BBC Four

Four young British art historians delve into six decades of the BBC archives to discover the powerful way in which television influences our understanding of the world's greatest artists.

Series looking at aspects of life in modern China

Sailor and writer Tom Cunliffe takes a voyage through the history of British seafaring and puts some of the vessels featured in the programme through their paces

The Britpop Story is a British television documentary about the Britpop movement which occurred in Britain during the 1990s. Hosted by John Harris, it was first broadcast on BBC Four in August 2005. It features interviews with Blur's Graham Coxon, Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann, Louise Wener of Sleeper and Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records.

During the reign of Henry VIII much was created buildings, music, artworks. Did this compensate for the destruction of the monastries and their treasures?

Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa! is a 2006 BBC Four television play starring Michael Sheen as the English comic actor Kenneth Williams, based on Williams' own diaries. Cheryl Campbell plays Williams' beloved mother, Lou. The drama received good reviews, The Observer singling out Sheen's performance as "a characterisation for which the description tour-de-force is, frankly, pretty faint praise". The Times compared Sheen's performance to "a diamond that is so dazzling as a result of the expertise deployed in its cutting that you can’t fully focus on the underlying shape of the stone, which is what actually enables it to glitter so spectacularly." Viewing figures were 860,000, including timeshift, making it by far the most popular BBC Four broadcast of March 2006. Sheen's performance won a Royal Television Society award for Best Male Actor, and the play also won two BAFTA nominations.

Maritime historian Dr Sam Willis looks at how and why the shipwreck came to loom so large in British history.

This is the secret, and untold, history of pop and rock from the men and women who pulled the strings behind the scenes - the producers, the managers and the PR giants.

Arabic scholar Tim Mackintosh-Smith journeys 75,000 miles through 40 countries in the footsteps of 14th century traveller Ibn Battutah, who was born in Tangiers, North Africa, and travelled the world for thirty years.

How should art depict the relationship between man and God? How can art best express eternal values? Can you, and should you, portray the face of Christ? For over a thousand years these were some of the questions which taxed the minds of the greatest artists of the early West. In this three-part series, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon sets out to unravel the mysteries of the art of the pre-perspective era. Why has this world been so frequently misunderstood and underrated? His journey takes him from the mysterious catacombs of ancient Rome to Coptic Egypt, to the Orthodox Christian world of Istanbul and then onwards to medieval Italy and France. This programme was first broadcast on BBC Four in 2007, and later repeated on BBC Two.

A series which shows the manufacture of some traditional artefacts in Australia, Rurutu, New Zealand and Hawaii.

These unorthodox military innovations were not developed by chance, each was constructed to solve a tactical or strategic problem, such as overcoming Nazi defences on D-Day, mounting a surprise attack over water, or safely moving an agent back and forth across enemy lines. The US smart bomb piloted by live pigeons, a jet pack used by flying soldiers, an incendiary bombing program that used bats released from aircraft, and a giant Catherine Wheel are all covered in this fascinating series. World’s Weirdest Weapons explores never before seen weapons and introduces viewers to the extraordinary people that invented these ingenious devices.

British Masters is a three-part BBC television series on 20th century British art, presented by Dr James Fox and first broadcast in July 2011 on BBC Four. The series covers the period from 1910 to 1975. The first programme explored the lives and works of Mark Gertler, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Walter Sickert, Wyndham Lewis, Lawrence Atkinson, David Bomberg, Richard Nevinson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. The second programme explored the works of John Nash, Stanley Spencer, Alfred Munnings, William Coldstream, Paul Nash and John Piper. In the third programme, subtitled 'A New Jerusalem,' Fox explored British art in the aftermath of the 2nd world war, and examined the works of Lucian Freud, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney and Keith Vaughan. In this final programme of the series Fox explored how the themes of evil, brutality, dehumanisation, consumerism and optimism can be seen in the works of these postwar artists. Fox contends in this programme that the death of Lucian Freud and the emergence of conceptual art have marginalised, eclipsed and brought to an end the tradition of British figurative painting. In each case, the backgrounds, techniques, subjects and interests of each artist are analysed against a backdrop of the social and political events of their day, especially the two world wars, the decline of Edwardian values and traditions, the poverty and economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s and the relative sense of optimism following both wars. The programmes also reflect a personal and national search for security in enduring but elusive British values, beliefs and identity in what Fox depicts as a century of crisis and upheaval, in which much more had perhaps been lost than gained.

Documentary series that investigates a momentous event in history, the trial and execution of King Charles I, an act that changed politics and power in England forever.

A look at kids' telly from the 1950s to the 1990s, covering the social trends and behind-the-scenes stories in each decade.

Series looking at how WW2 was documented by German and British amateur home movie makers.

Join Grace Dent on a televisual trip back in time.

Heist is a one-off 2008 television comedy-drama, written by Peter Harness and directed by Justin Hardy. It was completed at the end of 2006 and first broadcast on 23 April 2008 on BBC Four as part of its Medieval season. Loosely based on real events surrounding Richard of Pudlicott, it is a parody of and/or homage to heist films, set in medieval England, using several of that genre's conventions, and trailed under the same tagline as the 2003 remake of The Italian Job. As per the medieval setting, the film dialogue contains several Middle English and pseudo-Middle English expressions and insults. Marshall as lead character narrates several parts of the backstory to the audience during the film.

Riding onboard with a cheetah, a green turtle and a white-tailed sea eagle as they show us around their homes, with natural sounds and embedded graphics delivering information.

Eamonn McCabe celebrates Britain's greatest photographers, sees how science allowed their art to develop, and explores how they have captured the changing lives of the country.