Annabel Hobley

Take a celebrated musical genius, some sibling rivalry, an unknown manuscript, a dash of sass and one sensational revelation and what have you got? As moving as it is joyous, this is the story of a very modern woman – who just happened to live 200 years ago.

In 1951, a woman died in Baltimore, U.S.A. She was called Henrietta Lacks. These are cells from her body. They were taken from her just before she died. They have been growing and multiplying ever since. There are now billions of these cells in laboratories around the world. If massed together, they would weigh 400 times her original weight. These cells have transformed modern medicine, but they also became caught up in the politics of our age.

During 1924 and for the next two years, Claude Friese-Greene, filmmaker and cinematographer, embarked on an epic journey, and calling it The Open Road, which would bring the people and the lands of Great Britain together. From Land's End to Scotland's John O'Groats, and with his new and modern filming technique, that for once has the ability to film in colour. For the first time the people of England, and the world could see itself in colour. This modern-day retrospective looks back, and takes the same ride some eighty years later, reconnecting with past places and past memories. With its compare and contrast travelogue flavour, Dan Cruickshank, the British Film Institute and the BBC have revisited a journey of how we used to live and how, as a nation, have changed, since those glorious days of England's golden years. Wonderful colourful historical vision with its updated look into the past. Enchanting.

From Idris Elba, whose grandfather fought in WW2, this landmark series reveals the untold stories of soldiers of color in the war. By mixing war sequences with character portraits, this series restores the role of these soldiers and their units to their rightful place in the narrative of WW2 and reveals how these heroes inspired Civil Rights Movements in America and across the world.

A global portrait of tea and the people whose lives have been shaped by this extraordinary drink.

The Mayfair Set is a series of programmes produced by Adam Curtis for the BBC, first broadcast in the summer of 1999. The programme looked at how buccaneer capitalists of hot money were allowed to shape the climate of the Thatcher years, focusing on the rise of Colonel David Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith, and Tiny Rowland, all members of London's Clermont Club in the 1960s.