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Private Notes
In September 2007 Sir Richard Branson's friend, the record-breaking aviator Steve Fossett, disappeared on a pleasure flight. There were rumours that Fossett, who had made the first solo balloon flight around the world, was in Argentina or that he had faked his death. His loss sparked the biggest peacetime search and rescue operation in the history of the United States.
Over the ensuing weeks, reports surfaced of hundreds - even thousands - of missing aircraft in a triangular area of the Sierra Nevada mountains that ranges from some of the highest peaks, to the lowest point - Death Valley - in the USA.
Dating back to the early days of flight and World War II, the aircraft were lost in an area that also includes the top-secret 'Area 51' military air base, famous for unexplained UFO sightings.
As reports of missing aircraft mounted, rumours grew of a new 'Bermuda Triangle': the so-called 'Nevada Triangle'.
While the investigators faced challenges from wind, weather and terrain, many theories appeared to explain why so many planes had gone missing in the Nevada Triangle, from government conspiracy and alien intervention to unusual local atmospheric effects.
This film reveals what really happened to Steve Fossett. But can it shed some light on the truth of the Nevada Triangle?
Kevin McCloud visits Dharavi, one of the planet's most extreme urban spaces, to live, sleep, eat and wash there, and to test claims that the city has the answers to many of our urban ills.
Kevin's immersive journey through Dharavi continues as he explores the extraordinary recycling industry. Here, 80 per cent of the city's plastic waste is recycled.
Britain's Big Freeze examines the freezing winter of early 2010, meeting experts and eyewitnesses, revealing dramatic stories from the news and from individuals, and looking at the big freezes of 1947, 1963 and February 2009: just how does 2010 compare?
The documentary asks what has happened, why has it happened, what have the consequences been, and should we expect these conditions in British winters to come?
A hundred and two minutes passed between the first plane's impact into North Tower of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the second plane's attack on South Tower, and the collapse of both buildings.
In that time, people around New York reached for their cameras.
This documentary joins together hundreds of pieces of footage and audiotape into a single, seamless historical record, much of it never seen before.
It is an intensely personal and new perspective of the tragedy, telling that morning's events in real time, as they were experienced by people around New York.
For decades it has been thought that a bomb dropped by a Japanese aircraft sank the USS Arizona during World War II. However, the recent discovery of a group of small Japanese submarines in and around Pearl Harbour has raised questions about the battleship's final hours.
This film follows a team of expert investigators, who journey to the seafloor to explore the wreckage of a newly discovered sub, and questions whether this mini-sub, and its two-person crew, made it into Pearl Harbour to fire torpedoes at the Arizona.
With unprecedented access to the remains of the Arizona and other unique evidence, including aerial photos taken by Japanese aircraft and testimonials from US and Japanese veterans, Pearl Harbour: Mystery of the Killer Subs investigates the possibility that these tiny but lethal mini-subs may have played a crucial and previously unsuspected part in the tragic events of that 'Day of Infamy'.
The story of Britain's largest ever Anglo Saxon treasure hoard: the 1,600 items discovered in a Staffordshire field in 2009 by a metal detecting enthusiast.
Following the unprecedented disruption caused by the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano, The Volcano That Stopped Britain explores the geological and scientific background behind the headlines of this extraordinary story.
The documentary identifies the dangers posed by the ash and the effects that it has on aircraft and aviation, as well as exploring the impacts of further possible eruptions to the UK, Europe and the rest of the world.
Puyi was a participant in, and victim of, the tumultuous times through which he lived.
This film juxtaposes the major political events of the last Emperor of China's life with his strange domestic life, including his five 'wives'.
In 1908, aged only two, Puyi ascended the throne at the Forbidden City in Beijing as Qing Emperor of China. At six, rebellions forced his abdication but he continued to live at the palace surrounded by women and eunuchs.
At 13 he started to learn of the wider world from his British teacher Reginald Johnston (who was to be portrayed by Peter O'Toole in Bertolucci's famous feature film).
