Last Watched

A Passage to India

   2004    Nature
Travelling from K2 in Pakistan to Ladakh in India. It is a short distance as the crow flies but, due to politics, a huge loop. He passes through the Sikh city of Amritsar, with its Golden Temple, and through Shimla with its Vice Regal Lodge, Gaiety Theatre and cosy half-timbered tea-houses. He then meets the 14th Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, where the Tibetan government is in exile.
Series: Himalaya with Michael Palin

A Plastic Ocean

   2016    Nature
The film begins when journalist Craig Leeson, searching for the elusive blue whale, discovers plastic waste in what should be pristine ocean. In this adventure documentary, Craig teams up with free diver Tanya Streeter and an international team of scientists and researchers, and they travel to twenty locations around the world over the next four years to explore the fragile state of our oceans, uncover alarming truths about plastic pollution, and reveal working solutions that can be put into immediate effect.

A Point to Prove

   2022    Culture
This episode is all about Williams Racing. After over forty years in F1, the family from which the team is named has sold up, and the not-ominous-sounding-at-all Dorilton Capital has moved in and is ringing the changes. They have got a motor sport man through and through to run it though: former Volkswagen WRC principal Jost Capito. The new boss soon starts scything through the team with ruthless German efficiency.
George Russell soon gets in the mood also, like a prefect joining in with the teacher grassing someone up, saying some team members need to be given the shove. The team does come through to score a valiant eighth and ninth in Budapest. The new regime is rocking and rolling.
Series: Formula 1 Season four

A Robot Guide to Mars

   2023    Science
Mars is infested with robots, orbiting the planet and roaming the Martian surface on a mission to uncover its secrets; now, Perseverance joins this dedicated group of machines to uncover if there is, or was ever, life on the Red Planet.
Our neighbor, Mars, fascinates us. It's a planet that is similar to Earth but with some big differences. Mars is rusty, dusty, frigid, and frozen. Past missions suggest that Mars was once a very different world. The Mars we see today has completely changed from the Mars of a few billion years ago. Without a time machine to explore ancient Mars, we employ a team of high-tech robot investigators, an entire fleet of robotic spacecraft exploring the planet. Working together, they dig into Mars's past to answer the ultimate question -- did Mars once have life?
Series: How the Universe Works Season 11

A Savage Legacy

       History
Examines the impact of racism in the 20th century. By 1900 European colonial expansion had reached deep into the heart of Africa. Under the rule of King Leopold II, the Belgian Congo was turned into a vast rubber plantation. Men, women and children who failed to gather their latex quotas would have their limbs dismembered. The country became the scene of one of the century's greatest racial genocides, as an estimated 10 million Africans perished under colonial rule.
Series: Racism: A History

A Sky Full of Ghosts

   2014    Science
Tyson begins the episode by explaining the nature of the speed of light and how much of what is seen of the observable universe is from light emanated from billions of years in the past. Tyson further explains how modern astronomy has used such analyzes via deep time to identify the Big Bang event and the age of the universe. Tyson proceeds to describe how the work of Isaac Newton, William Herschel, and James Clerk Maxwell contributed to understanding the nature of electromagnetic waves and gravitational force, and how this work led towards Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, that the speed of light is a fundamental constant of the universe and gravity can be seen as distortion of the fabric of space-time. Tyson describes the concept of dark stars as postulated by John Michell which are not visible but detectable by tracking other stars trapped within their gravity wells, an idea Herschel used to discover binary stars. Tyson then describes the nature of black holes, their enormous gravitational forces that can even capture light, and their discovery via X-ray sources such as Cygnus X-1. Tyson uses the Ship of Imagination to provide a postulate of the warping of spacetime and time dilation as one enters the event horizon of the black hole, and the possibility that these may lead to other points within our universe or others, or even time travel. Tyson ends on noting that Herschel's son, John would be inspired by his father to continue to document the known stars as well as contributions towards photography that play on the same nature of deep time used by astronomers.
Series: Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey
The Story of the Jews

The Story of the Jews

2013  History
Top Gear

Top Gear

2012  Technology
Order and Disorder

Order and Disorder

2012  Science
Turkey with Simon Reeve

Turkey with Simon Reeve

2017  Culture
Dirty Money

Dirty Money

2018  Culture