britain

The story of Queen Victoria, who came to the throne at a time of great economic turbulence and resurgent republicanism – and died 64 years later the head of the largest empire the world had ever seen, having revitalised the throne’s public image and become “grandmother of Europe”.

In a Victorian world of steam, dreadnoughts, and occult horrors, Zhou Mingrui awakens as Klein Moretti. He walks a razor’s edge between light and darkness, entangled with warring Churches. This is the legend of unlimited potential…and unspeakable danger.

A zany comedy show with Matt Lucas and David Walliams, featuring characters from all over Little Britain.

The feel-good story of Michael 'Eddie' Edwards, an unlikely but courageous British ski-jumper who never stopped believing in himself—even as an entire nation was counting him out. With the help of a rebellious and charismatic coach, Eddie takes on the establishment and wins the hearts of sports fans around the world by making an improbable and historic showing at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.

A number of the UK's most talented tattoo designers help clients transform their tattoo mistakes into works of art. It is estimated that one in six British people who opt to go under the needle later regret their decision. Outrageous artwork, inappropriate quotes or the name of an ex-partner can be chosen in haste but the results are permanent. The talented inkers meet desperate customers at a pop-up studio for their consultations. After the meeting, the client chooses whose design ideas they like best and the artist gets to work. When the session is over, the new tattoos are revealed.

Adapted from Len Deighton’s 1978 alternate history novel. A British detective investigates a murder in German-occupied Britain during World War II.

A rule-bound head butler's world of manners and decorum in the household he maintains is tested by the arrival of a housekeeper who falls in love with him in post-WWI Britain. The possibility of romance and his master's cultivation of ties with the Nazi cause challenge his carefully maintained veneer of servitude.

The Crawley family goes on a grand journey to the south of France to uncover the mystery of the dowager countess's newly inherited villa. Meanwhile, a Hollywood director seeks to film his latest production at Downton.

Follows the adventures of Roary, his race car friends Maxi, Cici (Zizzy), Drifter (Dragga), and others at Silver Hatch race track. Roary is a red racing car shaped similarly to a grand prix car. The majority of the action takes place at the track's pits and workshop, although we often follow the cars on their laps around the track.

Britain, A.D. 117. Quintus Dias, the sole survivor of a Pictish raid on a Roman frontier fort, marches north with General Virilus' legendary Ninth Legion, under orders to wipe the Picts from the face of the Earth and destroy their leader, Gorlacon.

19-year-old Eric, arrogant and ultra-violent, is prematurely transferred to the same adult prison facility as his estranged father. As his explosive temper quickly finds him enemies in both prison authorities and fellow inmates — and his already volatile relationship with his father is pushed past breaking point — Eric is approached by a volunteer psychotherapist, who runs an anger management group for prisoners. Torn between gang politics, prison corruption, and a glimmer of something better, Eric finds himself in a fight for his own life, unsure if his own father is there to protect him or join in punishing him.

In 140 AD, twenty years after the unexplained disappearance of the entire Ninth Legion in the mountains of Scotland, young centurion Marcus Aquila arrives from Rome to solve the mystery and restore the reputation of his father, the commander of the Ninth. Accompanied only by his British slave Esca, Marcus sets out across Hadrian's Wall into the uncharted highlands of Caledonia - to confront its savage tribes, make peace with his father's memory, and retrieve the lost legion's golden emblem, the Eagle of the Ninth.

8 August 1963: Britain wakes up to news of the biggest robbery in the country’s history. A train has been hijacked and robbed, 35 miles from its arrival in central London. The country is stunned. Who could be behind it? How did they pull off such an audacious raid?

A gripping eight-part series about a state-of-the-art law enforcement team whose unswerving mission is to hunt down some of Britain’s most dangerous criminals. The Interceptor delves into the adventures of a dedicated surveillance team known as the UNIT. Keeping their quarries under ultra-tight surveillance, they take us into the real world inhabited by the criminals of today. And it’s easy to recognize because it’s the same world the rest of us inhabit.

A young British officer resigns his post when he learns of his regiment's plan to ship out to the Sudan for the conflict with the Mahdi. His friends and fiancée send him four white feathers as symbols of what they view as his cowardice. To redeem his honor, he disguises himself as an Arab and secretly saves their lives.

Well-known faces don their aprons in this charity special. Who has got what it takes to go all the way and compete for the Great Sport Relief Bake Off crown?

Celebrities take a stroll in the great British outdoors with their faithful hound.

In Moscow in 1983, an American journalist interviews Guy Bennett, who recalls his last year at public school, fifty years before, and how it contributed to his becoming a spy.

Drawing on newly available evidence, this epic series explores the Windsor dynasty's gripping family saga, providing fresh insights into how our royal family have survived four generations of crisis.

The nation's love affair with the coast will be reawakened for this entertaining and ambitious exploration of the entire UK coastline. Every part of the 9,000-mile coast is covered to explore how we've shaped it - and how it shapes us. Hosted by a team of history and geography experts who investigate everything from life on a nuclear submarine; rebuilding the Titanic using computer images; the story behind the first Butlins holiday camp; and the birth of the Severn Bore. Discover the curious, sometimes dysfunctional, relationship between the British and the seas.