Soon afterwards Puyi was evicted from the Palace and embarked on an amazing personal quest to recover his throne.
He was to become a puppet Emperor controlled by the Japanese, a prisoner of the Soviet Union, an inmate of a Communist Chinese re-education camp and finally an ordinary citizen living in Beijing through the brutal upheavals of the Cultural Revolution.
This dramatized documentary recounts how, during the most decisive phase of the Battle of the Britain, a single squadron of 34 Polish fighter pilots wreaked havoc on the Luftwaffe, in the process helping to change the course of history and overturning RAF prejudices.
From 303 Squadron's bitter struggle for acceptance when they first arrived in the UK, to the crucial part they played in averting the German invasion, and their ultimate betrayal by the Allies, this unknown story is one of the most extraordinary episodes of World War II.
Based on a diary kept by the pilots of the squadron, it is a story of increasing frustration on the part of the Poles who had already fought the Luftwaffe and now found themselves having to learn English and the RAF way of doing things. Meanwhile, as the Battle of Britain got underway, inexperienced British pilots were paying a heavy cost.
Belatedly, the Poles were cleared for active service and had an immediate impact. In their first week they shot down 40 enemy aircraft, making them the highest scoring RAF squadron. By the time the Battle of Britain was won, they had claimed 126 enemy planes. But as the war ended, their joy turned to despair as they saw their own country handed to Stalin.
Documentary with unprecedented access to the construction of the Royal Navy's newest destroyer, the £1billion HMS Daring, Britain's first new warship for 25 years. The programme follows the process of building the vessel in three different locations with the latest techniques and testing its vast array of weapons. Maritime experts discuss the significance of the ship to the UK's defences, and cameras go behind the scenes on the official launch that brings royalty to Glasgow.
In 1914, when World War I began, the aeroplane was so new the British had never used it in battle before. Eager recruits, some as young as 17, rushed to join the British army's new aircraft service - the Royal Flying Corps - and quickly came up against the Red Baron and the German hunting squadrons. By the end of the war in 1918, a new and terrifying form of warfare had been devised, the skies had been turned into battlefields and the cost to aviation pioneers had been enormous. Fighting the Red Baron follows two modern-day pilots as they face the same challenges the aviators of WWI faced, in order to find out how aerial warfare changed so quickly in just four years.
Documentary examining the American show choir phenomenon that inspired the award-winning show Glee. With contributions from former show choir members including Broadway star Donna Lynne Champlin, plus a chance to meet New York's answer to Mr Schuester - Judith Ranaletta, who has devoted more than 26 years to helping her school's choir become one of the best in the US.
Gladiators: Back from the Dead Up to a million gladiators are thought to have died in arenas across the Roman Empire. And, apart from ancient Italy itself, Roman Britain had the highest density of purpose-built gladiatorial arenas in Europe. Interest in gladiators has been at an all-time high since Russell Crowe's sword and sandals epic. But the details of the lives and deaths of gladiators remain fragmentary. Now, featuring sensational new archaeological discoveries, Gladiators: Back from the Dead vividly recreates the world of the Roman arena and how six gladiators lived, fought and died. The programme reveals how the various types of gladiator were trained in special schools, including Retiarii, who fought with nets and tridents, heavyweight Myrmillonis sword fighters, Thracians armed with special 'bent' swords, Secutors (literarily pursuers) who wore special helmets, and the Bestiarii, who fought wild animals. The programme follows archaeologists and forensic anthropologists as they analyse dozens of Roman skeletons found in Britain over recent years: individuals who evidence shows came from across the Roman Empire. And, using injuries found on the bones, including weapon cut marks and even large carnivore bite marks, as well as evidence of heavy training, the programme re-creates ancient gladiatorial life and death.
On Wednesday 2 June 2010, just after 11am, news began to emerge of the largest gun massacre in Britain for 14 years.
