Staff Picks
164 YouTube videos worth your time, picked by our team across 40 topics. Each one is a good place to start: a documentary, lecture or talk that rewards the hour.
Ancient History
Ancient Athens: The Rise Of The Most Influential Society In History | Metropolis
How a single city changed the world: this cinematic documentary rebuilds ancient Athens on screen, from the Acropolis and the Parthenon to the birth of democracy, philosophy and theatre, telling the story of the society that still shapes ours. (Published 25 Sep 2022)
The Genius of Ancient Rome's Architecture I SLICE HISTORY | FULL DOCUMENTARY
A cinematic, on-location tour of how Rome's engineers changed the world: the concrete, the aqueducts, the roads and the Colosseum that let a single city rule an empire and still shape how we build today. (Published 27 Apr 2025)
Alexander the Great: How One Man Conquered the Ancient World
From a contested throne in Macedon to the largest empire the world had ever seen: how Alexander out-thought and out-fought every power of his age before dying at 32. (Published 14 Nov 2025)
All 10 Ancient History picks →
The Natural World
How Do Animals See the World? | SLICE SCIENCE | FULL DOCUMENTARY
How do a cat, a hawk and a dragonfly actually see the world? A visual film on the astonishing range of animal senses, with researchers and real experiments. (Published 8 Mar 2024)
Great Moments in Evolution: From Single Cells to Complex Life | Full Documentary
A sweeping documentary tracing how life climbed from single cells to the dazzling complexity around us, told as a grand story rather than a textbook. (Published 27 May 2025)
Beyond Instinct: The New Science of Animal Logic | SLICE EARTH | FULL DOC
The new science of animal minds: a film on how creatures reason, plan and solve problems, overturning the line we like to draw between us and them. (Published 14 Mar 2026)
All 4 The Natural World picks →
AI & The Future
The Danger of Artificial Intelligence: Humanity's Last Invention? | ENDEVR Documentary
Could AI be humanity's last invention? A clear-eyed film on the real risks of building machines that may one day outthink us. (Published 28 Nov 2025)
Visualizing transformers and attention (Grant Sanderson / 3Blue1Brown)
The 3Blue1Brown creator uses his trademark animations to reveal the elegant math inside the transformer, the architecture powering modern AI, and demystifies exactly how large language models turn text into understanding. (Published 20 Nov 2024)
The future of intelligence | Demis Hassabis (Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind)
DeepMind's co-founder and Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis maps the road from today's AI to artificial general intelligence, and how systems like AlphaFold are already turning AI into an engine for scientific discovery. (Published 16 Dec 2025)
Space & The Cosmos
Roving with Perseverance: Findings from One Year on Mars (Live Public Talk)
Mission scientists share what the Perseverance rover found in its first year exploring Mars: the search for ancient life in a dried-up river delta, and how the rover does its work on another world. (Published 17 Feb 2022)
THE UNIVERSE - Out of Nothing: Infinity | SPACETIME - SCIENCE SHOW
How did everything come from nothing? A visual epic on the birth of the universe, from the Big Bang to the first stars and galaxies. (Published 1 Dec 2019)
The Tremendous Power Of Solar Storms | Naked Science Season 6 Episode 2
When the Sun unleashes its fury the effects ripple across the solar system: a cinematic film on solar storms and the threat they pose to our wired, satellite-dependent world. (Published 8 Mar 2024)
All 4 Space & The Cosmos picks →
Fundamental Science & Physics
Einstein vs Bohr: The Secrets Behind Quantum Physics
The greatest intellectual duel in physics: how Einstein and Bohr's decades-long argument over quantum reality changed our picture of the universe. (Published 20 Mar 2018)
The Surprising Physics Happening Deep Inside a Star
A deep look at the surprising physics inside a star: how the crushing pressures and nuclear furnaces at a star's core actually work, and why the rules down there defy everyday intuition. (Published 20 Nov 2025)
Math's Fundamental Flaw
Veritasium traces one of the most profound ideas in mathematics: Gödel's proof that any rich enough system contains true statements it can never prove, touching infinity, WWII codebreaking, and the birth of the computer. (Published 22 May 2021)
All 4 Fundamental Science & Physics picks →
The Human Mind
