Movies: British history

This Traveltalk series short visits an array of locations associated with England's heritage. Included are Runnymede, Windsor, Ascot, Lincoln, Wells, Salisbury, Glastonbury, and the ancient Stonehenge site....

Today, few people's clothes attract as much attention as the royal family, but this is not a modern-day paparazzi-inspired obsession. Historian Dr. Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, reveals that it has always been this way. Explo...

Using drama and documentary this film tells the remarkable story of Cromwell, one of the most important characters of British history, yet revered and hated in equal measure. Charles I has been executed and an East Anglian farmer is about to become l...

Lucy Worsley gets into bed with our past monarchs to uncover the Tales from the Royal Bedchamber. She reveals that our obsession with royal bedrooms, births and succession is nothing new. In fact, the rise and fall of their magnificent beds reflects ...

Long treated with indifference by critics and historians, British silent cinema has only recently undergone the reevaluation it has long deserved, revealing it to be far richer than previously acknowledged. This documentary, featuring clips from a re...

Mary Berry visits Harewood House in Yorkshire as it prepares for Christmas on a grand scale, and demonstrates how to make delicious recipes inspired by festive dishes of the past....

At its peak, The Black and White Minstrel Show was watched by a Saturday night audience of more than 20 million people. David Harewood goes on a mission to understand the roots of this strange, intensely problematic cultural form: where did the show ...

Mary Beard is on a mission to uncover the real Julius Caesar, and to challenge public perception, exploring Caesar's surprising legacy....

To mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Janina Ramirez tells the story of three books that defined this radical religious revolution in England....

In this special follow-up programme, the only television team with access to the dig and the scientific tests on the skeleton uses unseen footage and conducts two days of additional interviews to tell this extraordinary forensic detective story in ev...

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At the end of the 18th century, hundreds of Indian sailors, known as lascars, worked amongst European settlers in Aotearoa New Zealand - often under the gruesome working conditions of seal hunting gangs. The story follows a lascar, Dasa, who has bee...

Chief curator of historic royal palaces Lucy Worsley provides an exclusive tour of London’s most extraordinary palaces: the Tower of London, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace....

Built in 1923, the Flying Scotsman was the first steam locomotive to run at 100 miles an hour and to star in its own feature film. This is the untold story of the iconic Flying Scotsman-the very best in the engineering of its time....

Clarissa Dickson Wright tracks down Britain's oldest known cookbook, The Forme of Cury. This 700-year-old scroll was written during the reign of King Richard II from recipes created by the king's master chefs. How did this ancient manuscript influenc...

Broadcaster Gyles Brandreth travels to the West Yorkshire moors, known as "Bronte Country". It is an area that shaped the Bronte sisters, and they have, in turn, helped shape it. He explores some of the influences on their writing....

Queen Elizabeth II is the longest-reigning monarch in the history of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. While her service to her country is legendary, she has become a figure of strength, endurance, and dignity the world over and indeed we all feel ...

The beautiful gay erotic superstar Johan Paulik is enthusiastically celebrated in this jam-packed compendium of Johan's greatest on-screen performances, plus an exclusive interview with the charming boy himself and previously unseen out-takes which r...

David Olusoga opens secret government files to show how the Windrush scandal and the ‘hostile environment’ for black British immigrants has been 70 years in the making....

The exquisite Rosslyn Chapel is a masterpiece in stone. It used to be one of Scotland's best-kept secrets, but it became world-famous when it was featured in Dan Brown's the Da Vinci Code....