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Playful Creatures

   2015    Nature
Spy in the Huddle use innovative techniques to reveal the incredible secrets of your pets' behaviour in ways never seen before. As astonishing photography explores the wild side of our playful pets, find out why hamsters love to run in a wheel, how dogs pick up the rules of the pack and how kittens learn to be solitary hunters. Featuring incredible views of plunge-diving dogs, babysitting cats, acrobatic hamsters and a playful cat outwitted by his prey" - you'll never look at your favourite companions in quite the same way again. The latest science also reveals why budgies talk, how a cat scales a vertical wall with the help of a special claw, why hamsters stuff their faces with more food than they can eat and the real meaning behind a rabbit's hop. Our pets are also given a chance to explore their wild side as we join the free-roaming pet dogs of Cusco Peru, pet rabbits living in a natural warren and the wild-living inhabitants of Cat Island, Japan. A range of innovative techniques such as moving X-rays, thermal imagery, minicam-carrying dogs and revelatory slow-motion photography shows why our pets play and how their true wild nature is just a whisker away.
Series: Pets: Wild at Heart

Speed Sisters

   2015    Culture
The Speed Sisters are the first all-woman race car driving team in the Middle East. Grabbing headlines and turning heads at improvised tracks across the West Bank, these five women have sped their way into the heart of the gritty, male-dominated Palestinian street car-racing scene.
Weaving together their lives on and off the track, the film takes you on a surprising journey into the drive to go further and faster than anyone thought you could.

City Maps

   2010    Culture
This is the story of three maps, three 'visions' of London over three centuries. The Morgan Map of 1682 was the first to show the whole of the City of London after the Great Fire of London. In 1746 John Rocque produced at the time the most detailed map ever made of London. Like Morgan's, Rocque's map is all neo-Classical beauty and clinical precision, but the London it represented had become the opposite. In engravings of the time, such as Night, the artist William Hogarth shows a city boiling with vice and corruption. Stephen Walter's contemporary image, The Island, plays with notions of cartographic order and respectability. His extraordinary London map looks at first glance to be just as precise and ordered as his hero Rocque's but, looking closer, it includes 21st century markings such as 'favourite kebab vans' and sites of 'personal heartbreak'.
Series: The Beauty of Maps

Life in a Day 2020

   2021    Culture
On July 25th, 2020, people all over the world filmed their lives and shared their stories to be part of a documentary film. When all the submissions were tallied, the filmmakers had received over 300,000 videos from 192 countries. The result is a stirring film about love, death, heartbreak, and hope that looks beyond geography and circumstance to explore what connects us as humans.
Series: Life in a Day

What Happened Before the Beginning

   2011    Science
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.
Series: Through the Wormhole

The Great Flood

   2009    Nature
The great flood in the Okavango turns 4,000 square miles of arid plains into a beautiful wetland. Elephant mothers guide their families on an epic trek across the harsh Kalahari Desert towards it, siphoning fresh water from stagnant pools and facing hungry lions. Hippos battle for territory, as the magical water draws in thousands of buffalo and birds, and vast clouds of dragonflies. Will the young elephant calves survive to reach this grassland paradise? The experienced mother elephants time their arrival at the delta to coincide with the lush grass produced by the great flood.
In a TV first, the programme shows the way they use their trunks to siphon clean water from the surface layers of a stagnant pool, while avoiding stirring up the muddy sediment on the bottom with their feet. Lechwe swamp deer, zebras, giraffes, crocodiles and numerous fish and thousands of birds arrive in the delta. And, in a phenomenon never before filmed in the Okavango, thousands of dragonflies appear - seemingly from nowhere - within minutes of the flood arrival, mating and laying eggs. As the flood finally reaches its peak, elephants and buffalo, near the end of their epic trek across the desert, face the final gauntlet of a hungry pride of lions. In a heart-wrenching sequence, a baby elephant is brought down by a lion in broad daylight.
Series: Nature Great Events