Private Lives of the Pharaohs

A pioneering documentary in 1969, looking at the situation of gay men in the UK two years after the 1967 Reform Act, and revealing how attitudes have changed. It includes unique interviews with the Bill's initiator, Leo Abse; Peter Manolt, the Editor of the bi-sexual/gay magazine 'Jeremy'; social workers who regard 'gayness' as something to be 'cured'; the only gay man found willing to appear on camera at that time, and members of the public on the streets of London and Leeds.

In 2011 a team from the University of Basel made two astonishing discoveries in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. By chance they came across a new tomb that was the first to contain a body since the discovery of Tutankhamun. Then they discovered that the tomb beside it, which had never been excavated before, held the bodies of around 50 people. But who were all the people in these two linked tombs? This film follows the archaeological detective story to uncover the answer. It pursues the trail that leads to one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs, Amenhotep III - and to the women he was close to. And the film also reveals the astonishing project behind the re-emergence nearby of the largest temple ever built in ancient Egypt - the lost mortuary temple of the same pharaoh, Amenhotep III.