Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Whales have long been a profound mystery to us. They live in a world so removed from our own that we can barely imagine their lives. Their environment is different, their senses are different, their relationships are different. How might such almost alien creatures see the world?, Narrated by David Attenborough.

In 1982, the best of friends and still teenagers George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley as Wham! set out to conquer the world. By June of 1986, they played their very last gig at Wembley Stadium having done exactly that. Now, for the very first time, told in their own words, comes the amazing story of how in four years they dominated the charts around the world with timeless and classic pop songs. Hit after hit ‘Club Tropicana,’ ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go,’ ‘Freedom,’ ‘I'm Your Man’ and of course ‘Last Christmas.’
Their time in the spotlight was white-hot, and they became the very first Western pop act to play in China. It was a time that both encapsulated and epitomized not just their youth but also that of the many millions of fans that adored them.

Dr Janina Ramirez shows how medieval manuscripts gave power to the king and united the kingdom in an age of plague, warfare and rebellion, discovers that Edward III used the manuscripts he read as a boy to prepare him for his great victory at the battle of Crecy and reveals how a vigorous new national identity bloomed during the 100 Years War with France. In the British Library's Royal Manuscripts collection Dr Ramirez finds out that magnificent manuscripts like the Bedford Hours, taken as war booty from the French royal family, were adapted for the education of English princes. She also explores how knowledge spread through a new form of book - the encyclopaedia.

What is the universe made of? If you answered stars, planets, gas and dust, you'd be dead wrong. Thirty years ago, scientists first realized that some unknown dark substance was affecting the way galaxies moved. Today, they think there must be five times our understanding of the universe and the nature of reality itself has drastically changed over the last 100 years - and it's on the verge of another seismic shift. In a 17-mile-long tunnel buried 570 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the world's largest and most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, is powering up. Its goal is nothing less than recreating the first instants of creation, when the universe was unimaginably hot and long-extinct forms of matter sizzled and cooled into stars, planets, and ultimately, us. These incredibly small and exotic particles hold the keys to the greatest mysteries of the universe. What we find could validate our long-held theories about how the world works and what we are made of -- or, all of our notions about the essence of what is real will fall apart.

Documentary which tells the story of the theory of evolution by natural selection which is now scientific orthodoxy, but when it was unveiled it caused a storm of controversy. Many people criticised it for being short on evidence and long on assertion and Darwin, being the honest scientist that he was, agreed with them. He entrusted future generations to complete his work and prove the essential truth of his vision. Evolutionary biologist Professor Armand Marie Leroi argues that, with the new science of evolutionary developmental biology (evo devo), it may be possible to take that theory to a new level - to do more than explain what has evolved in the past, and start to predict what might evolve in the future.

Every cosmologist and astronomer agrees: our Universe is 13.7 billion years old. Using cutting-edge technology, scientists are now able to take a snapshot of the Universe a mere heartbeat after its birth. Armed with hypersensitive satellites, astronomers look back in time to the very moment of creation, when all the matter in the Universe exploded into existence. It is here that we uncover an unsolved mystery as old as time itself -- if the Universe was born, where did it come from? Meet the leading scientists who have now discovered what they believe to be the origin of our Universe, and a window into the time before time.