Travelling forward in time to 30,000 years ago, it's the middle of an ice age. The landscape is dominated by mighty mammoths, living side-by-side with woolly rhinos, giant deer and two separate species of human. The programme follows the fate of a herd of mammoths in their annual struggle against the harsh ice-age conditions. Every summer they spend on the grassy plains of what will one day become the bottom of the North Sea, but every winter they are forced to head for the less exposed valleys further south. It is a journey fraught with danger: mammoths can get trapped in frozen bogs, and the herd must run the gauntlet of hunters like cave lions and the deadly Neanderthals.

Journey through the long-vanished corners of prehistoric North America, beginning when man first entered the vast, unspoiled continent some 14,000 years ago, in this appealing BBC documentary. Witness ancient beasts, mammoths, mastodons, giant bears, and sabre-toothed cats, and see the legacies each has passed to their modern successors. Computer animation and digital effects bring to life mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, short-faced bears, glyptodonts, and a plethora of smaller animals in a lush Ice Age mosaic. Discoveries from sites across America are the basis for the reconstructions.

We call them 'man’s best friend', but their story is almost as old as man himself. Our very first friend in the world, they have walked by our side for over 20,000 years, helping us to hunt for food and offering us companionship and protection. Man’s First Friend is an epic new primetime documentary event that combines natural history, science and anthropology to explore the enduring relationship between humankind and dogs, how the two species have co-evolved together, where did they come from to take such a prominent position in our lives, and how did we learn to harness their unique talents.
The film takes viewers on an extraordinary journey through some of the most remote locations in the world to answers these questions and more. It highlights what dogs are capable of: from the Pariah dog in India who protects her owner’s banana plantations from daily attacks by Black-headed Monkeys; to Kenyan Bloodhounds trained to track ivory poachers. Dogs comfort us, relieving loneliness and helping us cope with old age.

Let's go behind the scenes at NASA to discover how it is preparing for its most ambitious and daring mission: to land men - and possibly women - on the surface of Mars. It's over 40 years since Neil Armstrong made the first human footprint on the moon. But getting to the red planet would involve a journey of at least three years. Meet the scientists and engineers who are designing new rockets, new space suits and finding ways to help astronauts survive the perils of this long voyage. And it turns out that having the 'right stuff' for a mission to mars might not be quite what you expect.

On August 7th, 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between the New York World Trade Center’s twin towers. After dancing for nearly an hour on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released. This extraordinary documentary incorporates Petit’s personal footage to show how he overcame seemingly insurmountable challenges to achieve the 'Artistic crime of the century'.

The Sundarbans mangrove forest, in Bangladesh near the Indian border, is a tidal jungle where Ganges and Brahmaputra enter the Indian Ocean. Its has some 400 Bengal tigers - the largest population in the world, and the only to be hardly scared of men. The downside is tigers kill up the 50 Bangladeshis a year, even from neighbouring villages, so keeping them inside the reserve is key to long-term survival.
A recent project tries to train local mongrels, not pets but fiercely self-reliant dogs, to spot and even scare off tigers from villages. An individual tiger can turn into a man-eater in order to survive - this process may occur due to an injury or old age (and so cannot hunt agile prey) or even accidentally tasting human flesh.