Origins: The Journey of Humankind

David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities

September 2025 •English

Sir David shines the spotlight on some of nature’s evolutionary anomalies and reveals how these curious animals continue to baffle and fascinate.

Kingdom of Plants

September 2025 •English

Sir David discovers a microscopic world that’s invisible to the naked eye, where insects feed and breed, where flowers fluoresce and where plants communicate with each other and with animals using scent and sound.

David Attenborough's Rise of Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates

September 2025 •English

David Attenborough embarks on a remarkable 500 million-year journey revealing the extraordinary group of animals that dominate our world, and how their evolution defines our human bodies.

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage

September 2025 •English

Carl Sagan covers a wide range of scientific subjects, including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea

September 2025 •English

Andrew Marr explores how Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has taken on a life of its own far beyond the world of science.

Money, Explained

September 2025 •English

We spend it, we borrow it, and save it. Now let's talk about money and its many minefields, from credit cards to casino, scammers to student loans.

The Ascent of Money

September 2025 •English

Historian Niall Ferguson tells the story of money and the rise of global finance. Bringing context and understanding to the current economic crisis, he reveals how the history of finance has been punctuated by gut-wrenching crashes.

Mankind: The Story of All of Us

September 2025 •English

Mankind The Story of All of Us is an epic 12-hour television event about the greatest adventure of all time—the history of the human race. It takes 10 billion years for the ideal planet to form and 3 billion more for the right conditions to emerge before it finally happens: mankind begins. From there unfolds a fast-paced story told here through key turning points—stepping stones in our journey from hunter-gatherer to global citizen. It’s a tale of connections—why some ideas take hold and spread around the globe, and how the lives of people in one part of the world are shaped by events in another.

Walking with Cavemen

September 2025 •English

Professor Robert Winston meets Lucy, the first upright ape, and follows her ancestors on the three-million-year journey to civilisation.

The Great Dyings

September 2025 •English

Life is a fragile thing. It changes and adapts so specifically to survive in the environment it's placed in. This ability to adapt is called evolution, and it's the reason that life has endured for the past few billion years. But evolution takes a long time, so when environments change too quickly for the inhabitants to keep up, the result is a drop in population or at the worst… extinction. And sometimes these changes can be so big that they affect the entire globe. Leading to some of the most catastrophic events in our planet’s history… mass extinctions. Content creator Angel of Death explores the five mass extinctions and the effects they had on life on earth in this five part miniseries.

The Body in Question

September 2025 •English

The Body in Question is a landmark British medical documentary series of 13 shows made for the BBC. It was a groundbreaking show, being the first to ever televise an autopsy (in the final show on 29 Jan 1979). Dr Jonathan Miller considers the functioning of the body as a subject of private experience. He explores our attitudes towards our bodies, our ignorance of them, and our inability to read our body's signals. The first episode starts with vox populi asking where various organs in the body are located. By the final episode we are left in no doubt. Taking as his starting point the experience of pain, Dr Miller analyses the elaborate social process of "falling ill", considers the physical foundations of "disease" and looks at the types of individuals humankind has historically attributed with the power of healing. The series was nominated for two 1979 BAFTAs: Best Factual Television Series and Most Original Programme/Series.

Jon Richardson Grows Up

September 2025 •English

This three-part series follows comedian Jon Richardson and his friend Matt Forde as they face up to the adult realities of mortgages, marriage and parenthood.

Body Invaders

September 2025 •English

Fatal Experiments: The Downfall of a Supersurgeon

September 2025 •Swedish

The series investigates Paolo Macchiarini’s claims to have invented a ground-breaking method to create new organs. His method using plastic tracheas sown with stemcells has been operated on patients in the US, Russia, Sweden and the UK. So far, unfortunately, the track record of his plastic organs is not very good. Almost all patients are dead. And several of his former surgeon colleagues in Sweden claim that not only does the method not work, but that his scientific claim to fame is based on falsified and misrepresented data. Some even claim that his patients have been used as human guinea-pigs.

La macchina meravigliosa

September 2025 •Italian

A long journey in 8 episodes to discover the human body, with Piero Angela who closely observes our organism, focusing each time on a theme: the eye, the ear, taste and smell, the stomach and the intestine, liver, bones, lungs and heart. How does our "wonder machine" work? To make each explanation direct and clear, the program uses films, animations and photographs developed with the scanning electron microscope.

Victorian Pharmacy

September 2025 •English

Victorian Pharmacy is a historical documentary TV series in four parts, first shown on BBC Two in July 2010. It was made for the BBC by independent production company Lion Television. It was filmed at Blists Hill Victorian Town in Shropshire. It is a historical documentary that looks at life in the 19th Century and how people attempted to cure common ailments. Since some of the ingredients of Victorian remedies are now either illegal or known to be dangerous, Nick Barber often uses his modern pharmaceutical knowledge to produce similar products without those ingredients. The other main presenters are Tom Quick, a PhD student, and Ruth Goodman, a domestic historian who also appeared in Tales from the Green Valley, Victorian Farm and Edwardian Farm.

First Peoples

September 2025 •English

A five-part series that features the latest research exploring how early humans evolved. See how the mixing of prehistoric human genes led the way for our species to survive and thrive around the globe. Archaeology, genetics and anthropology cast new light on 200,000 years of history, detailing how early humans became dominant.

J'aurais donc dû, docteur!

September 2025 •French

Some people see their lives dramatically turned upside down because they waited for too long before seeking care. The documentary series showcases individual who should have rapidly consulted with a doctor when the first signs of illness appeared, before the situation became critical.

Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston's Casebook

September 2025 •English

Surgeon Gabriel Weston introduces us to people from across the globe with the world's most unique bodies.

Broke & Famous

September 2025 •English

The stories of celebrities who went from a life of lavish spending to penny-pinching.