Born in Flames

What was it really like to be a fighter pilot during the Second World War?
Air combat is quick: Each choice must be decisive and executed without hesitation. Mere seconds can decide who will go down in the record books and who will go down in flames. In the high arenas of the Second World War, only a select few pilots ever shot down more than five enemy aircraft and earned the ambitious title of a "Fighter Ace". What made them a breed apart from their fellow fighter pilots? What separated the hunters from the hunted?

In the USA alone over 15,000 Airmen lost their lives in training accidents as the WWII Allies scaled-up their Air forces. The relatives of these young men often have no idea what actually happened and typically the official reasons were put down simply to "pilot error". From 1939 to 1945 thousands of young airmen met terrible ends not at the hands the enemy's machine guns or because of the murderous flak of anti-aircraft fire, but in catastrophic accidents and training crashes.

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..

Templar knights in their distinctive white mantles with a red cross, brave in the face of death rather than fleeing from the enemy, fighting for Christ and the Pope in the Holy Land during the Crusades. This documentary series aims at reconstructing, for the first time, in a complete fashion the evolution of the knights belonging to the Order of Solomon's Temple, whose original goal was to protect pilgrims during their travels to Jerusalem after the victory of the Crusaders at the First Crusade. The Knights Templar grew in power and wealth becoming the earliest banking institution of the Middle Age. They were so rich that they financed the King of France and benefitted from a direct and exclusive link with the Pope.

Dead men don't tell tales - or do they? Are there forensic clues left in the sands of time? Are there traces of archive film which even today are waiting to unveil their grisly secret? Not all the captivating and fascinating stories of military escapades in the 20th Century have been fully examined and many fascinating insights are still to be revealed and told.

Carleen Anderson narrates a three-part series telling the story of how soul music emerged from the world of gospel in the early 1960s to deliver an assertive, integrated vision of black America during the civil rights era, presided over by its own king and queen, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin.