Bbc Wonders Of Life (2013)

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.

Ant colonies are one of the wonders of nature - complex, organised and mysterious. This programme reveals the secret, underground world of the ant colony in a way that's never been seen before. At its heart is a massive, full-scale ant nest, specially designed and built to allow cameras to see its inner workings. The nest is a new home for a million-strong colony of leafcutter ants from Trinidad.

Ancient civilisations thought comets were Gods. They believed them to be bringers of life or harbingers of doom - these strange, magical, mysterious things that moved through the sky, fiery streaks of light that tore across the heavens.

It was the world's last Islamic empire - a super-power of a million square miles. From its capital in Istanbul it matched the glories of Ancient Rome. And after six centuries in power it collapsed less than a hundred years ago. Rageh Omaar sets out to discover why the Ottomans have vanished from our understanding of the history of Europe. Why so few realise the importance of Ottoman history in today's Middle East. And why you have to know the Ottoman story to understand the roots of many of today's trouble spots from Palestine, Iraq and Israel to Libya, Syria, Egypt, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Dr Michael Scott journeys to Athens to explore how drama first began.

Margaret Mountford goes in search of the truth behind the legend of Sappho, the most controversial writer of the ancient world and the first authentic woman's voice in western history.

The extraordinary and dramatic story of Gertrude Bell, the most powerful woman in the British Empire in her day. She shaped the modern Middle East after World War I in ways that still reverberate today. More influential than her friend and colleague Lawrence of Arabia, Bell helped draw the borders of Iraq and established the Iraq Museum.

At the British Museum, a collection of artefacts from the Muslim world is on show which tells the history of a journey to Mecca always forbidden to non-Muslims. It features a succession of examples of the rich visual language of Islamic culture past and present, artwork created to reflect the powerful experience for any Muslim making the Hajj pilgrimage to Islam's most sacred city and its most sacred building, the Ka'aba.

Rory Stewart examines the legacy of Britain's First World War campaign in the Middle East, and draws parallels with British and American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan today. In the First World War, TE Lawrence helped to unite feuding Arab tribes into a formidable guerrilla army which helped to topple the Ottoman Empire. But today Lawrence has an extraordinary new relevance. His experiences of defeating a foreign military occupation, and of leading an insurgency, have led to him being held up as the man who cracked fighting in the Middle East.