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- This documentary tells the story of the Spanish expeditions in the early sixteenth century that conquests America. This 4-part series Michael Wood (historian) travels in the footsteps of the Spanish expeditions of Hernán Cortés whose conquests was one of the most cataclysmic events in Modern American history.
- A bereaved woman adopts multiple disguises to track down the last three people to see her boyfriend before he died.
- Michael Wood tours the English locations important to William Shakespeare as he explores the playwright and poet's life and work.
- A group of people discuss chance encounters they have had that has led to sex with complete strangers. One girl recounts her experiences in the middle of a busy club, another being caught by the police. A lady describes a lesbian clinch in the toilets, a man recounts his 30 second affair on a train and a woman takes a coach journey.
- In each episode, English historian Michael Woods's team sheds an original light on a major period in British history. However, instead of a merely descriptive approach, they attempt to report as if on the present and stress links with our age.
- A tale told completely in rhyme sees the Devil caught between a rock and a hot place. His only way out? A soul searching deal with one more devious than he.
- A man sits at his computer and logs onto the interactive game "Caught Looking." He watches as he guides his virtual self through passages, in black and white. He considers but passes on opportunities with rough trade, a teen boy, a threesome, sex in a public toilet, and the kitsch of retro 50's muscle mystic in the Grotto of Tiberius. He sends his virtual self back to a pair of sailors, whom he films in 8mm. Then he meets a young man, a Tunisian named Karim. The man at the computer screen is interested. His ironic and self-mocking commentary ends; his tone changes. What will happen with Karim? Has our virtual voyeur been caught looking?
- James Holland presents an analysis of the legendary 1943 Dam Busters raid.
- With a PhD in papyrology, Margaret Mountford goes in search of the truth behind the legend of Sappho, the most controversial writer of the ancient world and the first authentic woman's voice in western history. The sensational discovery of a lost papyrus containing the words to songs unheard for 1700 years sends Margaret on a journey of exploration. From the fragmentary documents, ruined temple architecture and surviving oriental jewellery, the programme conjures the real world of the woman, whose erotic writings gave us the words 'sapphic' and 'lesbian', after the island of Lesbos the place of her birth. Was she indeed the first lesbian, a priestess, prostitute, a stern schoolmistress or an aristocratic lady of leisure as readers over the centuries have variously alleged. Plus how each generation's view of the archetypal liberated woman of letters tells us as much about us and our fears and concerns as it does about her.
- A gay poet heads west from New York City in his convertible. He picks up a muscular sailor who's bisexual; then Jackie, a waitress at a diner, joins them. Jackie is attracted to the poet who rebuffs her romantic gestures; rejection fuels her continued interest in him. The sailor and the poet are bonded by sex, but the sailor's frank advances to Jackie make him uninteresting to her. The sailor can get violent, the poet is passive, Jackie is glamorous and detached. The landscape changes, they stop in cities and in the desert. They reach a lake. Who will be left out of a final pairing?
- Michael Wood argues that the most important and influential British kings were a father, son and grandson who lived over a thousand years ago during the age of the Vikings.
- In December 1983, David Bowie's massive 'Serious Moonlight ' tour arrived in Asia for three shows in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Singapore, virtually uncharted territory for major rock acts at the time. The resulting triptych depicts Bowie's strange encounters with other cultures in a hybrid documentary-fiction-diary film. In Singapore, he grapples with the city's contradictions, befriending Chinese opera performers, drifting through alienating shopping malls, culminating in the troubled, almost cancelled concert in the National Stadium.
- Michael Wood explores village life in 14th century England, a time of plague, war and famine. Through the use of a remarkably complete set of documentary records, he explores one village - that of Codicote in Hertfordshire - looking at its boom times and its poorer times. Wood brings the period to life by focusing in on one family, that of the poor peasant Christina Cok, her father Hugh, her estranged husband William, and her children John and Alice. By looking at the poorest members of Codicote's society, Wood approaches his history from the bottom-up rather than taking the traditional historical approach of top-down, 'kings and barons' story-telling.
- Series looking at history through the eyes of ordinary people. Rulers and royals, lords and ladies have all had their say down the centuries, what were the last 1,600 years like for everyday Britons?
- A Bit of Scarlet excavates clips from Britain's cinema archives to create a moving and humorous testament to the closeted gay and lesbian images from filmmaking's earliest days.
- Michael Wood tells the extraordinary story of an ordinary woman in a time of revolution. Born during the reign of Henry VIII, Mary Arden is the daughter of a Warwickshire farmer, but she marries into a new life in the rising Tudor middle class in Stratford-upon-Avon. There she has eight children, three of whom die young. Her husband becomes mayor, but is bankrupted by his shady business dealings. Faced with financial ruin, religious persecution and power politics, the family is the glue that keeps them together until they are rescued by Mary's successful eldest son - William Shakespeare.
