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- Documentary telling the real story of the Cambridge Spies - subject of the drama series A Spy Among Friends.
- Simon Armitage presents the extraordinary story of the most disturbing witch trial in British history and the key role played in it by one nine-year-old girl. Jennet Device, a beggar-girl from Pendle in Lancashire, was the star witness in the trial in 1612 of her own mother, her brother, her sister and many of her neighbours and, thanks to her chilling testimony, they were all hanged. In 'The Pendle Witch Child' poet Simon Armitage explores the lethal power and influence of one child's words - a story of fear, magic and demonic pacts retold partly with vivid and innovative hand-drawn animation. He discovers how Jennet's appearance in the witness box cast its shadow way beyond Lancashire, impressing lawyers, politicians, clerics and even the King himself and setting a dark precedent for child testimony in witch trials as far away as America. Finally, in a dramatic twist to the tale, he reveals how, 22 years after the original trial, Jennet's own words were very nearly the death of her - when she herself was put on trial, accused of being a witch by a 10-year-old boy. With the help of historians Malcolm Gaskill, Diane Purkiss and Ronald Hutton, Simon Armitage attempts to get inside Jennet's head and understand how the illegitimate and illiterate youngest child of a family of beggars could become both pawn and player in a much bigger story of 17th century religion, power, law, science and the monarchy. What made Jennet speak out so everyone she knew would die? And how did the courts decide to admit her evidence, and allow her example to create a precedent for accepting the testimony of other child witnesses who wanted to send their neighbours to the gallows? Although the events in this film may date back four hundred years, its issues resonate today as much as ever - when to believe our children, how the police and the court system should handle child witnesses and above all how, in times of crisis, fear of evil can easily lead us to behave in ways which may corrode the very values that we most wish to protect.
- Infographic extravaganza with world famous Swedish statistician and showman Hans Rosling. His main message - that our world is profoundly changing in ways most of us simply don't realize - much of it for the better.
- Professor Hans Rosling shares his excitement with statistics, and shows how researchers are handling the modern data deluge.
- Professor David Spiegelhalter tries to pin down what chance truly is and how it works in the real world. With his unique storytelling method, he applies a blend of wit and wisdom, animation, graphics, and gleeful nerdery to the joys of chance and the mysteries of probability. It is a vital branch of mathematics that tells us what might happen in the future based on the events of the past.
- Suzy Klein explores how dictatorship shaped classical music in Europe between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War.
- Ian Hislop's sharp, provocative take on 200 years of fake news and its consequences - from Victorians on the moon to 21st-century deepfake, and Hislop as never seen before.
- What data is, how it is captured, stored, shared, and analyzed. Engineers of the data age create a technological and philosophical revolution. Modern society runs on data, making information the world's most valuable asset.
- Computer Scientist, Professor Cliff, thru philosophy, math, science and technology exhibits the quest for certainty/ fundamentals of sound reasoning.
- The setting is London, in the wake of a terrible war. Between mounds of rubble and bomb craters stands the house of a lonely old blind man. Late one night he receives three unexpected visitors and tragedy follows.
- Jim Al-Khalili investigates the progress of artificial intelligence, and what is easier and more difficult for robots to do than the human brain.
- Speechless tells the powerful stories of two men who can no longer take language for granted. Much of the film is made on the Neuro Rehab Unit of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London's Queen Square
- This multi-layered animation explores autobiographical memory and the cultural elements of our earliest childhood memory.
- Ian Hislop explores the British obsession with the past. He reveals how and why, throughout our history, we have continually plundered 'the olden days' to make sense of and shape the present.
- A troupe of Morris-dancing badgers try to avoid the animal quarantine facility above their burrow, until tragedy forces them to confront their fears and seek the help of their caged neighbours.
- The iconic illustrator and author, Sir Quentin Blake, tells the story of his creative life in his own words and pictures.
- As churches in the UK close at a rapid rate, a small group of pipe organ enthusiasts battle to save valuable, precious instruments from the scrapheap. This documentary follows the ups and downs of their quest.
- Michael Grade reveals the story of General Tom Thumb, the world's first global show business celebrity who went from humble beginnings in America to international superstardom.
- In a series of three films, the acclaimed documentary film maker, Richard Alwyn, goes behind the scenes in three of England's Church of England Cathedrals - Wakefield, Wells and Southwark. Each film explores in different ways the purpose and daily workings of these extraordinary edifices that stud the English landscape. What are they for? What do they do? Who uses them and how? Are they meeting places between heaven and earth, timeless containers of sacred space? Or empty shells, nothing more than feats of engineering, architecture, but essentially relics - anachronisms in a secular world?
- Inventive documentary. Academic and children's author Katherine Rundell examines the case of Thomas Clifton, taken from the streets of London to work on stage, his father's fight to get him back and the law that allowed him to be taken.
- Fashion photographer Rankin and artist Alison Lapper assess how digital photography, social media and selfie culture have affected people's sense of identity. They challenge four camera shy people to be photographed.
- Child choristers have been singing at Salisbury for 900 years. This film follows Salisbury Cathedral's current choristers. The Cathedral's separate boy and girl choirs each contain 16 of the most musically gifted 8-13 year-olds in the country. Their role, now as always, is to sing, day-in day-out some of the most sublime music ever written in one of Britain's most beautiful buildings.
- As Brexit Britain prepares to draw up new rules on immigration, Ian Hislop looks at the period when Britain first legislated against those wishing to settle here.
- In a world where light powers everything, a curious child is finally allowed to visit the factory that their parent owns. But the dark secret they uncover inside this factory threatens to tear their whole world apart. Now, they must make a choice between family, or the life of another...
- Ian Hislop examines the work of Victorian "do-gooders" - campaigners who were responsible for bringing about social reform in Britain, abolishing injustices such as slavery and young children working in coal mines and mills, and for raising the age of consent.
- In this poetic, mesmeric programme radio producer Tim Dee walks the vast, open wetlands of the Lincolnshire Wash on a quest to record the "pure" sound of the wind as in comes in off the North Sea.
- In this documentary, writer and historian Michael Collins delivers a riposte to the urban intelligentsia which has spent a century sneering at the suburbs.
- Ian Hislop presents an entertaining and provocative film about the colourful Victorian financiers whose spectacular philanthropy shows that banking wasn't always associated with greed or self-serving financial recklessness.
- Nature and domesticity collide in a dark animated tale of love and loss.
- Set in a dying industrial town, //_sleeper tells the story of Frank, a recluse who wakes each day to a strange anomaly on the horizon. Black treacle skies, glowing monitors and strange phone calls are the backdrop to this unsettling character journey, as Frank looks ever watching towards the horizon - the anomaly awaits him.
- Inspired by a mural they saw at Nottingham ice rink as children, former Olympic champions Torvill and Dean travel to Alaska on a quest to fulfill a life-long dream that also provides a first-hand insight into the effects of climate change.