Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to discover whether nuclear power is safe. He begins in Japan, at the former Fukushima nuclear plant, where he meets some of the tens of thousands of people who have been evacuated from the exclusion zone. He travels to an abandoned village just outside the zone to witness a nuclear clean-up operation. Jim draws on the latest scientific findings from Japan and from the previous explosion at Chernobyl to understand how dangerous the release of radiation is likely to be and what that means for our trust in nuclear power.

Was the sacrifice of an entire generation worldwide an avoidable or a necessary tragedy? Are the roots of World War II to be found in the devastation of World War I? Drawing from over 300 hours of archival footage and tracing the journeys of the civilians and soldiers across the world, anonymous or well-known, who fought for survival in this unprecedented period in human history, both heroic and barbaric. On June 28th, 1914, the assassination of an obscure Austrian archduke in Sarajevo triggers the most disastrous conflict the world has ever known. Germany becomes an enemy to France, invades Belgium, and in September arrives at the gates of Paris.

It is the greatest technological challenge ever undertaken by humankind. The quest to produce the ultimate energy solution, Fusion, a reliable source of clean power. What if we could create here on earth, our very own version of a star, a machine that makes power from nuclear fuel? But so immense are the challenges, the goal of a power-producing fusion reactor has so far remained elusive and out of reach... until now.

The Fyre Festival was billed as a luxury music experience on a posh private island, but it failed spectacularly in the hands of a cocky entrepreneur. Fyre smolders with agonizing tension when that party in paradise goes awry, but this slickly assembled documentary reserves its greatest horror for damning observations about the dangers of wealth.

The Milky Way, our galaxy, is a magnificent sight in the night sky, but we know surprisingly little about it for certain. What is its shape? How many stars does it actually contain? What lies at its centre? The Gaia space telescope will answer these questions, being armed with the most advanced camera to leave our planet, and it will allow us to see our galaxy as we've never seen it before. The Sky at Night visits the factory in Chelmsford that made the astonishing sensor at the heart of the mission.

Sir David Attenborough returns to the Galápagos Islands and travels throughout the archipelago to explain their origins and their unique fauna in evolutionary terms. He has captured a new species of pink iguana on film for the first time. In the first episode, the islands of the Galapagos rose explosively from the ocean four million years ago. Although life would not seem viable in such a remote Pacific outpost, the first arrivals landed as the fires still burned. David Attenborough explores the islands for the animals and plants that descend from these pioneers: from the sea birds carrying the seeds that made a tentative foothold on these rocks, to equator-dwelling penguins and a dancing bird with blue feet. This is a story of treacherous journeys, life-forms that forged unlikely companionships, and surviving against all odds. It is the story of an evolutionary melting pot in which anything and everything is possible.