Gladiators: Back from the Dead • 2010

79:32

During World War Il, the US begins to work on a top-secret project that results in the atomic bombings on Japan - and a global conflict lasting decades.

S1E1 • Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War • 2024 • History

43:38

Bettany Hughes recalls eight pivotal days that defined the Roman Empire and its establishment as the world's first superpower. She begins by exploring the day in 202BC when Rome defeated the might of Carthage under Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in modern-day Tunisia "Eight Days That Made Rome is a docu-drama that leaves behind the conventional chronologies of Rome's thousand-year history and brings razor-sharp focus to eight days that created, tested and defined its greatness. Each programme works as a stand-alone, as strong in its own right as part of a series and reveals a Rome relevant to us today, with its noblest and darkest instincts still resonating in the world around us."

S1E1 • Eight Days That Made Rome • 2017 • History

59:09

Simon Sebag Montefiore charts Rome's rise from the abandonment and neglect of the 14th century into the everlasting seat of the papacy recognised today. His story takes us through the debauchery and decadence of the Renaissance, the horrors of the Sack of Rome and the Catholic Reformation, through to the arrival of fascism and the creation of the Vatican State. By taking us inside Rome's most sensational palaces and churches and telling the stories behind some of the world's most beloved art, Sebag Montefiore's final instalment is a visual feast.

S1E3 • Rome: A History of the Eternal City • 2012 • History

44:10

1940. Nine months after the outbreak of World War II, Hitler attacks in the West, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Great Britain. The "phoney war" ends, the real war begins, in an unleashing of violence never seen before. The devastating blitzkrieg exceeds all expectations in intensity and its soldiers push back all human limits by consuming Pervitine, a synthetic drug that prevents them from sleeping. After a four-year-long First World War, Hitler's feat was to defeat Belgium and the Netherlands in 18 days and France in barely 45 days... The Nazi apocalypse swept through Sedan, on the Somme and to the English Channel, the last rampart of Great Britain. At Dunkirk, which had become a bottleneck, the British fled en masse under enemy fire. Can Churchill save them?

S1E1 • Apocalypse: Hitler Takes on the West • 2020 • History

58:54

He continues his personal account of Britain's empire by looking at how traders, conquerors and settlers spread the British way of doing things around the world - in particular how they created a very British idea of home. He begins in India, where early traders wore Indian costume and took Indian wives. Their descendants still cherish their mixed heritage. Victorian values put a stop to that as inter racial mixing became taboo. In Singapore he visits a club where British colonials gathered together, in Canada he finds a town whose inhabitants are still fiercely proud of the traditions of their Scottish ancestors, in Kenya he meets the descendants of the first white settlers - men whose presence came to be bitterly resented as pressure for African independence grew. And he traces the story of an Indian family in Leicester whose migrations have been determined by the changing fortunes of the British empire.

S1E2 • Empire • 2012 • History

51:27

The months of the war in Europe were shocking and desperate. This film follows the British and Americans as they cross the Rhine and the Russians as they push through Poland into Germany itself. It covers the horrors of the liberation of Belsen and Buchenwald, and the final terrible street fighting in Berlin. The story culminates in the suicide of Hitler, the carving up of Germany between the Allies, and the Nuremberg trials.

12/13 • World War II In HD Colour • 2009 • History