Mental health and resilience - the secrets of inner strength | DW Documentary
Why do some people bounce back from anything? A film on the science of resilience and what really protects the mind under stress. (Published 20 Jan 2024)
The brain’s way of healing explained | SLICE SCIENCE | FULL DOC
The brain can rewire itself in ways once thought impossible: a film on the remarkable science of neuroplasticity and recovery. (Published 26 Feb 2026)
The Man With The Seven Second Memory
Clive Wearing remembers nothing for more than a few seconds, yet still knows his wife and his music: an unforgettable film on memory and the self. (Published 13 Aug 2016)
Business & Startups
Boeing: Investigation into the Fall of a Giant
How a byword for engineering excellence lost its way: the inside story of Boeing's fall, from proud icon to two deadly crashes. (Published 9 Nov 2025)
Founders: The Startup Stories Documentary
Back-to-back origin stories of real founders: the spark, the grind and the gamble behind companies that started in spare rooms and changed the world. (Published 22 Dec 2025)
From Shake Shack To Mirror, Start-Up Success Stories | Founder Effect Marathon
Back-to-back origin stories of real founders, from Shake Shack to Mirror: how they spotted an opportunity, survived the early grind and built lasting companies, with the lessons that carried across all of them. (Published 12 Apr 2022)
All 4 Business & Startups picks →
Money & Economics
Before the Great Recession: "The Warning" (FRONTLINE)
The gripping story of Brooksley Born, the regulator who tried to warn about the unregulated derivatives that later blew up the global economy, and the powerful men who shut her down. (Published 27 Jan 2026)
How cash is becoming a thing of the past
As tap-to-pay and digital wallets replace coins and notes, who really benefits, and what do we give up when money goes invisible? (Published 21 Nov 2018)
Lebanon and Argentina: Surviving Hyperinflation | ARTE.tv Documentary
What happens when money stops working? ARTE follows Lebanon and Argentina through hyperinflation, showing how prices spiral, savings vanish, and ordinary people survive when a currency collapses. (Published 6 Apr 2024)
All 4 Money & Economics picks →
Philosophy & Big Ideas
Money, happiness and eternal life - Greed (1/2) | DW Documentary
How much is enough? A thoughtful essay-film on greed, money and the good life, asking what we're really chasing, and whether it makes us happy. (Published 13 Jan 2017)
Arthur Schopenhauer's Philosophy (Bryan Magee & Frederick Copleston, 1987)
A classic BBC conversation exploring Schopenhauer's bracing pessimism, the world as blind "will," art and compassion as escapes from suffering, and his influence on Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein. (Published 22 Aug 2023)
The Great Philosophers: Friedrich Nietzsche (J. P. Stern & Bryan Magee, 1987)
Bryan Magee and Nietzsche scholar J. P. Stern unpack the death of God, the will to power, eternal recurrence, and Nietzsche's challenge to create meaning in a world without given values. (Published 27 Jun 2023)
All 4 Philosophy & Big Ideas picks →
Health, Food & Longevity
My Kid Can't Stop Eating (Childhood Obesity Documentary) | Real Stories
An unflinching, human film on childhood obesity: the families living it, the science behind it, and why willpower is only part of the story. (Published 16 Aug 2016)
The intestine - The body’s underappreciated control center and gut health | DW Documentary
Your gut is far more than a digestion tube: a film on the 'second brain' in your belly and how its trillions of microbes shape your health and mood. (Published 9 Jan 2025)
How Ultra-Processed Food is Slowly Killing Us | ENDEVR Documentary
What's really in the food that fills our supermarkets? An investigation into ultra-processed food and what it's quietly doing to our bodies. (Published 2 Nov 2022)
All 4 Health, Food & Longevity picks →
Technology & Engineering
Hoover Dam: America's Impossible Engineering Masterpiece - Full Documentary
The Hoover Dam: how Depression-era engineers tamed a wild river and poured a wall of concrete big enough to reshape the American West, against the odds. (Published 18 Feb 2025)
This is The World's Most Remote Infrastructure Project
How do you connect remote islands across stormy Atlantic waters? A look at the Faroe Islands' astonishing network of undersea tunnels, one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects on Earth. (Published 27 Mar 2024)
ASML's Secret: Inside the global semiconductor giant (VPRO)
