Britain From Above
The series across the 91Èȱ¬
91Èȱ¬ One
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The three episodes on 91Èȱ¬ One illustrate how the nation works. This is revealed from above, through stories from Britain's cities, landscape and countryside, showing the impact that humans have had.
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Episode One – 24 Hour Britain
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A day in the life of Britain. It is an epic story of a nation that is constantly on the move.
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How does Britain get around, keep warm, fed and watered?
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How do we move 36 million people through the morning rush hour every day?
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How does the national grid deal with the power surge needed by 8 million kettles being switched on immediately after EastEnders?
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From shopping to waste, from money to sewage, witness the endless ballet of daily life as you've never seen it before.
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How close do we live to chaos and who are the people who keep the show on the road?
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Episode Two – Man-made Britain
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Discover how some of the greenest, most natural-seeming landscapes on these islands have in fact been shaped and moulded by human hands over the centuries.
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From the scars of ancient settlements to suburban splatter and sprawl, from medieval farming to farming by satellite, episode two reveals the battle between town and country and how the desire to preserve things as they are has to be balanced against the need to build more houses.
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Man-made Britain shows how towns grow organically, how we go to extraordinary lengths to preserve our national parks as artificial but beautiful playgrounds and how we use our landscape as the ultimate flight simulator for testing Britain's most ferocious military hardware: the Eurofighter.
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Episode Three – Untamed Britain
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Untamed and untameable, the final episode reveals the epic geological forces that have created this island nation, the winds that shape the land and the hidden minerals beneath our feet, like the gold in Northern Ireland.
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Untamed Britain tracks the wild migrations of animals, birds and even humans as we too come together in great unmanageable herds at specific times of the year, whether to watch football or listen to music.
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This is the story of the forces that have shaped – and continue to shape – the British Isles and how our attempts at imposing order and control are very much at the mercy of forces much greater than ourselves.
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91Èȱ¬ Two
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91Èȱ¬ Two's Britain From Above companion series turns back time, drawing on previously unseen archive footage and photography to focus on the dramatic transformation of Britain's cities, landscape and industry as seen from above.
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Focusing on the period since the Second World War, Britain From Above on 91Èȱ¬ Two explores the greatest period of change in the nation in the last 200 years.
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Episode One – The City
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The first programme in this series reveals the transformation of Britain's most important city: her capital, London.
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Starting with amazing Luftwaffe aerial photographs of the very first bombs of the Blitz falling on a vulnerable city, this film tracks the changes that came out of five years of bombing.
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Comparing extensive footage of London in the Forties with the city of today, we see how great plans for urban renewal were stillborn.
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Instead, London rebuilt itself in an ad hoc way along old street patterns.
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The only exception to this was the dramatic city that rose from the derelict docklands in the form of the glittering tower blocks of Canary Wharf.
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Where Canary Wharf had a blank canvas and used it to create an American-style grid of streets and huge buildings, the City itself was faced with squeezing ever more bizarrely shaped buildings into its confused medieval street plan.
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Episode Two – The Land
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Before the Second World War most of the country was still rural – and that rural world existed in a state of relative isolation.
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But all that changed at the start of the war in a desperate attempt to avoid national starvation.
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The impact was felt most keenly in East Anglia, which became the crucible of a land revolution as its agriculture was industrialised faster and on a larger scale than anywhere else.
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It is also here that the war planted the seeds of modern commercial air travel in hundreds of military airfields and where the changing economics and lifestyles of post-war Britain (based on the freedom of the motorcar) created a whole new way of living.
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It is in East Anglia that that way of living continues to impact the land most clearly and visibly today.
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Using hitherto unseen land-use maps of the 1930s, together with wartime aerial reconnaissance photos, Britain From Above reveals how and why East Anglia, and by extension Britain's rural landscape, has been shaped.
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Episode Three – The Industrial Landscape
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This is the story of Britain's remarkable transformation from an industrial nation to its modern reincarnation.
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We see how Swindon, Manchester and the Rhonda Valley in South Wales have seen their traditional manufacturing industries wiped away in the course of a single working life.
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The programme shows how the 19th century canals and railways have been replaced by the 20th century's motorways; how smoking factory chimneys have given way to giant distribution warehouses; and how Victorian terraced housing has made way for gleaming high-rise bijou apartments.
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91Èȱ¬ Four
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Britain From Above – Satellite Earth
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Fifty years ago no one had ever looked down and seen the Earth. Today, we see satellite images of our planet every day.
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This one-off 91Èȱ¬ Four film tells the story of the satellite and explains how it is, quite simply, the biggest technological revolution since the invention of the steam engine.
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Near-Earth orbits are crowded with flocks of satellites, constellations bristling with electronic eyes capable of looking far beyond the narrow band of optically visible light to reveal the blue planet's secret hues.
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Every conceivable aspect of our world is being "sensed" and recorded – from the science of the oceans and atmosphere to military spy technology; from the geological structure of the earth to natural phenomena like weather systems and earthquakes, as well as humans' profound impact on this planet.
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Satellite Earth reveals how global agencies and individuals are using satellites in all kinds of ways – farming their land from space, locating ancient water supplies hidden deep beneath the most arid desert regions, and tracking ocean currents and the global mechanisms of climate change.
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