This illuminating ten-part series tells the story of World War ll through the ten most pivotal turning points in the conflict. Gripping story-telling illustrated with exquisitely restored and colourised archived films and supported by a global cast of stellar historians bring this crucially important era in history to life.
In the first chapter, Britain and France declare war when Hitler invades Poland. In May 1940 the Germans attack Holland and Belgium as a decoy. As the Wehrmacht comes through the Ardennes and the Luftwaffe strikes in force, French leaders are caught like rabbits in headlights. The Germans are on a drug called Pervitin, which beats off fatigue, and reach the Atlantic coast. There is a danger that the Germans will encircle the Allies and cut them off from the sea. But Hitler issues his Halt Order and some 340,000 Allies are evacuated.

A team of intrepid palaeontologists recently discovered a lost world of dinosaurs in the unlikeliest of places — deep in the dark, snowy wilds of northern Alaska. Surprisingly, new findings indicates that dinosaurs thrived year-round and raised their young in frigid and dark conditions in the far north of the Arctic Circle.
Rappelling down giant ice cliffs bordering the Colville River, the team wields chainsaws to extract fossils frozen into the permafrost. Newly found dinosaur tracks indicates that a wide variety of species once flourished there, including herds of duck-bills, horned herbivores, pterosaurs, a new type of velociraptor, and northern relatives of T-rex.

The films begins at the Maine Correctional Center where Jacinta, 26, and her mother Rosemary, 46, are incarcerated together, both recovering from drug addiction. As a child, Jacinta became entangled in her mother's world of drugs and crime and has followed her in and out of the system since she was a teenager. This time, as Jacinta is released from prison, she hopes to maintain her sobriety and reconnect with her own daughter, Caylynn, 10. Despite her desire to rebuild her life for her daughter, Jacinta continually struggles against the forces that first led to her addiction.
With unparalleled access and a gripping vérité approach, director Jessica Earnshaw paints a deeply intimate portrait of mothers and daughters and the effects of trauma over generations.

The film documents the historic journey of a team of adventurers as they strive to complete the world's first completely human powered ocean row from Cape Horn to the Antarctic Peninsula across The Drake Passage, the most dangerous 600 miles of open ocean on Earth.
The expedition was captained by Icelandic explorer Fiann Paul, who was joined by a team of six record-holding explorers and athletes from four nations and three continents, including Colin O'Brady. The row pushes the entire crew to their limits, testing their physical and mental strength as they work to accomplish something many think was impossible.

Scientists and engineers fight to save Notre Dame Cathedral after the 2019 fire. When the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral erupted in flames in April of 2019, firefighters battled for nine gruelling hours to save the historic landmark. Still, Paris came alarmingly close to losing more than 800 years of history. Now engineers are in a different race against time: to rebuild the roof and secure the medieval structure of Notre Dame. Underneath the charred scaffolding and vaulted ceilings of the cathedral, scientists study the components of Notre Dame’s iconic structure to puzzle out how best to repair it.

David Attenborough joins an archaeological dig uncovering Britain’s biggest mammoth discovery in almost 20 years. In 2017, in a gravel quarry near Swindon, two amateur fossil hunters found an extraordinary cache of Ice Age mammoth remains and a stone hand-axe made by a Neanderthal. Professor Ben Garrod joins the team at DigVentures during the excavation as they try to discover why the mammoths were here and how they died. Could the Neanderthals have killed these Ice Age giants?