Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Follow actor William Shatner through interviews with the other actors who have portrayed starship Enterprise captains in five other incarnations of the Star Trek franchise. Shatner's subjects discuss their lives and careers before, during and after their tenure with Star Trek. With the use of conversations and archival footage, they explore the pressures, stigmas and sacrifices that accompanied their roles and their larger careers. During the process of the film and with help from the other Captains, Sir Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula and Chris Pine, Shatner overcomes his disdain and learns to embrace his best known character, Captain James T. Kirk.

A humpback whale mother and calf embark on an epic journey from tropical coral paradises to storm ravaged polar seas. Newly discovered coral reefs in Indonesia reveal head-butting pygmy seahorses, flashing 'electric' clams and bands of sea kraits, 30-strong, which hunt in packs. Elsewhere plagues of sea urchins fell forests of giant kelp. Huge bull fur seals attack king penguins, who despite their weight disadvantage, put up a spirited defence.

Our icy adventure begins with host Dr. Iain Stewart in the Alps, where he goes down an ice crevasse to show viewers how snowfall develops into expansive masses. Then, we see how ice can shape the earth's topography giving rise to features like Yosemite National Park and Manhattan Island, in NY. Finally, journey to Greenland and see how ice sheets and glaciers are melting at a phenomenal rate that is likely to accelerate over the coming years, changing the world as we know it.

Be prepared to fight your way past all kinds of computer animation. Somehow Patrick Moore's The Sky at Night manages to convey just as much excitement with little more than a couple of diagrams and the presenter's hyperactive enthusiasm. The series cover the history of the solar system and humanity's age-old desire to learn its secrets. Far beyond the inner planets of rock and iron lie the gas giants. Discover the most distant and alien worlds in our Solar System and the moment of genius that allowed scientists to explore them.

Professor Robert Bartlett explores the impact of the Norman conquest of Britain and Ireland. Bartlett shows how William the Conqueror imposed a new aristocracy, savagely cut down opposition and built scores of castles and cathedrals to intimidate and control. He also commissioned the Domesday Book, the greatest national survey of England that had ever been attempted. England adapted to its new masters and both the language and culture were transformed as the Normans and the English intermarried. Bartlett shows how the political and cultural landscape of Scotland, Wales and Ireland were also forged by the Normans and argues that the Normans created the blueprint for colonialism in the modern world.

Marine invertebrates are some of the most bizarre and beautiful animals on the planet, and thrive in the toughest parts of the oceans. Divers swim into a shoal of predatory Humboldt squid as they emerge from the ocean depths to hunt in packs. When cuttlefish gather to mate, their bodies flash in stroboscopic colours. Time-lapse photography reveals thousands of starfish gathering under the Arctic ice to devour a seal carcass. A giant octopus commits suicide for her young. A camera follows her into a cave which she walls up, then she protects her eggs until she starves. The greatest living structures on earth, coral reefs, are created by tiny animals in some of the world's most inhospitable waters.