Bbc Cilvilisation

BBC Four Collections delve into the archives to select classic full.length BBC TV programmes, creating a lasting online legacy for future audiences to explore and enjoy.

Chris and Maggie dive into the archives to discover how the hunt for extra-terrestrial life in the universe has been reported by the BBC over six decades. Such luminaries as Patrick Moore, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, James Burke and Alan Whicker discuss the eternal question of whether we are alone. The story of how the BBC has covered advancements in this scientific field is told from the birth of radio astronomy in the 1960s to the discovery of the first planets outside of our own solar system in the 1990s, and right up to probes exploring our neighbouring planets in the present day.

Love it or hate it, the pop decade that brought us, variously, Wham!, Bananarama, Annie Lennox, Morrissey, Michael Jackson, S'Express and, er, Joe Dolce certainly had variety. Award-winning author Dylan Jones is in the driving seat for this authoritative four-part look back. No stone (rose) remains unturned, as he revisits the New Romantics, hip-hop, indie jingle, synth-pop and club culture. Not to mention Culture Club…

Picasso is known as the godfather of modern art. In this programme, art historian David Dibosa explores six decades of BBC archive to discover how television has influenced our understanding of him. David reveals how film-makers have portrayed two different Picassos - the child genius who drew like a master and the adult who rejected his conventional talent in a quest to reflect the world, in ways that shattered all the rules. He also finds that film-makers have long been fascinated by Picasso’s private life. A notorious womaniser, Picasso used his lovers as muses and left behind a trail of broken relationships.

In early history, nudes were gods or heroes. Since then, the nude has often been about sex but also a powerful influence on how we view the body. Art historian Kate Bryan explores six decades of BBC archive to discover how television has influenced our understanding of the nude and how our attitudes have changed. As she examines the archives, Kate finds that while beauty and sexuality are never far away, artists have always used the nude as a vehicle to defy conventions.

To coincide with the US elections of 2008 comes this refreshing antidote to the whir of sensationalist spin and scandal, measuring up to the seriousness of the moment without diluting the excitement of campaign politics. After 9/11, after Katrina, Enron and Baghdad, the robustness of American optimism is struggling to reassert itself against the sobering reality of military frustration and domestic anxieties. This is an America grappling with an un-American sense of its own limits.

Two-part series which tells the story of children's outdoor games in 20th-century Britain begins by looking at British children at play between the 1900s and the mid-1950s.

Dr Susan Jebb takes a look through nearly fifty years of amazing BBC archive of mankind's relationship with what we eat, charting the shift from the malnutrition of the past to today's obesity epidemic.
This is the story of our attempt to control nature through the wholesale industrialisation of food production in our search for enough to eat, and the consequences of that massive shift in our diet on the shape of our bodies, and the diseases that kill us.

BEING HUMAN is a British television supernatural drama-comedy series created and written by Toby Whithouse and broadcast on BBC Three, is one of the most popular shows on BBC’s iPlayer. It stars Aidan Turner, Russell Tovey and Lenora Crichlow as three apparent twenty-something characters sharing a house in Totterdown, Bristol, trying to live a normal social life, despite being a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost respectively.