- Two astronauts await the news that will decide their fate.
- A historical re-examination of Britain's Finest Hour and its actual nature.
- This film documents the origins of the AIDS activist movement in the US and the UK and the gay community's growing anger and frustration with the totally in adequate response of the US political and medical establishment to the epidemic. While the film celebrates the real successes of this movement, it also examines the problematic debates within it concerning democracy, representation, power differentials, and the relationship between homophobia, racism and sexism. Finally the film describes the birth of groups such as Queer Nation in the US and Ourtage in the UK which have sprung out of a newly politicized sense of pride and community fueled by the AIDS activist movement. The final section of the film talks with a long term survivor of AIDS and discusses how the community has come to terms with grieving and interviews a founding member of the "Forget Me Nots".
- A story about courage; Paul, his cheating lover and a casual sexual encounter.
- The bittersweet story of a single parent father with a teenage daughter, and the day she brings home her new boyfriend.
- A stranger than fiction horror story, based on true events that shocked America in 1970. Announced on the main evening news: a thirteen year old girl is discovered in LA suburb after being held prisoner in a room, harnessed to a potty chair for twelve years.
- Crystal Aquarium was the name given to tanks set up on Music Hall stages for underwater performance, at the turn of the century. There are four performers - a drummer, a swimmer, an ice skater and a fourth woman. Although the protagonists never appear together they are inextricably bound up by their actions.
- Join host Bruce Feiler on an unprecedented journey to the world's most meaningful landscapes and rigorous religious pilgrimages.
- A documentary cine-essay about the UK during the Thatcher era, looking at the construction of national identity and the interpretation of the past. Utilising a poetic voice over, interviews, archive and 'fantasy' the film is a collage informed by Walter Benjamin's ideas on the philosophy of history.
- With Darfur's peace agreement long forgotten and the sound of gunfire ringing in the air, this eye-opening, exclusive film goes deep into the territory to reveal a people struggling desperately for life yet determined to carry on in the face of danger and hardship.
- The worldwide Nazi search for archaeological and historical support for their beliefs in the Aryan (German) master race.
- The Kumbh Mela, the Hindu festival when pilgrims bathe where two sacred rivers meet, is explored.
- The life of young William Shakespeare from his birth in Warwickshire, through his school years until age fourteen and up to his marriage to Anne Hathaway at age 19. It was a turbulent time of revolution in England as religion and solidarity to the crown were torn apart by the Tudors. William grew up in modest wealth and saw his family lose it all around age 12. It is the foundation upon which his writings will be shaped, his remembrances of the country life growing up in Stratford-upon-Avon.
- In March 1603 Queen Elizabeth I dies with no heir. King James of Scotland, whose mother, Mary Queen of Scots Elizabeth had beheaded, succeeds to the English throne. Shakespeare's company is made to serve the king with theater on Christmas holiday. In 1605, when the Gunpowder Plot is foiled, the king takes a firm and cruel anti-papist stance and it is during this time that Shakespeare writes "MacBeth". The king sees it as seditious and bans any further productions. As Protestantism is forced upon all English subjects through heavy fines, imposed a on Shakespeare's daughter Susanna herself, he next writes and produces "King Lear". After the beginnings of civil uprising of the Diggers of Warwickshire, the day following his attendance of Susanna's marriage to a Puritan doctor, a marriage that will finally bear him a grandchild, Shakespeare returns to London to write and produce "Coriolanus". He and the company open a second theater across the river Thames in London, in the Priory of the Blackfriars. They made more money here in their indoor winter theater than they did at The Globe. They were able to use lighting to set darker moods for their plays like "Cardenio", a music filled rendition of a new translation of "Don Quixote". The Blackfriars' shows raised the social status of actors, the sure sign of their arrival demonstrated in having their portraits painted. The mixing of Shakespeare and his actors with scientists and explorers, may have lead to his discovery of attempts to reach The New World, and inspired his last solo play, "The Tempest". The next year he returns to Warwickshire, buys more land, but rather than retiring, buys a known Catholic safehouse next to Blackfriars. He writes and produces "Henry VIII" at Blackfriars. In 1614 The Globe burns down and Shakespeare divests his shares in there and returns to Warwickshire, bowing out of the theater. He lives a life of leisure, traveling with his son-in-law to London on occasional business trips, generally living the small town life as a pillar of the local church and society. He falls ill in 1616 and dies 23rd April, leaving the bulk of his estate to his daughter Susanna, and some bits to his actors and the marital bed to his wife Anne. Seven years after his death in 1623 actors Heminges and Condell had 37 of his plays printed in a folio, rescuing 16 plays that had never been published and would have been lost forever without their effort to preserve and record his literary legacy, as gesture of their love for their dear friend. This is borne out in the personal tributes that preface the folio.
