Professor Mary Beard looks beyond the stories of emperors, armies, guts and gore to meet the everyday people at the heart of Ancient Rome's vast empire. In this programme, Mary asks not what the Romans did for us, but what the empire did for Rome. She rides the Via Appia, climbs up to the top seats of the Colosseum, takes a boat to Rome's port Ostia and takes us into the bowels of Monte Testaccio. She also meets some extraordinary Romans: Eurysaces, an eccentric baker, who made a fortune out of the grain trade and built his tomb in the shape of a giant bread oven; Baricha, Zabda and Achiba, three prisoners of war who became Roman citizens; and Pupius Amicus, the purple dye seller making imperial dye from shellfish imported from Tunisia. This is Rome from the bottom up.

A documentary feature on the explosive narco culture, a phenomenon blurring the lines between war and entertainment. To a growing number of Mexicans and Latinos in the Americas, the Narco Traffickers represent the only models of fame and success, the only way out of the ghetto. This is the untold story behind the drug war, an unstoppable cycle that has created a culture of addiction on both sides of the border — addiction to the vanity of money, drugs and violence. These are the personal stories of those entangled in this war, from the musicians who profit by glorifying violence, to the man who collects the bodies the morning after.

An unassuming 80-year-old device that has the appearance of a typewriter could actually be one of the greatest secret weapons in history. Using cutting-edge digital technology, experts investigate the secrets of a revolutionary encryption machine.
How could there be a carving of a modern helicopter on an ancient Egyptian inscription? can this 800-year-old device covered in strange sayings really predict the future?

Oil theft has become big business in Nigeria. Travel to this Africa's oil-producing region to meet with oil thieves, and follows one farmer's attempt to sue a foreign oil company for poisoning his family's land. The lethal combination of gangs and guns has turned Chicago into a war zone. Visit the city's most dangerous areas.

Researchers discover film footage from World War II that turns out to be a lost documentary shot by Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein in 1945 about German concentration camps liberated by allied troops. When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums. This eloquent, lucid documentary by André Singer (executive producer of the award-winning The Act of Killing) tells the extraordinary story of the filming of the camps and the fate of Bernstein’s project, using original archive footage and eyewitness testimonies.

Seven years have passed since Antony's departure from Rome, and the former commander, dissipated and debauched - held in thrall by the charms and sexual prowess of his new bride, Cleopatra, withholds precious shipments of grain from Rome, where people die in the streets from hunger.
Unable to incite a war with Antony and Egypt without committing political suicide, Octavian sends Atia and Octavia to Alexandria to mediate and reason with Antony; a strategy which proves predictably unsuccessful.