Bbc Secret Britain: Series 2 (2015)

Professor Alice Roberts with the very best in British archaeology 2016 - filmed by the archaeologists themselves, straight from the trenches, so you can see each exciting discovery as it happens. The teams then bring their best finds - from skeletons to treasure - back to the Digging for Britain lab, to examine them with Alice and reveal how they are changing the story of Britain.

Dallas Campbell reveals why we can only understand the familiar world around us by discovering the hidden wonders beneath our feet.

Broadcasting from one of Britain's biggest car factories, James May, Kate Humble and Ant Anstead reveal the science, engineering and people that keep us all on the road.

Dr Janina Ramirez explores the fall-out of the longest and bloodiest divorce in history, when little England dared to take on the superpower France.

Britain's country houses are home to astonishing world-class art collections full of priceless old masters and more. In this three-part series art historian Helen Rosslyn opens the doors of some of our most impressive country houses to tell the story of how so many great paintings came to Britain and of the adventurous men and women who brought them here.

90 million miles away from us is the power that shapes our world - the Sun. We see it shine in the sky above us, but beyond our sight something dramatic is happening - the Sun is going into overdrive. It's more active now that it's been for a decade, sending eruptions of super-heated plasma and vast waves of radiation towards our planet. With the potential to disrupt our lives in dramatic ways.

Art critic Alastair Sooke delves into the murky world of art theft. Despite the high stakes - and often daring - involved, many cases are shrouded in mystery and go unnoticed by the media. Around 47,000 works of art are reported missing each year, yet it is only the heists involving the world's most valuable paintings that hit the headlines. But high-profile or not - once gone, the works are rarely recovered. Alastair meets one of America’s most notorious art thieves, Myles Connor.

On a spectacular journey through Renaissance Italy, Andrew Graham-Dixon searches for the shadowy figure who wrote one of the most important books on art and looks at some dazzling works, including masterpieces of the early Renaissance by Giotto, Masaccio and Donatello. Giorgio Vasari was the grandaddy of all art critics, travelling Italy in the 16th century for his definitive Lives of the Artists. Scorning medieval Gothic, he praised to the vaulted ceilings the revival of classical art and architecture.

Now in its 2nd Season, the story of archaeology fascinates both laymen and professionals. In these installments we accompany Ernst Herzfeld on his last expedition to Persepolis in 1923; we travel to Mexico with the man who cracked the code of the Aztec calendar; we visit the greatest pre-industrial city on earth at Angkor; we join Isidoro Falchi as he discovers proof of the existence of the Etruscans; and we watch Alfred Merlin found the discipline of marine archaeology when he discovers shipwrecks in the Mediterranean..