial mounds, stone circles, temples, and tombs with the limited technology available to them? This episode visits major archaeological sites in Scotland, Brittany, Austria, Malta, Turkey, and Jordan to investigate how massive stones were transported, what these monuments meant, and what they reveal about early social organization and beliefs.

S1E2 • Secrets of the Stone Age • 2017 • History

From Hunters to Farmers

Around 12,000 years ago, humans began abandoning a nomadic existence for settled life. The episode follows the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry, the growth of settlements, changing diets, and the remarkable discovery of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey—where hunter-gatherers erected massive decorated stone columns long before farming became widespread.

S1E1 • Secrets of the Stone Age • 2017 • History

Cunk on Life

Philomena Cunk returns with her most ambitious quest yet - venturing right up the universe to examine life and existence. Mockumentary from Charlie Brooker starring Diane Morgan.

2024 • Nature

Mongolia

Simon Reeve embarks on a 3,000-mile journey across the deserts, plains and mountains of Mongolia in search of snow leopards and the nomadic people who hunt with golden eagles.

S2E4 • Wilderness with Simon Reeve • 2026 • Nature

Yukon

Simon Reeve treks and canoes through Canada’s rugged and frozen Yukon Territory to meet the people who make the wilderness home and to search for grizzly bears, the apex predator.

S2E3 • Wilderness with Simon Reeve • 2026 • Nature

Sea of Cortez

Simon Reeve voyages across Mexico’s beautiful and remote Sea of Cortez, known as the 'aquarium of the world', to dive with rare and dangerous sharks.

S2E2 • Wilderness with Simon Reeve • 2026 • Nature

Papua New Guinea

Simon Reeve journeys through the lost world of Papua New Guinea’s tropical rainforest in search of the tenkile tree kangaroo, one of the rarest animals on Earth.

S2E1 • Wilderness with Simon Reeve • 2026 • Nature

Kalahari

Simon Reeve crosses the parched desert of southern Africa, tracking wildebeest with the famous hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, before heading to the oasis of the Okavango Delta.

S1E4 • Wilderness with Simon Reeve • 2024 • Nature

Recommended Documentaries

Super-Powers

Richard Hammond concludes his look at miracles in the natural world by discovering some incredible animal super-powers. Creatures that can create slime as strong as steel, survive massive extremes of temperature or even turn invisible. Animal super-powers that have inspired scientists and engineers to create brand new human inventions that could change the way we live. He discovers how the husky's paw can help American footballers; how a strange eel-like creature with a skull but no skeleton might be the next best thing to a spider; how the kingfisher could revolutionise air-sea rescue; and how the cuttlefish has enabled a military tank to pretend it's a small family saloon.

S1E3 • Richard Hammond's Miracles of Nature • 2012 • Nature

Space Telescopes

Space telescopes orbiting above the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere, such as the Hubble, have made incredible contributions to our knowledge of the universe.

S1E9 • Zenith: Advances in Space Exploration • 2021 • Technology

Ice Station Antarctica

Antarctica is the last great wilderness. It's the coldest, windiest, driest and most isolated place on Earth. And every winter, for over three months of the year, the sun never rises. But it's also home to the British Antarctic Survey's Halley Research Station. A veteran of living and working at Halley in the early eighties, BBC weatherman Peter Gibbs makes an emotional return to the place he once called home. A place that, during his time, was key to the discovery of the ozone hole. The journey starts with an arduous 12-day, 3000-mile voyage onboard the RRS Ernest Shackleton. Once on the ice shelf, Peter is delighted to finally arrive at the futuristic research station and marvels at the cutting edge science being done at Halley today. From vital discoveries about how our lives are vulnerable to the sun's activities, to studying interplanetary travel and the threat of man-made climate change. But Peter's journey is also something of a rescue mission. The research station's home is a floating ice shelf that constantly moves and cracks, and the ice shelf has developed a chasm that could cast Halley adrift on a massive iceberg.

Horizon • 2016 • Science

Arctic - Life in the Deep Freeze

Human Planet tells remarkable stories of people who make their homes in the Arctic.

S1E3 • Human Planet • Environment

Philosophy - Plato

Plato was one of the world's earliest and possibly greatest philosophers. He matters because of his devotion to making humanity more fulfilled.

The School of Life • 2014 • People

Part 2

Neil Oliver reveals the truth behind the legend of the Vikings. (Part 2.) Neil Oliver heads out from the Scandinavian homelands to Russia, Turkey and Ireland to trace the beginnings of a vast trading empire that handled Chinese silks as adeptly as Pictish slaves. Neil discovers a world of 'starry-eyed maidens' and Buddhist statues that are a world away from our British experience of axe-wielding warriors, although it turns out that there were quite a few of those as well.

S1E2 • Vikings • 2012 • History

Physics Documentaries

Where Am I

Where Am I? Is a new documentary about the skills we use to find our way around. Whether you are an Inuit hunter, a foraging insect, or just someone out for a stroll, your brain is performing one of its most fundamental services – it’s navigating. Why are some of us good at finding our way, while others are not? Good navigators are able to use both memory and imagination…remembering where they have been, and imagining where they’re going. Some researchers believe we build a cognitive or mental map when we navigate, a kind of bird’s eye view of our surroundings, a view that can be rotated and examined in our mind. There has been about sixty years of argument amongst scientists about whether humans and other mammals actually form these cognitive maps or not. The advent of GPS or Global Positioning Systems has changed the discussion about navigation. GPS triggers a simpler, more automatic navigational technique that does not involve building a mental map. With GPS, we simply respond to directions and may not truly understand where we are.

