SUNDAY 03 JULY 2016

SUN 19:00 Five Children and It (b07k0t27)
Episode 1

In 1902, four children and their baby brother are spending their summer in the countryside while their parents are away. While playing in a nearby sand pit, the children discover 'It', which turns out to be a Psammead, or sand fairy, thousands of years old and with the power to grant wishes. The Psammead agrees to give the children a wish a day - but warns them that the wishes will fade at sunset.


SUN 19:25 Five Children and It (b07k76j5)
Episode 2

In 1902, four children and their baby brother are spending their summer in the countryside while their parents are away. Having wished for riches 'beyond the dreams of avarice', the children have arrived in town determined to buy lots of things with the gold the Psammead has granted them.


SUN 19:50 Five Children and It (b07k76j9)
Episode 3

In 1902, four children and their baby brother are spending their summer in the countryside while their parents are away. While playing in a nearby sand pit, the children discover 'It', which turns out to be a Psammead, or sand fairy, thousands of years old and with the power to grant wishes.

The children are stranded on the church tower - the wings the Psammead had granted them have vanished, and all they can do is shout for help.


SUN 20:15 Natural World (b0377t15)
2013-2014

Giant Squid: Filming the Impossible - Natural World Special

The giant squid is a creature of legend and myth which, even in the 21st century, has never been seen alive. But now, an international team of scientists thinks it has finally found its lair, 1,000 metres down, off the coast of Japan. This is the culmination of decades of research. The team deploys underwater robots and state-of-the-art submersible vessels for a world first - to find and film the impossible.


SUN 21:00 War of Words: Soldier-Poets of the Somme (b04pw01r)
The 1916 Battle of the Somme remains the most famous battle of World War I, remembered for its bloodshed and its limited territorial gains. What is often overlooked, however, is the literary importance of the Somme: more writers and poets fought in it than in any other battle in history.

Narrated by Michael Sheen, this film details the experiences of the poets and writers who served in the battle. The work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg and JRR Tolkien (who arrived at the Western Front with ambitions to be a poet) was informed and transformed by the battle. Taken together, their experiences allow us to see this dreadful historical event through multiple points of view.

The film uses animation, documentary accounts, surviving artefacts, battalion war diaries and the landscape itself to reconnect this literature to the events that inspired it.


SUN 22:30 Hidden Histories: WW1's Forgotten Photographs (b03xsrvv)
Documentary telling the extraordinary untold story of soldiers' photography in the First World War. The British and German soldiers marched off to war with secret 'vest pocket' cameras, determined to record what they thought would be a great adventure, but few were prepared for the horrors they were about to witness and photograph. Their photos - many never seen before in public - provide a deeply moving document of their lives in the trenches and their rapid loss of innocence.

With no soldier photographer alive to tell the tale, we join their close relatives on emotional journeys of discovery as they go in search of the secrets hidden within their ancestors' photographs.

This is the war viewed from a new and surprising perspective - through the eyes of the men who fought in it.


SUN 23:30 Timeshift (b06pm5vf)
Series 15

How Britain Won the Space Race: The Story of Bernard Lovell and Jodrell Bank

The unlikely story of how one man with some ex-WWII army equipment eventually turned a muddy field in Cheshire into a key site in the space race. That man was Bernard Lovell, and his telescope at Jodrell Bank would be used at the height of the Cold War by both the Americans and the Russians to track their competing spacecraft. It also put Britain at the forefront of radio astronomy, a new science which transformed our knowledge of space and provided the key to understanding the most mind-bending theory of the beginnings of the universe - the Big Bang.


SUN 00:30 Wonders of the Universe (b0101h6w)
Messengers

In the last episode of Professor Brian Cox's epic journey across the universe, he travels from the fossils of the Burgess Shale to the sands of the oldest desert in the world to show how light holds the key to our understanding of the whole universe, including our own deepest origins.

To understand how light holds the key to the story of the universe, you first have to understand its peculiar properties. Brian considers how the properties of light that lend colour to desert sands and the spectrum of a rainbow can lead to profound insights into the history and evolution of our universe.

Finally, with some of the world's most fascinating fossils in hand Brian considers how, but for an apparently obscure moment in the early evolutionary history of life, all the secrets of light may have remained hidden. Because although the universe is bathed in light that carries extraordinary amounts of information about where we come from, it would have remained invisible without a crucial evolutionary development that allowed us to see. Only because of that development can we now observe, capture and contemplate the incredible wonders of the universe that we inhabit.


SUN 01:30 Horizon (b03wyr3c)
2013-2014

How You Really Make Decisions

Horizon uncovers the truth about how you really make decisions.

Every day you make thousands of decisions, big and small, and behind all them is a powerful battle in your mind, pitting intuition against logic.

This conflict affects every aspect of your life - from what you eat to what you believe, and especially to how you spend your money.

And it turns out that the intuitive part of your mind is a lot more powerful than you may realise.


SUN 02:30 Rise of the Continents (b036ks6f)
Eurasia

Two hundred million years ago the continent we know as Eurasia - the vast swathe of land that extends from Europe in the west to Asia in the east - didn't exist.

To reveal Eurasia's origins, Professor Iain Stewart climbs up to the 'eternal flames' of Mount Chimera in southern Turkey, blazing natural gas that seeps out of the rock. Formed on the seafloor, it shows that where the south of Eurasia is today, there was once a 90-million-square-kilometre ocean known as the Tethys. It is the destruction of the Tethys Ocean that holds the key to Eurasia's formation.

In the backwaters of Kerala in southern India, he finds evidence of how that happened, in the most unlikely of places: the bones of the local fishermen's catch. The freshwater fish called karimeen shares anatomical features with another group of fish that live in Madagascar, evidence that India and Madagascar were joined. India was once 4,000 kilometres south of its current position on the other side of the Tethys.

As it moved north, the ocean in front of it closed. And as it collided with the rest of Eurasia the impact built the Himalayas, the greatest mountain range on Earth. Professor Stewart reveals how the mountains aren't simply pieces of the land pushed upwards. In fact the rock that forms them was once the floor of the Tethys Ocean.

As Eurasia assembled, Arabia, Greece and Italy too moved north, completing the continent we know today and creating a mountain chain that spans the continent. And it was in the shadow of these mountains that the continent's first civilisations rose.

But the formation of Eurasia is just the beginning, because the process that formed it is still active today. On the island of Stromboli, Italy's most continually active volcano, the spectacular eruptions show that the ocean floor is being pulled beneath Eurasia. It is this process that closed the Tethys, and today is closing the Mediterranean, revealing Eurasia's future. 250 million years in the future all of the continents will collide together once more, forming a new Pangea, with Eurasia at its heart.