Whitehaven, a small fishing port on the Cumbrian coast, joined Hungerford and Dunblane as places synonymous with sudden and inexplicable mass murder.
Fifty-two-year-old Derrick Bird, a local taxi driver, divorced with two grown-up sons, had recently become a grandfather. Early in the morning, armed with a rifle and shotgun, Bird embarked on a killing spree that would last until the afternoon and result in 12 dead, 11 injured and his own suicide.
This documentary covers the days leading up to what police describe as 'a 45-mile rampage across West Cumbria', the details of what happened on June 2, and the aftermath.
Martin Taylor's revealing behind-the-scenes look at Australia's longest running and probably most politically incorrect beauty contest, Miss Nude Australia.
Best Undressed is an offbeat portrait of suburban Australia that's somewhere between Strictly Come Dancing and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; always entertaining, occasionally hilarious and sometimes a little tragic.
It is an intimate insight into a group of young women and their families who share the same hopes and dreams as anyone and who are striving to be the very best at what they do but without any of the pretensions of more mainstream beauty pageants.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/best-undressed
Martin Taylor's revealing behind-the-scenes look at Australia's longest running and probably most politically incorrect beauty contest, Miss Nude Australia.
Best Undressed is an offbeat portrait of suburban Australia that's somewhere between Strictly Come Dancing and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; always entertaining, occasionally hilarious and sometimes a little tragic.
It is an intimate insight into a group of young women and their families who share the same hopes and dreams as anyone and who are striving to be the very best at what they do but without any of the pretensions of more mainstream beauty pageants.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/best-undressed
From the moment it first flew in 1969, Concorde was an immediate icon, generating intense national pride. Travelling at twice the speed of sound, faster than a bullet, passengers could sip champagne in shirtsleeves on the very edge of space, jetting from London to New York in just three and a half hours. But ten years ago, on 25 July 2000, a devastating crash outside Paris helped to seal Concorde's fate and brought the supersonic age to a close. A decade on, arguments still rage about the exact causes of the loss of Air France flight AF4590, and a French court case is due to decide whether anyone was to blame. Using archive footage, reconstructions and CGI, Concorde's Last Flight tells the turbulent story of the airliner's dramatic rise and fall in the words of her designers and engineers, the pilots and VIP passengers who flew in it, as well as witnesses to the French crash and crash investigators.
In 2009, in an astonishing discovery, the bodies of 250 British and Australian World War I soldiers were found in unmarked graves near Fromelles in northern France. It's the largest war grave to be found in Western Europe in modern times.
This film tells the story of how, over the course of a year, the bodies have been carefully exhumed and many of them identified via DNA matches with living relatives.
WWI: Finding the Lost Battalions features three British families who hope to discover whether their relatives are amongst the dead, and lay to rest family mysteries that have lasted almost a century.
Their relatives are men who went missing in action, but no confirmation of death could ever be given by the War Office. Two are from the sleepy Buckinghamshire village of The Lee, which gave most of its young men to the 2nd Bucks Battalion, whose story this film follows in particular detail.
Drawing on personal possessions found with the bodies, including a bible with handwritten annotations, a heart-shaped leather pouch and a return train ticket, as well as astonishing personal diaries and letters from the men who went missing, the film brings the horrifying truth of the Battle of Fromelles, and its impact on the subsequent generations, vividly to life.
The fighting took place at the same time as the Battle of the Somme, at the height of WWI. More than 1,500 British and 5,533 Australian soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner during 12 hours of carnage between 19 and 20 July 1916. The Allies failed to gain an inch of ground.
Channel 4 was granted exclusive access by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to document the exhumation of the soldiers' remains and their subsequent burial in the new Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery - the first to be built in 50 years.
The number of faith schools in Britain is rising. Around 7,000 publicly-funded schools - one in three - now has a religious affiliation.
As the coalition government paves the way for more faith-based education by promoting 'free schools', the renowned atheist and evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins says enough is enough.