- William has great success with writing and production with his theater company in "Romeo and Juliet", but shortly thereafter the plague forces closure of all production houses, so Shakespeare turns to writing poetry to earn a living. But then the death of his only son at 11 years old marks a time of upheaval in his life. The bard writes voluminous poems of love for his lost son which are interpreted as him falling for a young nobleman and has an affair with a married woman. Meanwhile his theater company builds The Globe, rebels somewhat against an ailing Elizabeth I, and brings great characters to life in successes with "The Merchant of Venice", "Falstaff", Hamlet and "Othello", among others.
- Michael Wood's investigation into the life of the world's greatest writer, explains how this young man from Stratford became a star of Elizabethan London, uncovering a tale of religious conflict behind Shakespeare's lost years.
- In the 6th century AD was the start of India's Golden Age, with the rise of mythical kingdoms, especially Rama's Ayodhya, according to the supreme Hindu epic, the moralistic Ramayana. Aydodhya was later really built as capital of the historical Gupta dynasty's vast, rich, well-organized northern empire, recorded by Chinese visiting monk Fa Hsien. They excelled in metallurgy, astronomy and hedonism. The later southern counterpart was the Chola empire (c900-1300), capital Tanjore. Their Tamil culture, excelling in architecture, dance and bronze, lives on.
- At the 60th independence anniversary of the largest democracy, Michael tells how it entered the world stage. Some 75,000 years ago, curious men from Africa followed the shore to southern Indian, thriving as it was fertile. Some of its prehistorical 'cultural' heritage remains, e.g. in some of the Brahmin caste's Hindu traditions, as in some genes. 10,000 years later, agriculture started sedentarisation and cities, perhaps the oldest being present Pakistan's Harappa, which civilization peaked in the third millennium BC. Also Mohenjo-Dara, capital of a vast, 5,000,000 people empire until trade collapsed mysteriously. Circa 1,500 BC arose the Sanskrit language and script. Its Vedic scriptures support cultural import, including domesticated horses, from the West by Aryan immigration circa 1,750 BC to the Indus valley, via Central Asia, from (or as) Mazdeist Iran. The Mahabharata epic mythologizes their epic tribal and princely warfare and their new religion, Hindu polytheism.
- Michael discusses with Indian historians and witnesses, including some rajahs, first how British India was established by the East India Company in the general British rivalry with France, first in southern principalities, then in Bengal, finally taking over the Mughal empire. Then the pros and contras of the raj (colonial rule). Finally the mutiny, the long struggle for independence, finally won by Ganghi, and the separation between a mainly Hindu Indian state and a Muslim Pakistan.
- In 150 BC, the Greek Hippalos discovered strong monsoons that allowed seafaring using improved Roman wooden ships from the Red and Arab Seas to the spice coast of modern Kerala and back. This enabled trade in what made the subcontinent as rich as silk-home China. Herbal products like peppers, ginger, cardamom and other conservation - and seasoning ingredients, worth up to their weight in gold, plus gems, paid mainly in metals and wine. India's fertile south conserves the Ancient Tamil language and metropolitan capital then, Manduarai. North of the Himalaya, the Kushan tribes formed a now forgotten empire, based on Merw (Turkmenistan), which opened the Silk Route, the main land trade.
- Ghazni Afghan empire founder's 11th century raids from Multan (Pakistan) started Islam's influence on India. Since the twelfth century conquests established sultanates dominating northern Hindustan. In the 16th century another wave of Turkic-Mongol-Persian invaders, under Babur's dynasty, united them. Soon much of the South, was established as the Mughal empire. The natural meeting of Sufism and Hinduism in asceticism now was matched by a policy of tolerant coexistence, with Hindu vassals. A brilliant culture flowered, embellished by the Taj Mahal. However economic decline set in.
- Since the fifth century BC, India developed an Iron Age pacifist model: individuals seek dharma (virtue), artha (richess and success), kharma (pleasure and joy) and ultimately moksa (enlightenment). In the holy Ganges cities, Michael contemplates the hierarchic, controversially fatalistic Hindu caste system and ritualistic tradition. The philosophical rise of moralism and meditation culminated in Buddhism, the teaching of prince Gautama turned wandering ascetic preaching detachment. After Alexander conquered the Persian empire, Indian admirer Chandragaupta Maurya founds his own from Bengal to Afghanistan and Ganges capital Patna, then the world's greatest city. His grandson Ashoka elaborates secular absolute rule, complete with torture house and aggressive war, then converted to Jain non-violence and Buddhist humanity.