Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II wages an epic campaign to take the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. Twenty-three armies have tried to take the legendary city and all have failed. Out of the carnage, one ruler will emerge victorious and shapes the course of history for centuries. For one empire to rise, another must fall.
The Ottomans, former Anatolian warlords and nomads who've built a burgeoning empire are the biggest threat to the Romans' 1100-year reign. The death of Ottoman Sultan Murad II in 1451 unleashes a chain of events that will soon bring the Ottomans and Romans to the brink of war. After claiming the Ottoman throne, Mehmed II sends an unmistakable signal to Byzantine emperor Constantine XI.

A definitive account of Putin's power and how it changed the modern world. The series is an exploration of how Vladimir Putin brought his knowledge of spy-craft to bear on his leadership of Russia, how his personal experiences have influenced his politics and how modern Russia has been created through an acute sense of betrayal, pride and anger.
The first episode takes viewers on a journey into the mind of one of the 21st century's most influential leaders, offering a portrait of a politician who modelled himself on the Russian James Bond and whose presidency reads like a spy thriller. We will see how Putin escapes poverty by joining the KGB, his reinvention as a political fixer in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and how he gets into position to take over from President Yeltsin.

Spain is found at the crossroads between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, between Europe and Africa, resulting in diverse landscapes, ancient cultures and magnificent wildlife. It's a hidden Spain missed by many tourists who fail to venture outside the resorts. Worlds within worlds, the medieval towns, to farming communities, desert, mountains and forests with some of the most dramatic and diverse wildlife of the continent.

Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, after more than a decade since their last motorbike adventure around the world, will cover 13,000 miles over 100 days through 13 countries. Starting from the city of Ushuaia at the tip of South America, Ewan and Charley travel through the glorious and underexposed landscapes of South and Central America to Los Angeles in the United States in their most challenging expedition to date. In their journey they will use cutting-edge technology on the backs of their prototype electric Harley-Davidsons in order to contribute to the sustainability of the planet.
In the first episode, Ewan McGregor reunites with his best friend Charley Boorman to evaluate what's important in their lives, following a life-threatening accident of Charley.

We take it for granted, but every time we pick up a pen or type on the keyboard, we are employing the most powerful technology ever invented: the technology of writing. Explore how the invention of writing gave humanity a history. From hieroglyphs to emojis, the series is an exploration of the way in which the technology of writing has shaped the world we live in.
The invention of writing about 5,000 years ago made civilization itself possible, and every innovation of the modern world is based on the foundation of the written word. But how and where did writing begin, and who began it? In From Pictures to Words, the first of three films about the history of writing, we uncover the hidden links between all the diverse writing systems in use today and trace the origin of our own alphabet to a turquoise mine in the Sinai Desert and a man riding a donkey whose name was Khebded.

Writing itself is 5,000 years old, and for most of that time words were written by hand using a variety of tools. The Romans were able to run an empire thanks to documents written on papyrus. Scroll books could be made quite cheaply and, as a result, ancient Rome had a thriving written culture. With the fall of the Roman Empire, papyrus became more difficult to obtain. Europeans were forced to turn to a much more expensive surface on which to write: Parchment. Medieval handwritten books could cost as much as a house, they also represent a limitation on literacy and scholarship.
No such limitations were felt in China, where paper had been invented in the second century. Paper was the foundation of Chinese culture and power, and for centuries how to make it was kept secret. When the secret was out, paper mills soon sprang up across central Asia. The result was an intellectual flourishing known as the Islamic Golden Age. Muslim scholars made discoveries in biology, geology, astronomy and mathematics. By contrast, Europe was an intellectual backwater.
That changed with Gutenberg’s development of movable type printing. The letters of the Latin alphabet have very simple block-like shapes, which made it relatively simple to turn them into type pieces. When printers tried to use movable type to print Arabic texts, they found themselves hampered by the cursive nature of Arabic writing. The success of movable type printing in Europe led to a thousand-fold increase in the availability of information, which produced an explosion of ideas that led directly to the European Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that followed.