In this passionately argued film, Dawkins calls on us to reconsider the consequences of faith education, which, he argues, bamboozles parents and indoctrinates and divides children.
Broadcasting two years to the day before the Paralympic 2012 Games begin, Inside Incredible Athletes profiles some of the elite British athletes who excel in their field, from both a personal and a scientific perspective.
A group of environmentalists across the world believe that, in order to save the planet, humanity must embrace the very science and technology they once so stridently opposed.
In this film, these life-long die-hard greens advocate radical solutions to climate change, which include GM crops and nuclear energy. They argue that by clinging to an ideology formed more than 40 years ago, the traditional green lobby has failed in its aims and is ultimately harming its own environmental cause.
As author and environmentalist Mark Lynas says, 'Being an environmentalist was part of my identity and most of my friends were environmentalists. We were involved in the whole movement together. It took me years to actually begin to question those core, cherished beliefs. It was so challenging it was almost like going over to the dark side. It was a like a horrible dark secret you couldn't share with anyone.
The Warsaw Ghetto housed 440,000 Polish Jews and Roma during World War II. Typhus, starvation and random murders killed over 100,000 of the ghetto's residents even before the Nazis began the massive deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp. Yet the Nazis created a mysterious propaganda film that juxtaposed meticulously staged scenes of Jews enjoying a life of luxury in the ghetto with other, chilling images that required no staging at all. After the war, filmmakers and museums - unaware of the deception - used images from the film as objective illustrations of life in the ghetto, which subsequently became engraved as historical truth. With contributions from ghetto survivors and one of the German cameramen, Warsaw Ghetto: The Unfinished Film reveals how the Nazis used the ghetto as a film set, the inhabitants as actors and the decaying bodies as exhibits, and examines how far we can trust historic images.
The narration is mostly in English but it also includes Polish and Deutsch as well.
Presented by gadget, gizmo and toy collector extraordinaire Jonathan Ross, 100 Greatest Toys with Jonathan Ross is a three-hour countdown of the nation's favourite toys and games.
One of the most respected and prolific writers of his generation, John le Carre is the undisputed master of the spy novel, with over 22 bestsellers. At 79 years old, the normally guarded le Carre gives his most candid television interview to at his remote clifftop home in Cornwall.
Paul Weller talks about his love of England, his influences and his 30-year music career from forming The Jam in the 70s to making his more recent albums.
Martin Durkin explains the full extent of the financial mess the UK is in and presents his argument of what needs to be done to make the economy boom again
As a boy, TV personality, travel writer and journalist Dom Joly dreamt of becoming Tintin.
In this First Cut film, he fulfils his fantasy to become the world-famous Belgian reporter, and attempts to retrace the steps of Tintin's British adventure: The Black Island. He sets out to track down the real-life places that inspired the story and find the Black Island Castle.
The ever-enthusiastic Dom Joly dons the costume of his hero, complete with shorts, plus fours, a white shirt and blue jersey, and even dyes his hair ginger.
He goes to Brussels and visits the studio where Herge drew the character.
Ever faithful to his quest, Dom goes in search of a Snowy the Dog and visits a seaman's bar in an attempt to find a Captain Haddock look-alike.
They say that blood is thicker than water, and this documentary puts that to the test by examining the brothers who have formed and fronted rock bands. From the Everlys to the Gallaghers via the Kinks and Spandau Ballet, it tells the stories of the bands of brothers who went from their bedrooms to become household names - often with a price to pay.
With contributions from Martin Kemp, Matt Goss, Dave Davies, Phil Everly, David Knopfler and the Campbell brothers of UB40
Alan Bennett and director Nicholas Hytner discuss and dissect the process they went through to produce the final version of The Habit of Art, the critically acclaimed play in which a group of actors rehearse a play about W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten.
Several people walk into a bar... The funniest comedians of our time stand up to be counted down in our exhaustive look at who really has funny bones. Boom boom!
