David Attenborough explores Britain and Ireland’s grasslands, revealing the creatures that create them and the extraordinary stories they hide. From the coastal flower meadows in the Scottish Outer Hebrides to the rich open landscapes in the mountains of southern Ireland, we enter surprising and dramatic worlds.
In southern England, we meet an extraordinary bee that lives in chalk grassland, one of our rarest habitats, laying her eggs in empty snail shells. Meanwhile, in the colourful machair of the Hebrides, ringed plovers and lapwings strive to rear their families of tiny fluffy chicks and to save them for marauding gulls.
We travel back in time to explore the vast wild grasslands once found throughout our isles, before meeting herds of semi-wild horses, where males battle fiercely for the females. Today, they are helping to turn some of this land back to wilderness. And in our precious remaining pockets of flower-rich meadow, a remarkable conservation success story plays out. Once extinct in our isles, England now has the largest known populations of large blue butterflies. Their survival relies on a game of deception with red ants, which are tricked into adopting the butterfly’s unassuming but predatory caterpillars.
Our story then journeys to the mountains. Each morning in early spring, feisty male black grouse battle for prime position on their frozen breeding grounds. Their sole mission is to impress a female. Meanwhile, on south-facing scree slopes, dozens of adders emerge from hibernation to perform a surprisingly delicate courtship routine.
The episode concludes with a mighty battle in the wild mountains of County Kerry. This is the scene of an epic and spectacular rut between the largest land mammals in Britain and Ireland, red deer.
The grasslands of Britain and Ireland are under threat. We have lost 97 per cent of our species-rich meadows in the last century, as modern agriculture replaces these precious habitats. This episode shows just how important different types of grassland are to the species which call these islands home.

This edition explores the vast grasslands of the continent, hauntingly beautiful regions inhabited by strange creatures - giant anteaters, armadillos, maned wolves, capybara and jaguars.

This episode includes footage of wildlife inhabiting underwater kelp forests, thousands of giant cuttlefish spawning along a restricted area of rocky reef off the south coast of Australia. Males outnumber females 11 to one, which leads to fierce competition. Larger males use brute force to drive off competition, while their smaller rivals use deception by mimicking the appearance of females. The programme also features tiger sharks hunting for green turtles in fields of seagrass and spider crabs trying to avoid predators while they shed their shells.

Timothy Treadwell's death was as sensational as his life: Having presumed he could live safely among the grizzly bears of the Alaskan wilderness, the outdoorsman and author (Among Grizzlies)--along with his partner, Amie Huguenard--was eventually killed and devoured by one of the very animals to whom he had devoted years of study.
In telling this story, Werner Herzog relies considerably on Treadwell's own video footage, shot during his time in the wild. The famed German director takes Treadwell's story into unexpected emotional frontiers and startling landscapes of the mind. Treadwell is an intriguing, infuriating, perhaps even tragic figure. But Herzog himself is equally compelling, and this brilliant film is just one reason why.

The second episode is about how plants gain their sustenance. Sunlight is one of the essential requirements if a seed is to germinate, and Attenborough highlights the cheese plant as an example whose young shoots head for the nearest tree trunk and then climb to the top of the forest canopy, developing its leaves en route. Using sunshine, air, water and a few minerals, the leaves are, in effect, the "factories" that produce food. However, some, such as the begonia, can thrive without much light. To gain moisture, plants typically use their roots to probe underground. Trees pump water up pipes that run inside their trunks, and Attenborough observes that a sycamore can do this at the rate of 450 litres an hour — in total silence. Too much rainfall can clog up a leaf's pores, and many have specially designed 'gutters' to cope with it. However, their biggest threat is from animals, and some require extreme methods of defence, such as spines, camouflage, or poison. Some can move quickly to deter predators: the mimosa can fold its leaves instantly when touched, and the Venus flytrap eats insects by closing its leaves around its prey when triggered. Another carnivorous plant is the trumpet pitcher that snares insects when they fall into its tubular leaves. Attenborough visits Borneo to see the largest pitcher of them all, Nepenthes rajah, whose traps contain up to two litres of water and have been known to kill small rodents.

Jacob Ward travels the globe to investigate Decision Science. We imagine our conscious minds make most decisions but in reality we go through much of our lives on 'Autopilot'. And marketers and social media companies rely on it.
The first part offers you the owner’s manual for this autopilot. The second part, 'Weapons of Influence', explores how politicians, social media companies and corporate marketers use big data to hack decision-making system. The third part, 'Us vs. Them', shows how this autopilot biases fuel the nation's divisions and how to overcome them. The last part, 'The Wings of Angels', explores why hacking for good is an important scientific discovery; how people can hack their own minds to improve their lives and change the world for the better.