S53E09 • The Nature of Things • 2013 • Physics

Time

Time flies - sometimes. Its passage can seem to speed up and slow down. Why do we experience time the way we do, and how do we take back some control?

S3E12 • Explained • 2021 • Physics

What is love

People ask Google everything under the sun. One of the most commonly searched questions in the world is “What Is Love?” Allow us at SciShow to explain.

2014 • Physics

What can Schrödinger's cat teach us about quantum mechanics?

The classical physics that we encounter in our everyday, macroscopic world is very different from the quantum physics that governs systems on a much smaller scale (like atoms).

TED-Ed • Physics

Earth Time

We hold a unique knowledge of time, realising that it stretches deep into the past, and will continue into the future. How does this affect our sense of who we are?

S1E3 • BBC: Time • 2006 • Physics

How does it work?

Nuclear Energy is a controversial subject. The pro- and anti-nuclear lobbies fight furiously, and it's difficult to decide who is right. So we're trying to clear up the issue - in this video we discuss how we got to where we are today, as the basis for discussion.

S1E1 • Nuclear Energy Explained • Physics

Music Documentaries

How playing an instrument benefits your brain

When you listen to music, multiple areas of your brain become engaged and active. But when you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout. What's going on? Anita Collins explains the fireworks that go off in musicians' brains when they play, and examines some of the long-term positive effects of this mental workout.

TED-Ed • Music

Making a Star

In the first programme of the series, music agent Emma Banks looks at how the music business finds talent and creates superstars. Over 25 years as one of the top agents in the business, Emma has worked with some of the world's most famous artists, including Katy Perry, Kanye West and Red Hot Chili Peppers. She's seen first-hand the fine line between success and failure, following the careers of hundreds of acts - from geniuses who never quite made it to megastars who conquered the world.

S1E1 • Hits Hype and Hustle: An Insiders Guide to the Music Business • 2018 • Music

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

Kurt Cobain, legendary lead singer, guitarist and songwriter of Nirvana, “the flagship band of Generation X,” remains an object of reverence and fascination for music fans around the world. His story is told for the first time in KURT COBAIN: MONTAGE OF HECK

2015 • Music

Score: A Film Music Documentary

This documentary brings Hollywood's premier composers together to give viewers a privileged look inside the musical challenges and creative secrecy of the world's most widely known music genre: the film score.

2016 • Music

Dance Crazes

From the waltz to voguing, dance crazes have connected people throughout history. But when a dance catches on, who gets the credit - and compensation?

S3E11 • Explained • 2021 • Music

Daft Punk Unchained

Film about the pop culture phenomenon that is Daft Punk, the duo with 12 million albums sold worldwide and seven Grammy awards. Throughout their career Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have always resisted compromise and the established codes of show business. They have remained determined to maintain control of every link in the chain of their creative process. In the era of globalisation and social networks, they rarely speak in public and neither do they show their faces on TV. This documentary explores this unprecedented cultural revolution, revealing two artists on a permanent quest for creativity, independence and freedom. Between fiction and reality, magic and secret, future and reinvention, theatricality and humility, The Robots have built a unique world. The film combines rare archive footage as well as exclusive interviews with their closest collaborators who talk about their work with Daft Punk, including Pharrell Williams, Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers and Michel Gondry.

2016 • Music

Random! Documentaries

Victory in the Pacific

The end of the War in the Pacific is one of the greatest and most terrible tales of modern history. The Japanese fought to the bitter end and continued to fight island by island, hill by hill. US Air Force command tried bombing Japan into submission, firebombing Tokyo but could not break the Japanese resolve. Over 200,000 people died. In the end, President Truman decided to go nuclear and the fates of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sealed.

13/13 • World War II In HD Colour • 2009 • History

Communication

Animals use communication to attract mates, warn off predators, defend territory, or trick their prey. And of course, it's the senses that play the key role - Sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing - all are employed to send signals to others in the hope actions speak louder than words.

S1E12 • Animal Super Senses • 2020 • Nature

Man and Metals

Five thousand years ago man first throws a handful of rocks into a campfire and stumbles upon a discovery that changes the world: Metal. Copper, Tin and Bronze empower the ancient world and allow empires to expand, armed with sharp, hard-wearing weapons.

8/12 • Mankind Decoded • 2013 • History

Hope

Neuroscientist Emile Bruneau explores how we can use our capacity for critical thinking, our brain plasticity, and strategies like education and cooperation to help combat hate.

S1E6 • Why We Hate • 2019 • Brain

Uncharted Amazon

Deep in the jungles of Peru, a silky anteater is fighting to stay awake and a mother hummingbird is struggling to raise her chick. As this documentary reveals, life in his incredible part of the planet faces changing conditions.

2015 • Nature

Brothers at War

Neil follows the rise of Clan Stewart to become Scotland’s Royal dynasty. It’s the blood soaked tale of a bitter family feud. In a vicious contest, using clan power to plot, manoeuvre and murder their way to power, the story culminates with the dramatic assassination of King James I below a tennis court in Perth, 1437. Neil traces this family feud through clan combat, royal romances and spectacular Renaissance courts to the brutal torture and execution of the last rival Stewart, Walter Atholl, when the king’s widowed Queen Joan wreaks a terrible revenge for his treachery.

S1E2 • Rise of the Clans • 2018 • History