Rare cleanroom access inside ASML, the secretive Dutch company whose machines make advanced chips possible and whose technology has become a geopolitical pivot point. (Published 1 Oct 2022)
All 4 Technology & Engineering picks →
Modern History & The World
Hitler's Reich — Diaries of supporters, opponents and victims (1/4)
Drawing on private diaries of supporters, opponents, and victims, this rebuilds life inside Nazi Germany from the ground up. Part one traces how an ordinary society slid into dictatorship. (Published 7 May 2025)
The Spanish Civil War (1/2) | ARTE.tv Documentary
ARTE's account of the Spanish Civil War: how a divided Spain descended into a brutal 1930s conflict that became a rehearsal for the Second World War and a cause that drew in the world. (Published 13 Dec 2025)
My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947 - Episode 1
Broadcaster Anita Rani traces her own family's story through the 1947 Partition of India, when independence split the subcontinent and uprooted millions in one of the largest and most traumatic migrations in history. (Published 11 Jan 2019)
All 4 Modern History & The World picks →
Art & Creativity
Is Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ Actually A Fake? | The Authenticity Of The Sunflowers
Is one of the world's most beloved paintings a fake? A gripping investigation into Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers', the science of authentication, and the doubts that won't go away. (Published 27 Mar 2018)
Wolfgang Beltracchi, the greatest art forger
The astonishing story of Wolfgang Beltracchi, the forger who fooled the art world for decades by painting 'lost' masterpieces, and the slip that finally caught him. (Published 13 Dec 2021)
Gothic architecture — When cathedrals reached up to the heavens
How did medieval builders make stone soar? This follows the 12th-century revolution in France, pointed arches, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses, that let cathedrals stretch impossibly toward the heavens. (Published 3 Apr 2026)
All 4 Art & Creativity picks →
Food & Cooking
Where Pepper & Cinnamon Came From | The Spice Trail
Kate Humble retraces the ancient trade routes that carried pepper and cinnamon from India and Sri Lanka to the world, spices so prized they reshaped empires, fortunes, and the map itself. (Published 29 May 2020)
French Cheese in Crisis | ARTE.tv Documentary
France's great cheeses are under threat. A vivid film on the craft, the chemistry and the culture of cheese, and the fight to keep traditional flavours alive. (Published 9 Feb 2024)
Mediterranean cuisine - The recipe for a long and healthy life? | DW Documentary
What makes the Mediterranean diet so good for us? A film travelling the coast to find the recipe for a longer, healthier life in its food and its way of living. (Published 31 Dec 2025)
Sport
Doping Exposed: The Hidden Network Fuelling the Olympics | Java Documentary
Inside the hidden network that fuels cheating in elite sport: a gripping investigation into doping, the dealers, and the athletes caught in between. (Published 1 Aug 2024)
The Brady 6: Journey of the Legend NO ONE Wanted!
The definitive telling of how the greatest quarterback of all time slipped to the 199th pick, profiling the six quarterbacks chosen ahead of Tom Brady and what the scouts missed. (Published 5 Mar 2020)
Running to the Limits
An overweight, asthmatic, chain-smoking filmmaker sets himself an audacious goal, to train to Olympic-marathon standard, and travels to Kenya and Ethiopia to learn from the world's best. (Published 22 Feb 2014)
Travel & Culture
Mansa Musa: The Life Of The 'Richest Man In History'
The life of Mansa Musa, the 14th-century ruler of Mali often called the richest person in history: the gold, the legendary pilgrimage to Mecca, and the West African empire and centres of learning he built. (Published 24 Oct 2025)
Petra: Lost City of Stone | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS
How did the Nabataeans carve a metropolis of temples and tombs into desert cliffs, and engineer the water system that let it bloom? NOVA rebuilds Petra with archaeologists and hands-on experiments. (Published 14 Jun 2023)
Northern India: Empire of Senses | WIDE | FULL DOCUMENTARY
A journey through northern India, from the sacred Ganges to the deserts of Rajasthan: the landscapes, faiths and daily life that make this one of the most vivid cultural regions on Earth. (Published 15 Jun 2021)
All 4 Travel & Culture picks →
Medicine & The Human Body
Our immune system — Miracle weapon against cancer?
