Season 9
Episodes • 2009

1. Farm to Pharma: The Rise and Rise of Food Science
60 minDocumentary about the history of British food science meets a man who pioneered instant soup for Batchelors, and discovers how Quorn was invented to prevent a global food crisis.
▶ Watch Episode
2. The Golden Age of Liners
60 minPaul Atterbury travels around Britain finding out how the great ocean liners made such a mark on the popular imagination and why they continue to enchant.
▶ Watch Episode
3. The Men Who Built the Liners
60 minDocumentary looking at the unique culture that grew up in the Clyde shipyards of Scotland, where the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth and the QE2 were built.
▶ Watch Episode
4. The Last Days of the Liners
60 minDocumentary telling how, in the years after the Second World War and with national pride and prestige at stake, countries competed to launch the most magnificent passenger ships.
▶ Watch Episode
5. How to Win at Chess
60 minIn a programme showing how to play better chess, British grandmasters Dan King and Ray Keene go through a demonstration game from opening gambit to checkmate.
▶ Watch Episode
6. Oliver Postgate: A Life in Small Films
60 minA celebration of the life and work of Oliver Postgate, the man behind some of Britain's best-loved children's TV programmes, including Bagpuss, the Clangers and Ivor the Engine.
▶ Watch Episode
7. Clement Freud: In His Own Words
60 minDocumentary which draws together interviews with the late Clement Freud - Liberal MP, cookery expert, newspaper columnist and author - from across four decades.
▶ Watch Episode
8. Bread: A Loaf Affair
60 minDocumentary about the rise of the popular loaf in Britain. After the holy grail of affordable white bread was achieved, dietary experts began to trumpet the virtues of brown.
▶ Watch Episode
9. Disappearing Dad
60 minNovelist Andrew Martin takes a wry look at the way fathers are represented in fiction and film, and finds that they tend to be depicted as marginal, loopy or entirely absent.
▶ Watch Episode