Britain's Greatest Invention

Actual footage by the United States Signal Corps of the landing and attack on Arawe Beach, Cape Glouster, New Britain island in 1943 in the South Pacific theatre of World War Two, and the handicaps of the wild jungle in addition to the Japanese snipers and pill-box emplacements.

Michael Cockerell sheds new light on the tragi-comedy of the 1970s by focusing on some of its most controversial characters. With fresh filming and new interviews, along with a treasure trove of rare archive, the film presents the inside story of giant personalities who make today's public figures look sadly dull in comparison. The well-known journalist revisits some of his films on the big characters who helped shaped the 1970s in Britain. Both tragic and comic, it highlights just how much our world has changed in four decades.

Since the invention of the automobile, women have distinguished themselves by their daring: the history of women in motor sport.

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the last name of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institute Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, Le Cinema! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious re(telling) of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.

Hogwood: A Modern Horror Story takes you beyond the factory farm walls and follows an intrepid group of undercover investigators as they enter some of Britain's biggest factory farms for the very first time.

After 200 years under lock and key, all the personal papers of one of our most important monarchs are for the first time seeing the light of day. In the first documentary to gain extensive access to the Royal Archives, Robert Hardman sheds fascinating new light on George III, Britain's longest reigning king. George III may be chiefly remembered for his madness, but these private documents reveal a monarch who was a political micromanager and a restless patron of science and the arts, an obsessive traveller who never left southern England yet toured the world in his mind and a man who was driven (sometimes to distraction) by his sense of duty to his family and his country. Featuring Simon Callow and Sian Thomas as the voices of King George and Queen Charlotte.

A documentary analyzing the furore which so-called "video nasties" caused in Britain during the 1980s.

A brief history of British aviation and the development of both civil and military aircraft. Made for the Festival of Britain.

In the mid-1960s, Bretons took direct action against the French state. What were the origins and causes of this fervor, sung by Glenmor, the bard of this angry Brittany, from which young people had to emigrate to find a future?

Parfenov's documentary is about a brilliant scientist and engineer, born in Russia, but only known on the other side of the ocean. The invention of modern television changed the history of mankind. The invention has an author, who is almost unknown in his homeland. Vladimir Zworykin, born in Murom, a Russian American, was the person who created distant wireless transmission of images.

In 1963 in the countryside in England, fifteen men pulled off 'The Great Train Robbery' netting today's equivalent of $85million. This incredible film features Gordon Goody, one of the instigators of the crime, for the first time ever, revealing the identity of the missing mastermind behind Britain's most famous heist- the elusive and mysterious 'Ulsterman'.

A look at Britain's beloved canal network via a fact-filled cruise along the first superhighways of the Industrial Revolution. In the age before mechanisation, a frenzy of canal-building saw a new army of workers carve out the British landscape, digging out hundreds of miles of waterways using picks, shovels and muscle.

Having been granted special permission to film inside one of the most secretive countries in the world, Britain's fastest snowboarder sets off to experience first hand this country we know so little about.

In the blistering hot summer of 1984, a sadistic predator is terrorising rural Britain. This is the story of the desperate police manhunt for The Fox, one of the most prolific and depraved offenders in British criminal history.

Beautifully made and historically important pipe organs are being scrapped in their hundreds. Once at the centre of British culture pipe organs are now neglected and unloved.

As good as any Dickens novel, this is the triumphant and tragic story of the greatest architectural dynasty of the 19th century. Dan Cruickshank charts the rise of Sir George Gilbert Scott to the very heights of success, the fall of his son George Junior and the rise again of his grandson Giles. It is a story of architects bent on a mission to rebuild Britain. From the Romantic heights of the Midland Hotel at St Pancras station to the modern image of Bankside power station (now Tate Modern), this is the story of a family that shaped the Victorian age and left a giant legacy.

Timeshift turns back the clock to a time when villains wore silver capes, grannies swooned at the sight of bulky men in latex and the most masculine man in the country was called Shirley. In its heyday, British professional wrestling attracted huge TV audiences and made household names of generations of wrestlers from Mick McManus and Jackie 'Mr TV' Pallo to Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy. With contributions from inside the world of wrestling and surprising fans such as artist Peter Blake, this is an affectionate and lively portrait of a lost era of simpler pleasures, both in and out of the ring.

This spiritual successor to the 1942 original explores the vibrant yet tumultuous growth of Britishness over the past century. The film gives voices to a new reality of Britain, one that has been formed through the flourishing multiculturalism the country has seen since the original film was made. Academics and artists are interviewed to explore both past and present, and consider what a future Britain may look like.

An historical account looking at how Britain's canals were used, and declining, in 1951.

Die Macht der Elektronengehirne