Over one billion Christians look to Rome, more than half of all Christians on the planet. But how did a small Jewish sect from the backwoods of 1st-century Palestine, which preached humility and the virtue of poverty, become the established religion of western Europe - wealthy, powerful and expecting unfailing obedience from the faithful? Amongst the surprising revelations, Professor MacCulloch tells how confession was invented by monks on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, and how the Crusades gave Britain the university system. Above all, it is a story of what can be achieved when you have friends in high places.

Stonehenge is an icon of prehistoric British culture, an enigma that has seduced archaeologists and tourists for centuries. Why is it here? What is its significance? And which forces inspired its creators? Now a group of international archaeologists led by the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzman Institute in Vienna believe that a new state-of-the-art approach is the key to unlocking Stonehenge's secrets. For four years the team have surveyed and mapped every monument, both visible and invisible, across ten square kilometres of the sacred landscape to create the most complete digital picture of Stonehenge and the surrounding area over millennia. Known monuments have yielded more data than ever before, revealing hidden structures within, and new finds are revolutionising the very timeline of Stonehenge. The film takes the viewer on a prehistoric journey from 8000 BC to 2500 BC as the scientists uncover the very origins of Stonehenge, learning why this landscape is sacred, preserved and has been revered by following generations. Evidence of war and conflict, as well as the cultivation of ideas and industry, is explored to reveal complex communities with international trade links as far-reaching as Spain and central Europe.

Professor Jim Al Khalili from the University of Surrey delves into over 50 years of the BBC science archive to tell the story behind the emergence of one of the greatest theories of modern science, the Big Bang. The remarkable idea that our universe simply began from nothing has not always been accepted with the conviction it is today and, from fiercely disputed leftfield beginnings, took the best part of the 20th century to emerge as the triumphant explanation of how the universe began. Using curious horn-shaped antennas, U-2 spy planes, satellites and particle accelerators, scientists have slowly pieced together the cosmological jigsaw, and this documentary charts the overwhelming evidence for a universe created by a Big Bang.

In this revealing documentary, Giancarlo Granda, former pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Hotel, shares the intimate details of his 7-year relationship with a charming older woman, Becki Falwell, and her husband, the Evangelical Trump stalwart Jerry Falwell Jr. Directed by Billy Corben, the film outlines Granda's entanglement with the Falwell's seemingly perfect lives and the overarching influence this affair had on a presidential election.
The life of Jerry Falwell — the late Moral Majority televangelist who for decades helped catalyze the rightward shift of American evangelicals before his death in 2007 — is a quintessentially American story. But it’s in the next generation that the Falwell narrative becomes at once soap opera and morality tale. The film covers the graceless fall of Jerry Falwell Jr., who after the death of his father was placed in the presidency of the family’s conservative organ Liberty University. There, he seemed to remain painfully in thrall to his appetites. We hear testimony about his alleged tendency to drink on the job and discomfiting, slurry interviews between him and sympathetic media — but most crucially, we receive the testimony of Giancarlo Granda.
Granda was a pool attendant at a Miami hotel when he met Falwell and his wife, Becki, in 2012. Today, he alleges that he was persuaded to have sex with Becki while Falwell watched, and that the pair engaged in an ongoing campaign of communication with him that could be described as coercive. His energies were consumed with managing their tempers and occasionally threatening behavior, and he blames the swirl of scandal around them for derailing his professional future. Plainspoken and only occasionally visibly emotional, Granda is his own best advocate as he describes a couple who, he says, craved his body and were willing to discard the rest of him.

Join us on a journey into the mysterious depths of the human psyche as we investigate the strange and surprising terrain of the Mind Field.
Chimps and Humans can be traced biologically back to a common ancestor. The Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis theorizes about the two different paths of development - particularly cognitive development - that occurred in these two species after the split. Chimps stayed in the trees and developed some extraordinary cognitive capabilities which are shown by the research work of Japanese scientists, while humans came down into the savanna and developed social capabilities and language.
The hypothesis is that humans 'traded' some aspects of cognitive capabilities by re-purposing areas of the brain that had evolved in the context of other uses. Those capabilities are kept in chimps and are far surpassing that of normal humans. This is shown by the research work of scientists at the Primate Research Center connected with Kyoto University.

Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Hanging Garden of Babylon is the most elusive of these constructions of classical antiquity. While traces have been found of the Great Pyramid of Gaza, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria, centuries of digging have turned up nothing about the lost gardens of Babylon – until now.
Why, in the nearly 3,000 years since the gardens were presumably built, has no archeological evidence ever been found to support their existence? Is the Hanging Garden of Babylon a myth or a mystery to be solved?
Travel with Dr. Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University’s Oriental Institute and author of The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, to one of the most dangerous places on earth, as she sets out to answer these questions and prove not only that the gardens did exist, but also identify where they most likely were located, describe what they looked like and explain how they were constructed.