A clear, up-to-date tour of how the human immune system actually works, and how scientists are now turning the body's own defenses into a frontline weapon against cancer. (Published 19 Sep 2025)
A Tale of Trade and Tragedy: The Black Death on the Silk Road | Full Documentary
How a single disease, carried along trade routes, wiped out a third of Europe and reshaped the medieval world that survived it. (Published 1 Aug 2025)
Lyme Disease: The Hidden Epidemic | SLICE SCIENCE | FULL DOC
A hidden epidemic carried by a tick the size of a poppy seed: the science, the controversy and the lives upended by Lyme disease. (Published 4 Apr 2025)
All 4 Medicine & The Human Body picks →
Mystery & The Unexplained
Siberia's Strangest Unsolved Mystery (Dyatlov Pass)
In 1959, nine experienced hikers cut their way out of their tent and fled barefoot into a Siberian blizzard, where they all died under bizarre circumstances. A calm, evidence-led walk through every leading theory. (Published 5 Mar 2025)
Ghost Ship Mary Celeste: The 150 Year Mystery
In 1872 a sound, seaworthy ship was found drifting in the Atlantic with cargo intact and not a soul aboard. This sorts the credible explanations from the myths around the most famous ghost ship in history. (Published 12 Dec 2022)
The Antikythera Mechanism
Sponge divers pulled a corroded lump of bronze from an ancient shipwreck, and it turned out to be a 2,000-year-old geared "computer" that modelled the heavens with astonishing precision. (Published 19 Dec 2021)
All 4 Mystery & The Unexplained picks →
Maths & Computer Science
The Birth of Silicon Valley: The Hippies That Built the First PC | Full Documentary
How a stretch of orchards became the centre of the world: the story of Silicon Valley, the misfits and visionaries who built it, and the chips that changed everything. (Published 19 Aug 2025)
Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician's Journey Through Symmetry (Marcus du Sautoy)
What is symmetry, really, and why is it one of the deepest ideas in mathematics, linking snowflakes to string theory? Du Sautoy takes you inside group theory and the strange object called "the Monster." (Published 23 Jun 2011)
How the Allies Cracked the Enigma Code | Bletchley Park with Dan Snow
How a team of mathematicians, linguists and chess champions at Bletchley Park cracked Nazi Germany's "unbreakable" Enigma cipher, inventing ideas that gave birth to the modern computer. Told by historian Dan Snow. (Published 13 Dec 2024)
All 4 Maths & Computer Science picks →
Music
Before 1989: How Manchester Became MADchester
How a grey post-industrial city birthed one of Britain's most euphoric music scenes, the bands, clubs and clashing subcultures that fused guitars with acid-house rhythms. (Published 28 Sep 2022)
From Detroit With Love: A History of Techno Music
How three friends in 1980s Detroit turned drum machines and synthesizers into techno, and how that sound traveled the world. An accessible deep-dive into the origins, pioneers and machines. (Published 2 Aug 2024)
Note by Note: The Making of a Steinway Piano | Musical Instrument | ENDEVR Documentary
It takes a year and 12,000 parts to build one Steinway grand piano. A beautiful, meditative film following a single instrument from raw timber to concert stage. (Published 1 Jan 2021)
Climate & Environment
Weathering the Future | NOVA
Across the US, communities face longer heat waves, fiercer storms, megafires and droughts, and this PBS film meets the scientists, engineers and locals adapting and fighting back with real-world solutions. (Published 12 Apr 2023)
Global renewables: Pioneering the energy transition
From California to Bavaria to Copenhagen, this visits real places that have already shifted their entire power supply to renewables, exploring solar, hydrogen, battery recycling and "energy islands." (Published 1 Dec 2023)
Siberia: The Melting Permafrost | ARTE Documentary
ARTE travels to Siberia to investigate the thawing permafrost: the vast frozen store of carbon that, as it melts, could release greenhouse gases and accelerate warming, and the scientists racing to understand the feedback. (Published 13 Sep 2018)
