Deborah Lee

As Brexit Britain prepares to draw up new rules on who is welcome here, Ian Hislop takes an entertaining and provocative look at the decades from the Victorian era to the First World War, when modern Britain introduced its first peacetime restrictions on immigration.

We watch one young woman’s unconventional attempt to take control of her own love life by growing the perfect partner - a beautiful giant slug. Both freaks of nature, it’s a seemingly perfect match; until the slug is introduced to the outside world where he develops a taste for dinner parties and stimulating conversation.

Inspired by the poetry of Edwin Morgan where natural and domestic worlds collide and the hidden animal instincts of humans rise to the surface, this poetic visual narrative features voices from interviews recorded around the UK, woven into an evocative soundtrack. Stop motion puppets and live action footage combine to tell a dark love story.

In an English coastal border town, a small band of badgers live in the shadow of an animal quarantine facility. As they struggle to keep their folk traditions alive, they try to ignore the strange sounds coming from the compound. But when tragedy strikes, they are forced to seek help from the unlikeliest place.

Archie and Mary Harrison obsessively shave themselves. Archie hates hair, and Mary loves Archie. In an attempt to please the love of her life, Mary suppresses her secret desire for hair. However, soon this desire starts to surface and their relationship becomes toxic.

This multi-layered animation explores autobiographical memory and the cultural elements of our earliest childhood memory. Often episodic, this recollection of personally experienced past events often emerge from as early as three years old. After the age of five, these memories become elusive. A journey back to where it all began can be both beautiful and enlightening.

The story follows Spudling, a sheltered character whose parent runs the factory manufacturing light for the city's inhabitants. When finally granted permission to follow their parent into work for one day, Spudling discovers the secret of what is really powering their world...

Armando Iannucci presents a personal argument in praise of the genius of Charles Dickens. Through the prism of the author's most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, Armando looks beyond Dickens - the national institution - and instead explores the qualities of Dickens's work that still make him one of the best British writers. While Dickens is often celebrated for his powerful depictions of Victorian England and his role as a social reformer, this programme foregrounds the elements of his writing which make him worth reading, as much for what he tells us about ourselves in the twenty-first century as our ancestors in the nineteenth. Armando argues that Dickens's remarkable use of language and his extraordinary gift for creating characters make him a startlingly experimental and psychologically penetrating writer who demands not just to be adapted for television but to be read and read again.

A short stop frame animation following a lonely Inuit who struggles to survive after an oil tanker leaks oil off the coast of Alaska, killing all the wildlife in the area.

Inspired by the loneliness experienced by older people in our society, Ladder to You is an insight into the life of Eric, an old man dealing with the loss of his wife. We follow Eric’s day-to-day life and become immersed in the solitude he is trying to overcome. Through his feelings and memories of better times we get to see what it’s like for the thousands of old people who live every day without any human contact. Ending with a message that love can beat despair, Ladder to You can also hopefully inspire people to give a little more time to the older folk who live amongst us.

Tody is a lonely bird slaving his life away in a packaging factory. He dreams of a better life in the sunshine with someone there who actually cares if he’s tired or overworked. When a box arrives at his station, destined for sunnier lands, Tody decides to make a break for it in order to find his paradise. The factory, however, has other plans.

//_sleeper is a short animation set in a dying, industrial town both familiar and unfamiliar. This is neither future nor past, but rather somewhere lost. Somewhere other. The film uses a mix of 2D and CG animation to explore what happens to a lonely figure when a mysterious anomaly appears on the fringes of the landscape. It aims to capture the strange sense of ennui, loss and anxiety that feels appropriate for our times.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili looks at how we have created machines that can simulate, augment, and even outperform the human mind - and why we shouldn't let this spook us. He reveals the story of the pursuit of AI, the emergence of machine learning and the recent breakthroughs brought about by artificial neural networks. He shows how AI is not only changing our world but also challenging our very ideas of intelligence and consciousness. Along the way, we'll investigate spam filters, meet a cutting-edge chatbot, look at why a few altered pixels makes a computer think it's looking at a trombone rather than a dog and talk to Demis Hassabis, who heads DeepMind and whose stated mission is to 'solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else'. Stephen Hawking remarked 'AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. Or the worst'. Jim argues that AI is a potent new tool that should enhance our lives, not replace us.

An audio-driven animated documentary covering a day of life in Yorkshire.

This animation takes place in a ravaged London street in the midst of war. Between mounds of rubble and bomb craters stands the house of a lonely old blind man. Late one night he receives three unexpected visitors.

Lord Baden-Powell's 1908 handbook Scouting for Boys is one of the most influential and best-selling books of all time. In the 20th century, only the Bible, the Koran and the Thoughts of Chairman Mao sold more. But they had fewer jokes, no pictures and were useless at important stuff like tying knots. In this entertaining and affectionate film, Ian Hislop uncovers the story behind the book which kick-started the Scout Movement - a work which is very eccentric, very Edwardian and very English. Hislop discovers that the book is also very radical and addresses a variety of modern issues, such as citizenship, disaffected youth and social responsibility. He explores the maverick brilliance of Baden-Powell, a national celebrity after his heroism in the Boer War, and considers the book's candid focus on health and well-being.

Frank told a bad joke at his new place of work. Nobody laughed. Now at 3am in the morning he is unable to sleep as he obsesses and ruminates over this social faux-pas, leading him to ponder on the nature of memory itself.

An animation about a disabled penguin who lives on a rocky island in the southern seas where she feels isolated from the rest of her colony. She is inventive, resourceful and tough but frustrated about what she cannot do.

Documentary series exploring the history of photography - from daguerreotype to digital, from portraits to photo-journalism, from art to advertising.

Fiona Bruce fronts this eye-opening new three-part series on the stories behind Britain's official royal residences: Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Palace of Holyroodhouse.

Ian Hislop asks when and why we British have bottled up or let out our feelings and how this has affected our history.