Stretching from the Stone Age to the year 2000, Simon Schama's Complete History of Britain does not pretend to be a definitive chronicle of the turbulent events which buffeted and shaped the British Isles. What Schama does do, however, is tell the story in vivid and gripping narrative terms, free of the fustiness of traditional academe, personalising key historical events by examining the major characters at the centre of them. Not all historians would approve of the history depicted here as shaped principally by the actions of great men and women rather than by more abstract developments, but Schama's way of telling it is a good deal more enthralling as a result. Schama successfully gives lie to the idea that the history of Britain has been moderate and temperate, passing down the generations as stately as a galleon, taking on board sensible ideas but steering clear of sillier, revolutionary ones. Nonsense. Schama retells British history the way it was--as bloody, convulsive, precarious, hot-blooded and several times within an inch of haring off onto an entirely different course. Schama seems almost to delight in the goriness of history. Themes returned to repeatedly include the wars between the Scots and the Irish and the Catholic/Protestant conflicts--only the Irish question remains unresolved by the new millennium. As Britain becomes a constitutional monarchy, Schama talks less of Kings and Queens but of poets and idea-makers like Orwell. Still, with his pungent, direct manner and against an evocative visual and aural backdrop, Schama makes history seem as though it happened yesterday, the bloodstains not yet dry.

For the Greater Good is a three-part 1991 BBC Two television drama serial written by G.F. Newman and directed by Danny Boyle. It centres on three politicians attempting to reform the British prison system. However, their efforts are undermined when the tabloid press exposes their private lives.

A 1950s true crime drama about Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain to be hanged. This startling story reveals hidden truths about Ruth's murder of her lover, the legal case surrounding it and those who were also complicit.

After a crippling injury leaves her husband impotent, Lady Chatterly is torn between her love for her husband and her physical desires. With her husband's consent, she seeks out other means of fulfilling her needs.

Emily Walters is an American widow living a peaceful, uneventful existence in the idyllic Hampstead Village of London, when she meets local recluse, Donald Horner. For 17 years, Donald has lived—wildly yet peacefully—in a ramshackle hut near the edge of the forest. When Emily learns his home is the target of developers who will stop at nothing to remove him, saving Donald and his property becomes her personal mission. Despite his gruff exterior and polite refusals for help, Emily is drawn to him—as he is to her—and what begins as a charitable cause evolves into a relationship that will grow even as the bulldozers close in.

When her father's puppet samurai show gets ambushed by a notorious gang, Tornado vows to seek vengeance and forge her own destiny by stealing their ill-gotten gold.

The dramatic inside story of 6 November 1956, the final day of the Suez Crisis. A day that changed Britain forever. Exactly as it happened - hour by hour, minute by minute.

On an isolated English farm in 1657, Fanny lives a quiet life with her oppressive husband John and their young son. One day their life is rocked with the arrival of young couple Thomas and Rebecca who claim to have been robbed and need a place to stay. But are these strangers really who they say they are?

The story of the NHS in unprecedented times.

A police detective finds herself at the centre of the most dangerous case of her life when she is seconded on to the investigation into the murder of a drugs trafficker. What nobody around her knows is that she is the missing witness that the police and the killer are searching for.

Yorkshire, 1974, the Maynard family moves into their dream house. It's a dream that quickly descends into a panic stricken nightmare as the family discovers a horrifying truth, a truth that will make the history books. The house is already occupied by the most violent poltergeist ever documented, a poltergeist that will tear you from your bed as you sleep and drag you helplessly into the darkness.

Two Britons—inventor Hengist Pod, and Horse, a brave and cunning fighter—are captured and enslaved by invading Romans and taken to Rome. One of their first encounters in Rome leaves Hengist being mistaken for a fighter, and gets drafted into the Royal Guard to protect Cleopatra.

Tony Robinson goes for a walk through some of Britain's beautiful and historic landscapes.

The enormous popularity of recent British dramas such as Downton Abbey, Mr. Selfridge, and Sherlock, has led to vast interest in the real-life stories and history of the icons of Great Britain. Each episode of this series visits a famous British building or institution to explore its past and present, meeting a wide range of experts and historians along the way.

Sensitive rural town model student Steven Carter hides his gay feelings, except with his neighbor and best friend Linda. Suddenly his desperate search for partners leads to a blind date with golden boy John Dixon, bound for an Oxbridge career.

Carry On favourite Barbara Windsor makes her debut in this outrageous send-up of the James Bond movies. Fearless agent Desmond Simpkins and Charlie Bind, aided and abetted by the comely Agent Honeybutt and Agent Crump, battle against the evil powers of international bad guys STENCH and their three cronies.

The Grand Knockout Tournament (colloquially also known as It's a Royal Knockout) was a one-off charity event which was shown on British television on 19 June 1987. It followed the format of It's a Knockout, a slapstick TV gameshow which was broadcast in the UK until 1982. The event was staged on the lakeside lawn of the Alton Towers stately home-cum-theme park.

A visiting American engages in a bold business promotion, the likes of which the British have not seen.

Teenage boy Tom lives with his single mum in a flat in South London. Into the flat below moves Steve, an anti-social former Rock God who faked his death 8 years ago. Tom agrees not to reveal his secret on condition that he teaches him the dark arts of Rock Guitar.

Cult favourite Matt Berry offers his unique take on Brexit, in this one-off comedy special to mark the passing of the Article 50 deadline. Reuniting with collaborator Arthur Matthews for the first time since Toast Of London, Berry plays rogue historian Michael Squeamish, who’s on a mission to discover the origins of Brexit and offer some interesting opinions on Britain’s current plight along the way. Through creative use of archive footage and filmed interviews, The Road To Brexit unashamedly plays fast and loose with the facts to create a joyously surreal whistle stop tour of Britain’s relationship with Europe, from the 1950s right up to Brexit.