All 4 Climate & Environment picks →
Human Origins & Evolution
Who were the Neanderthals? | DW Documentary
Not the brutish cavemen of legend: new archaeology reveals Neanderthals who made art, cared for their sick, and lived alongside us for millennia. (Published 23 Jan 2021)
The Neanderthal in Us | Revealing The Last Mystery Of Our Origin
They never fully died out: the ancient-DNA detective story of how Neanderthals live on in the genes of almost everyone alive today. (Published 16 Jun 2023)
In Search of Human Origins: A Paleontologist's Perspective
A paleontologist walks through the fossil evidence for human origins, from our earliest upright-walking ancestors to the emergence of our own species, and how each new find reshapes the story. (Published 17 May 2020)
All 4 Human Origins & Evolution picks →
True Crime & Justice
Organised Cybercrime: When Hackers Destroy Lives | Java Documentary
A journey into organised cybercrime: how hackers run businesses, drain banks and hold cities to ransom, and the investigators racing to stop them. (Published 14 Jan 2025)
Inside Britain's Murder Courtroom: The Jury Experiment Begins | The Jury: Murder Trial | Channel 4
An extraordinary experiment puts two juries through the same murder case to see how ordinary people actually reach a verdict, revealing how evidence, bias and deliberation shape justice in the courtroom. (Published 28 Feb 2024)
Golden State Killer: How DNA Solved a 40-Year Mystery
How investigators finally unmasked one of America's most elusive criminals decades later, tracing crime-scene DNA through a public ancestry database, the case that rewrote how cold cases get solved. (Published 23 Nov 2024)
All 4 True Crime & Justice picks →
Religion, Myth & Belief
What is Old Norse Religion?
A scholarly walk through the actual Norse belief system, Yggdrasil and the nine realms, creation and Ragnarök, the rituals of blót and seiðr, with an honest look at how much we really know. (Published 18 Aug 2023)
Irving Finkel | The Ark Before Noah: A Great Adventure
British Museum curator Irving Finkel tells the detective story of a 4,000-year-old Babylonian tablet describing a great flood and a round ark, and what it reveals about the Mesopotamian roots of the Noah story. (Published 20 Jul 2016)
The Forgotten Gods of our Oldest Known Religion
A reconstruction of humanity's oldest known pantheon, how the very first gods were imagined, and how those beliefs rippled down into the religions that followed. (Published 24 May 2025)
All 4 Religion, Myth & Belief picks →
Geography & How the World Works
The New Silk Road, Part 1: From China to Pakistan | DW Documentary
A reporting team travels the modern Silk Road from Shenzhen's factories to the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan, showing how China's largest-ever investment program is physically rewiring the routes that connect Asia, Europe and Africa. (Published 20 Jul 2019)
Africa: States of independence - the scramble for Africa
How a handful of European powers carved up a continent at the 1884 Berlin Conference, drawing the arbitrary borders that still define Africa's fifty-plus nations today. (Published 2 Sep 2010)
Kaliningrad: Russia’s Most Dangerous Outpost in the Heart of Europe | ENDEVR Documentary
A heavily armed slice of Russia wedged between two NATO states: the story of Kaliningrad shows, vividly, how geography still shapes war and peace in Europe. (Published 10 May 2026)
All 4 Geography & How the World Works picks →
Film & Cinema
Making of The Shining: Vivian Kubrick's Behind The Scenes Documentary - 1978 VHS
Seventeen-year-old Vivian Kubrick's rare, intimate film of her father Stanley at work, with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, on one of cinema's most obsessively crafted horror films. (Published 17 Sep 2023)
The Greatest Films You Don't Know
A beautifully edited video essay spotlighting overlooked masterpieces from around the world, and the case for why each deserves a place in the canon. (Published 1 Oct 2021)
