Britain From Above - Episode guide
In a landmark series of documentaries presented by Andrew Marr, spanning BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Four and bbc.co.uk, Britain From Above will change the way viewers see the nation forever.
Andrew Marr takes viewers on a journey across the country and back in time to reveal the habits, rhythms and secrets uncovered when looking down from the skies, in a new, epic documentary series.
Episode 1: 24-Hour Britain
Sunday 10th August 2008
This first episode explores one day in the life of the British. Data from satellites exposes the great migrations across the nation on land, at sea and in the air. The documentary reveals a bird's eye view of the great water, electricity and telephone networks that keep the country working in a never-ending chain of supply and demand.
In the hour before dawn, most of the nation is slumbering. But, between 7 and 10am, 36 million people are on the move as the nation gets to work or school. More than one million people board a train, tens of thousands of buses hit the roads and 15 million drivers jump in their cars. Andrew meets the transport specialists who explain why Britain's networks of tracks and roads are working at full capacity, how the phantom traffic jam originates and how the experts try to keep the nation moving.
Once rush hour is over, work begins and, using state-of-the-art technology and satellite tracking, Britain From Above reveals the demands placed on supplies of electricity and water and finds out where the waste goes. It also shows the national telephone network as it comes to life on an average working day, with hundreds of thousands of phone calls being made per minute and over 5,000 texts per second being sent, not to mention the volume of email traffic ... and that's just before lunch.
Meanwhile, Andrew gets to the bottom of why London's city planners think gossip is as important as money, and finds out why one man is fixated on the theme tune for EastEnders.
Episode 2: Man-Made Britain
Sunday 17th August 2008
Andrew Marr experiences his biggest adventure yet, plummeting from an airplane in his first-ever sky-dive – all in the name of exploring the nation from above. During the course of his travels, Andrew discovers how some of the greenest, most natural-seeming landscapes across the country have actually been shaped by human hands.
This week's journey begins 10,000 feet above ground in East Anglia, where a familiar patchwork quilt of fields lies below. This is the breadbasket of the nation, producing over a quarter of the country's wheat and barley. But it's not as natural as it looks. Here, farmers are harnessing military technology to help them manage their farms. Spy planes, normally used to snap reconnaissance photos of Iraq or Afghanistan, have been converted to crop-cams. Using GPS, the computer-controlled crop-cam flies over farmland, recording images as it goes.
Flying over Savernake Forest near Swindon, experts are employing modern technology to see beneath the forest canopy and reveal the nation's ancient history below. A plane-mounted laser flies over the forest. This laser – known as LiDAR – scans the ground, firing 33,000 times each second. The recorded impulses produce a model of the ground beneath the trees, revealing a temple-complex dating back to the Iron Age.
Finally, Andrew explores the nation's National Parks, witnessing them as a host to wildlife, countless leisure activities and sheep. He sees their fight against destruction and their role as a testing ground for fast jet aircraft like the Eurofighter.
Episode 3: Untamed Britain
Sunday 24th August 2008
Andrew Marr microlights and paraglides through the skies, getting a buzzard's eye view of the nation's untamed and untameable landscape, in the final instalment of Britain From Above. He joins geologists, meteorologists, amateur photographers and festival-goers to explore Britain's geology, the impact of the weather on these shores and the riches hidden beneath our feet.
Microlighting down the Great Glen Fault in the Scottish Highlands, Andrew learns about the very origins of the nation, where England and Scotland collided over 400 million years ago. He also visits Northern Ireland, where geologists looked down from above at a river flowing through the Sperrin Mountains to discover unimagined riches: gold.
Paragliding on the Welsh borders, Andrew finds out how to read the wind and about its effects on landscape, before flying over the east coast of Norfolk, where the wind's destructive powers are shown to devastating effect: in places, waves have broken through the sea defences and coastal erosion means whole villages are being swallowed by the sea.
But Britain's geology and weather also affect the country's wildlife. Satellite tracking shows the migration of birds from Senegal and Siberia to Britain's shores and, using thermal imaging that is normally employed to search out insurgents in the mountains of Afghanistan, other immigrants from the East can be tracked, such as the shy Sika deer who help manage the land on Lulworth Range.
The series concludes at Glastonbury Festival: Britain in microcosm. For three days, a miniature society flowers which is crowded, cheerful, dirty, mildly anarchic and with a transport system that only just works...
