This film tells the story of the last year of the war in Europe, from the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944 to the dual German surrender, first in Reims then Berlin, in May 1945. Eleven months of unprecedented combat.
Simon uncovers the truth about Spain's hero El Cid. He also investigates the horror of the Spanish Inquisition and in the process discovers an unsettling story about one of his own ancestors.
2/3 • Blood and Gold: The Making of Spain • 2015 • History
Richard Miles explores the power and the paradox of the 'Greek Thing' - a blossoming in art, philosophy and science that went hand in hand with political discord, social injustice and endless war. He paints a fascinating picture of the internal and external pressures that fuelled this unique political and social experiment, one that would pioneer many of the political systems that we still live with today, from oligarchy to tyranny, from totalitarianism to democracy.
3/6 • Ancient Worlds • 2010 • History
On a journey through Ancient Egyptian art, Alastair Sooke picks treasures from its most opulent and glittering moment. Starting with troubling psychological portraits of tyrant king Senwosret III and ending with the golden mask of boy king Tutankhamun, Sooke also explores architectural wonders, exquisite tombs and a lost city - site of the greatest artistic revolution in Egypt's history where a new sinuous style was born under King Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti. Along the way Egyptologists and artists reveal that the golden veneer conceals a touching humanity.
2/3 • Treasures of Ancient Egypt • 2014 • History
Around 200,000 years ago, a new species, Homo sapiens, appeared on the African landscape. While scientists have imagined eastern Africa as a real-life Garden of Eden, the latest research suggests humans evolved in many places across the continent at the same time. DNA from a 19th-century African-American slave is forcing geneticists to re-think the origins of our species. The theory is that our ancestors met, mated and hybridized with other human types in Africa — creating ever greater diversity within our species.
Part 2 • First Peoples • 2015 • History
Historical documentary telling the definitive story of Hitler's final hours as told by the people who were there. The programme features exclusive interviews originally filmed in 1948 - only recently rediscovered after 65 years and never before seen in the UK - with the inner circle who were trapped with Hitler in his bunker as the Russians fought to take Berlin. Parts of the bunker are rebuilt according to this eyewitness testimony in order to forensically chart the last hours, days and minutes of the Fuhrer's life.
2016 • History
If knowledge is power, communication is the jet fuel, the delivery system, the gift we give each other that links the modern world. But it has a dark side.
4/8 • Origins: The Journey of Humankind • 2017 • History