Stanley Kubrick's Boxes - Documentary on the filmmaker's brilliant and obsessive nature (2008)
Inside the mind of a perfectionist: built from the thousands of boxes Stanley Kubrick kept, a fascinating film on how one director controlled every frame he ever made. (Published 13 Jun 2024)
Architecture & Cities
Jan Gehl Interview: How to Build a Good City
The Danish architect who reshaped Copenhagen, New York and London explains designing cities around people instead of cars, and what makes a street feel alive. (Published 3 Oct 2017)
The City (1939 Documentary)
A landmark documentary, scored by Aaron Copland, contrasting the smoke and chaos of the industrial metropolis with a hopeful vision of the planned community. (Published 30 Oct 2012)
Hagia Sophia: Istanbul's Ancient Mystery | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS
For 1,500 years Hagia Sophia's vast dome has survived earthquakes that should have toppled it. Engineers build and shake-test a model to crack how Byzantine builders defied physics. (Published 21 Jun 2023)
All 4 Architecture & Cities picks →
Language & Words
Thoth's Pill - an Animated History of Writing (Full)
A beautifully animated history of how humanity learned to write, from clay tokens and hieroglyphs to alphabets and printing, and how it reshaped memory, power and the spread of ideas. (Published 23 Feb 2016)
Champollion and the Secret Behind the Decoding of Hieroglyphs I SLICE HISTORY | FULL DOCUMENTARY
The race to read the unreadable: how a young scholar named Champollion cracked Egyptian hieroglyphs and gave a lost civilisation its voice back. (Published 30 Jan 2026)
Birth of a Language - BBC Documentary | Ep.1 The Adventure Of English
Melvyn Bragg traces English from a minor Germanic dialect spoken by a few thousand settlers to the brink of extinction and back, a story of invasions, survival, and the words that came along. (Published 25 Apr 2016)
All 4 Language & Words picks →
Productivity & Learning
The secret to concentration - How to increase your attention span | DW Documentary
In a world built to distract us, can we relearn how to focus? A film on the science of attention and how to win it back. (Published 16 Apr 2026)
The Creativity Delusion (FULL): Brains, Geniuses and Originality
Is creativity a gift a few are born with, or a skill anyone can build? A film that dismantles the myths about where great ideas really come from. (Published 25 May 2022)
Neuromarketing: How Companies are Studying your Brain for Profit | ENDEVR Documentary
Companies are studying your brain to make you buy: a revealing film on how neuroscience is used to hack attention, desire and decision-making. (Published 18 Oct 2020)
All 4 Productivity & Learning picks →
Personal Finance & Investing
The Retirement Gamble (full documentary) | FRONTLINE
A PBS FRONTLINE investigation into the retirement industry, how hidden 401(k) fees and conflicts of interest quietly cost ordinary savers a fortune over a lifetime. A primer on why low costs matter more than almost anything else in investing. (Published 21 Sep 2021)
Jack Bogle on Index Funds, Vanguard, and Investing Advice
A career-spanning conversation with John "Jack" Bogle, the Vanguard founder who invented the index fund, calm, principled, timeless wisdom on costs, patience, and staying the course. (Published 17 Jan 2019)
Passive Investing: The Evidence the Fund Management Industry Would Prefer You Not to See
A rigorous documentary featuring Nobel laureates and leading academics making the data-backed case that low-cost index funds beat most active managers over time. (Published 29 Nov 2012)
All 4 Personal Finance & Investing picks →
Photography
War Through His Eyes: The Intrepid Life and Tragic End of Robert Capa | SLICE WHO | FULL DOCUMENTARY
The definitive portrait of Robert Capa, the daring co-founder of Magnum who defined modern war photography from the Spanish Civil War to D-Day, before his life ended on a battlefield. (Published 28 Nov 2024)
Peter Lindbergh — the supermodel photographer | DW Documentary
