Britain From Above - Season 1

First aired: 8/10/2008 7 episodes

Episodes

1. 24 Hour Britain

Aired: 8/10/2008

From helicopters, planes, hang gliders and satellites, we see the picture of a nation constantly on the move with beautiful, varied and often mysterious landscapes. Swooping over towns and cities, allows Andrew Marr to see them from a new angle as he meets the people whose work takes them high above us to monitor and manage the networks that keep the country working.

2. The City

Aired: 8/10/2008

Revealing the transformation of Britain's most important city: her capital, London. Starting with amazing Luftwaffe aerial photographs of the very first bombs of the Blitz falling on a vulnerable city, the programme tracks the changes that came out of five years of bombing. Comparing exhaustive footage of London in the 40s with the city of today, the team see how great plans for urban renewal were stillborn and, instead, London rebuilt itself in an ad hoc way along old street patterns. The only exception to this was the dramatic city that rose from the derelict docklands.

3. Manmade Britain

Aired: 8/17/2008

In East Anglia, Andrew Marr flies 10,000 feet above ground to locate a patchwork quilt of fields that produce a quarter of the country's wheat and barley. He also investigates how farmers are using military-style spy planes and GPS technology to monitor their crops, and faces his biggest challenge yet - a daunting plummet from an airborne plane in his first ever skydive.

4. The Land

Aired: 8/17/2008

In the heat of World War Two, 300,000 "unproductive" farms were commandeered by the government and tightly regimented to increase their output.

5. Untamed Britain

Aired: 8/24/2008

Andrew Marr concludes his journey as he microlights and paraglides through the skies, getting a buzzard's eye view of the nation's untamed and untameable landscape. Along the way, he joins geologists, meteorologists, amateur photographers and festival goers to explore Britain's geology, the impact of the weather on our shores and the riches hidden beneath our feet.

6. The Industrial Landscape

Aired: 8/24/2008

This final episode tells the story of how Britain's industrial heartlands have been transformed in the space of a single lifetime.

7. Satellite Earth

Aired: 8/24/2008

Documentary telling the story of one satellite's journey into space and how global agencies and individuals are using satellites in all kinds of ways - farming their land from space, locating ancient water supplies hidden deep beneath the most arid desert regions and tracking ocean currents and the global mechanisms of climate change.