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Climate Change: A Horizon Guide

   2015    Nature
Today, the topic of climate change is a major part of daily life, yet 40 years ago it was virtually unheard of. Since then, Horizon have followed scientists as they have tried to unpick how the climate works and whether it is changing. Dr Helen Czerski delves into this unique archive to chart the transformation of a little-known theory into one of the greatest scientific undertakings in history. It has been a constantly surprising journey of discovery that has revolutionised our understanding of climate, and seen scientists face unprecedented controversy and criticism.

Leaping Tigers Naked Nagas

   2004    Culture
Following the Yangtze along Tiger Leaping Gorge into Yunnan in China, Palin reaches the easternmost end of the Himalayas. He gets a medical check-up before exploring medieval Lijiang with the director of the local orchestra. Heading over Myanmar to Nagaland in India he rides the steam train to Tipong Coalmine. In Assam he rides an elephant and then stays in a strange monastery.
Series: Himalaya with Michael Palin

Battle for the Himalayas: The Fight to Film Everest

   2015    History
Between the 1920s and the 1960s the world's great powers sent vast military-style expeditions to conquer the peaks of the Himalayas, with Everest at their head. This was a great game played - camera in hand - by Imperial Britain, Nazi Germany and superpower America. As a result, Himalayan mountaineering's most iconic, epic and tragic moments didn't just go down in history, but were caught on film - from the deaths of Mallory and Irvine on Everest in 1924, to Everest's final conquest in 1953 by Hillary and Tensing. Using footage never before seen on British television, this is the story how of how film-makers turned the great peaks into great propaganda.

Edison

   2015    History
By the time he died in 1931, Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most famous men in the world. The holder of more patents than any other inventor in history, Edison had achieved glory as the genius behind such revolutionary inventions as sound recording, motion pictures, and electric light. Edison's curiosity led him to its cutting edge. With just three months of formal schooling, he took on one seemingly impossible technical challenge after another, and through intuition, persistence, and a unique team approach to innovation, invariably solved it." Driven and intensely competitive, Edison was often neglectful in his private life and could be ruthless in business. Challenged by competition in the industry he'd founded, Edison launched an ugly propaganda campaign against his rivals, and used his credibility as an electrical expert to help ensure that high-voltage electrocution became a form of capital punishment. Edison explores the complex alchemy that accounts for the enduring celebrity of America's most famous inventor, offering new perspectives on the man and his milieu, and illuminating not only the true nature of invention, but its role in turn-of-the-century America's rush into the future.

Hitler Supercars

   2020    Culture
The film tells the story of the ill-fated Nazi Land Speed record attempts. This is a story of engineering excellence, Grand Prix racing, Nazi propaganda, celebrity, and an intense rivalry which would leave a speed record unbroken for 79 years and one of Nazi Germany's best racing drivers dead. During the rise of the Third Reich two German car manufacturers were ordered to build the most high performance vehicles the world had ever seen. What followed was a rivalry that would reap Grand Prix victories, international domination that was a propaganda coup, and provide world fame to its drivers who risked their lives smashing speed records that would stand for 79 years. All under the direct orders of the Fuhrer himself.
Bugatti and Alfa Romeo dominated racing before 1934. But the years from 1934 to 1939 were six tumultuous years in which Grand Prix racing was dominated by the German Auto Union, the arranged marriage of Audi, Horch, Wanderer, and DKW, and Mercedes-Benz teams and provided a spectacle of speed, sound and fury never previously attained and never since matched. There are few periods of racing that have excited as much interest, event attendance and sophistication of equipment as the era of the Silver Cars. They were so far ahead of their time that many of their accomplishments were not duplicated until Mercedes went racing again in the early 1950s. There is also something about men who faced the challenges of staying in a cockpit of a highly sophisticated machine capable of 200 mph with no safety systems. They were giants and among them were Italian Tazio Nuvolari and two greatest German pilots of the thirties, Rudolf Caracciola of Mercedes and Auto Union's Bernd Rosemeyer who duelled with faster, more innovative and sleeker machines, developed in wind tunnels.
This special documentary charts the rise of Nazi Germany's dominate 'Silver Arrow' Grand Prix and Speed Record cars of the 1930's. Leading motor racing and World War 2 experts James Holland, Richard Williams, Eberhard Reuss and Chris Routledge tell the story of the Nazi funded Auto Union and Mercedes Benz 'National Racing Cars'. Hitler's Supercars interweaves the rise of the Third Reich with the racing exploits it funded and what propaganda messages these racing cars where sending.

Alien Technology

   2017    Science    HD
Is there anyone out there? Astronomers have been pointing their radio telescopes at the skies for decades trying to pick up alien signals, so far without success. But now there's a new way of looking for aliens. Hitch a ride with Dr Graham Philips as he joins astronomers trawling through the galaxy looking for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Series: Catalyst