An intimate portrait of Peter Lindbergh, the photographer who defined the supermodel era, his black-and-white eye, and the women he turned into icons. (Published 4 Sep 2019)
National Geographic Search for the Afghan Girl
Seventeen years after Steve McCurry's haunting green-eyed portrait became the most famous magazine cover ever shot, a National Geographic team returns to Afghanistan to find the woman behind the gaze. (Published 15 Sep 2015)
Gaming
The Story of Tetris
The wild true story of how a simple puzzle game escaped the Soviet Union, a Cold War tangle of programmers, publishers and corporate spies all fighting over the most addictive game ever made. (Published 2 Feb 2018)
The Making of Dishonored | Noclip Documentary
A feature-length documentary on the making of Dishonored: how Arkane Studios built one of gaming's most inventive worlds, and the design philosophy behind its play-it-your-way immersive sim. (Published 10 May 2021)
Naughty Dog 30th Anniversary Video in FULL
Three decades of one of gaming's most beloved studios: the people, the setbacks and the hits behind Naughty Dog, from Crash Bandicoot to The Last of Us. (Published 23 Dec 2014)
Aviation & Spaceflight
A Powerless Boeing Falls From The Sky! | Gimli Glider | FULL EPISODE | Mayday: Air Disaster
When a brand-new Boeing 767 runs completely out of fuel at 41,000 feet, both engines die and the cockpit goes dark, and the only hope is a captain who happens to be a glider pilot, aiming a powerless airliner at an abandoned runway. (Published 5 May 2022)
How One Man Won The Space Race For America (Apollo Program: Saturn V Documentary) | Spark
How Wernher von Braun and a 400,000-strong army of engineers built the Saturn V, the largest, most powerful machine ever flown, and used it to win the race to the Moon. (Published 9 Jul 2021)
The Insane Engineering of the X-15
Real Engineering breaks down the X-15, the rocket plane that flew to the edge of space: the materials, aerodynamics and control problems its engineers had to solve, and the flight data that fed straight into the space programme. (Published 31 Mar 2021)
All 4 Aviation & Spaceflight picks →
Cars & Motorsport
Racing with Giants: Porsche at Le Mans - narrated by Patrick Dempsey
A cinematic feature charting Porsche's obsessive seven-decade campaign to conquer the 24 Hours of Le Mans, from underdog beginnings to record-breaking dominance, narrated by lifelong racer Patrick Dempsey. (Published 1 Jun 2023)
Why Supercars Are Easy To Drive | Supercar Tech (S1E01)
Why can a 600-horsepower hypercar be more docile than a hot hatch? This explainer unpacks the engineering that tames extreme power, grip and tyres, downforce, drivetrains and the electronics quietly keeping you on the road. (Published 6 Sep 2024)
The Thrilling History Of Formula 1
History Hit traces Formula 1 from its lethal early decades to the modern engineering era: the rivalries, the technology leaps, and how the sport became the pinnacle of motor racing. (Published 26 Jun 2025)
All 4 Cars & Motorsport picks →
Comedy & Performance
Laurel & Hardy: Seeing Double (Documentary)
The story behind comedy's most beloved double act: how Laurel and Hardy built their timeless partnership and the craft hidden inside their perfect silliness. (Published 5 Feb 2024)
Inventing Improv: A Chicago Stories Special Documentary
A polished PBS documentary tracing how improvised comedy was born in Chicago and grew into the engine behind SNL, Second City, and modern comedy. (Published 19 Nov 2021)
Extended interviews: Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Martin and Kevin James
Three comedy heavyweights, Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Martin and Kevin James, sit down separately to talk craft, the long road of a comedy career, and what still makes them laugh. (Published 18 Jun 2024)
All 4 Comedy & Performance picks →
Birds & Wildlife-watching
Dinosaurs with Feathers: The Missing Link to Birds | FULL DOC | SLICE WILD
The dinosaurs never died: a cinematic film on the fossils with feathers that prove the birds at your window are the last living dinosaurs. (Published 28 Mar 2026)
