episodes
- 1. Viking Voyage In July 2007, 61 men and women set off on an extraordinary voyage to sail the world's largest reconstructed Viking ship from Denmark to Ireland. This film follows their seven-week journey and reveals...
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2.
Bloody Omaha
The D-Day landing at Omaha Beach in Normandy on 6 June 1944 is widely regarded as a great victory, but the operation was almost an unimaginable disaster. Very little actually went to plan on the day -...
- 3. The Wreckers In January 2007 the MSC Napoli ran aground, spilling its cargo on a Devon beach. Opportunists plundered the ship's booty while the authorities struggled to police the scene. But the looters of the Nap...
- 4. The Greatest Knight The medieval mêlée tournament was a brutal free-for-all with sharpened weapons, few rules, and one undisputed champion: William Marshal. Military historian Dr Saul David journeys into Marshal's knight...
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5.
The Pharaoh's Lost City
More than 3,000 years ago the rebel Pharaoh Akhenaten marched his people from Thebes to a desert plain beside the Nile. Within 20 years a huge new city was constructed dedicated to the Pharaoh's new g...
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6.
Ten Pound Poms
Some 30,000 Brits head for Australia each year - just a fraction of the one million who gambled on the ten-pound assisted-passage scheme through the 1950s and 60s, in one of the largest planned migrat...
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7.
Stonehenge
Experts have always believed that Britain's most iconic ancient monument was designed as a burial site. Two years ago a radical new theory emerged suggesting that Stonehenge was a place of healing rat...
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8.
Britain's Forgotten Floods
The Asian tsunami of 2004 was a devastating natural disaster of epic proportions. Many believe a huge wave on this scale couldn't hit Europe - are they wrong? In 1607, an enormous flood engulfed Somer...
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9.
The Boxer Rebellion
Peking, June 1900: The "Society of Right and Harmonious Fists", known by Europeans as the Boxers, entrapped more than 3,000 foreigners and Chinese Christians in the diplomatic quarter, in a bid to fre...
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10.
Young Victoria
How did an unassuming little girl become the most powerful woman in the world? At her birth, few believed Princess Victoria would one day be crowned Queen, but following a number of untimely deaths an...
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11.
The Last Day of World War One
Michael Palin tells the explosive, poignant story of the First World War's final day, which marks the start of the BBC's 90 Years of Remembrance season. Taking a solemn trudge around the former battle...