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- 2011–8.2 (5)TV Episode
- If you've saved your country what do you do for an encore? That was the question facing Winston Churchill in 1945. This film provides a distinctive new take on what drove this immense, difficult personality as he continued striving for power and reputation right into his eighties... Presented by leading Churchill expert, Professor David Reynolds of Cambridge University, the film combines in-depth analysis from David in evocative locations in the USA, Europe and Britain, powerful insights in interviews from surviving family, staff and political colleagues and revealing new archive footage which gets us closer to the real man behind the national icon we think we know. The aim is not to debunk Churchill but to show the hero as the rich three-dimensional character he really was - with superhuman energies and very human frailties. To understand the character of the man people have voted the 'Greatest Briton', we need to examine his last twenty years... Churchill refused to wither gracefully into a peaceful old age. Almost written off in 1945, he forced his way back on to the stage as a world statesman. Stinging from electoral defeat and criticism, he quite deliberately went about sealing his own place in history. Despite ill health including several strokes, he struggled back to the Prime Ministership, and reinvented himself as a man of peace. Here was an old man determined to control a reputation that others were already beginning to chip away. A man who, despite his failing health, remained busy - desperately busy - in order to stave off chronic depression. And in the process, as this programme reveals for the first time, he neglected his increasingly dysfunctional family life - with tragic consequences.
- Is Utopia, ultimately, a state of mind? Can we find it within ourselves? Richard seems answers in a broad range of art forms from music to poetry, opera to computer games.
- Afua Hirsch looks at how Ethiopian's proud history of independence had informed its art - and how its time under empire saw it develop its own sophisticated method of "Wax and Gold".
- Utopia has been imagined in many different ways, but when people try to build it they very often fail. Can utopian visions reconcile the tension between the individual and the group? Rules and freedom?
- Explores a seismic shift in the way scientists predict eruptions. The new method: reading seismic signals indicating magma and gas buildup in active volcanoes.
- Afua Hirsch concludes the series with a look at how art emerged in Kenya in a period of post-colonialism. Subjects include both the spiritual significance of art, and its means to create and reinforce stereotypes.
- Deep under the sea, British and American submarines waged a secret war of espionage against the Soviet navy during the Cold War.
- Prof Richard Clay explores how Utopian visions start as blueprints for a fairer world and asks if they can lead to real change. He argues that such visions have been a way of criticising the present.
- High atop the white cliffs of southern England, Dover Castle was built by King Henry II to protect an empire. Its deadly gatehouses, layers of walls, and magnificent keep were engineered to crush the enemy. In 1216, an ambitious French prince and his determined troops descend to capture this key to England and with it, the English crown.
- The experts continue their attempt to discover why Angkor suddenly collapsed, using a revolutionary technology called lidar to reveal the true scale and splendour of this abandoned megacity. Deep in the Cambodian jungle, they have discovered a sophisticated network of roads and canals that are the forgotten world of Angkor's greatest king, shedding new light on the dramatic events leading to the fall of the city.
- Imagine if every time you saw someone called Derek you got a strong taste of earwax in your mouth. It happens to James Wannerton, who runs a pub. Derek is one of his regulars. Another regular's name gives him the taste of wet nappies. For some puzzling reason, James's sense of sound and taste are intermingled. Dorothy Latham sees words as colours. Whenever she reads a black and white text, she sees each letter tinged in the shade of her own multi-coloured alphabet - even though she knows the reality of the text is black and white. Spoken words have an even stranger effect. She sees them, spelled out letter by letter, on a colourful tickertape in front of her head. Both James and Dorothy have a mysterious condition called synaesthesia, in which their senses have become linked. For years scientists dismissed it, putting it in the same category as séances and spoon-bending. But now, synaesthesia is sparking a revolution in our understanding of the human mind.
- The story of three French scientists who went to extraordinary lengths to prove that the Earth was not a perfect sphere: Louis Godin, Charles-Marie de La Condamine and Pierre Bouguer.