How Dinosaurs Became Birds | SLICE EARTH | FULL DOC
How a line of fearsome predators shrank, grew feathers and took to the skies: the astonishing evolutionary journey from dinosaur to bird. (Published 14 Jun 2025)
Ravens - Intelligent Rascals of the Skies | Free Documentary Nature
Tool-users, pranksters and problem-solvers: a field film on ravens, revealing why these everyday black birds are among the cleverest animals alive. (Published 11 Nov 2020)
All 4 Birds & Wildlife-watching picks →
Wine & Drink
New vineyards of the world: The incredible story of English Wine [Documentary]
Once a joke, now winning gold: the unlikely, cinematic story of how a warming climate turned the English countryside into serious vineyard country. (Published 12 Jun 2022)
From Ancient Ale to Craft Beer: A Global Brewing Story | FULL DOCUMENTARY
A global history of beer, from Sumerian and Egyptian brews to the modern craft revolution: how fermentation was discovered, how it shaped early societies, and how brewing became both a science and a culture. (Published 10 May 2025)
Bowmore: The Making Of A Legend | How Islay’s Oldest Distillery Became A Scotch Whisky Icon
Inside Bowmore, one of Islay's oldest distilleries: how single malt Scotch whisky is actually made, from malted barley and peat smoke to the long years in the cask that give it its character. (Published 24 Dec 2024)
Chess & Strategy
Karpov vs. Kasparov: Epic Rivalry of Chess Titans Amid USSR Collapse | SLICE WHO | FULL DOCUMENTARY
The 25-year duel between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov, played out against the slow collapse of the Soviet Union, two opposed temperaments and an ideological proxy war fought across a chessboard. (Published 18 Jul 2024)
1972: BOBBY FISCHER - This Little Thing with Me and Spassky | Classic BBC Documentary | BBC Archive
James Burke reports from Reykjavik as a 29-year-old Bobby Fischer faces Boris Spassky in the Cold War's most famous match, a remarkable time capsule of chess's biggest moment. (Published 28 Apr 2025)
Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue: The Chess Battle For Humanity
The full story of the 1997 showdown between world champion Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue, the match where a machine beat the best human player for the first time, told through the games that decided it. (Published 31 Mar 2021)
All 4 Chess & Strategy picks →
Gardening
The Secret History of the British Garden, The 18th Century
Monty Don traces how the 1700s overturned the formal garden and gave Britain its rolling, naturalistic landscapes, the era of Capability Brown and the picturesque ideal. (Published 7 Apr 2016)
Capability Brown's Unfinished Garden (BBC)
Garden designer Bunny Guinness travels to Blenheim, Burghley and other masterpieces to uncover the genius of Lancelot "Capability" Brown, the man who reshaped the English landscape. (Published 15 Jan 2024)
A Season Begins: Life Returns to the Garden | Full Documentary
A garden waking up: a quietly beautiful film following a single great garden as it bursts back into life across one full season. (Published 9 Mar 2026)
Fashion & Design
"Christian Dior, Designer of Dreams" at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs
An hour inside the blockbuster retrospective tracing 70 years of the House of Dior, room by room, with the curators as your guides through the gowns, ateliers and archives, a definitive walk through couture history. (Published 14 Apr 2020)
the messy rise and fall of Victoria's Secret
A sharp, well-researched video essay on how one lingerie brand defined a beauty ideal, dominated pop culture, and then lost its grip on the public, fashion history told as cultural reckoning. (Published 5 Sep 2022)
Abstract: The Art of Design | Tinker Hatfield: Footwear Design | FULL EPISODE | Netflix
The Nike legend behind the Air Jordan and Air Max walks through how an architect's eye and an athlete's instincts reshaped the modern sneaker, a masterclass in how the objects we wear every day get designed. (Published 17 Apr 2020)