Wood begins in the Churchill War Rooms with the story of England's desperate struggle against the Vikings. Travelling along The Ridgeway he recounts the Battle of Ashdown which helped Alfred gain the kingship. Later, at Hamwic, Wessex' major port, the Danes devastated trade and the local economy, before moving on to Wareham, Exeter, and Gloucester. After the ambush at Chippenham, his kingdom reached its nadir in the nearby marshes of Athelney (near where the Alfred Jewel was later discovered). He risked all at the Battle of Eddington, and established stability via the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum. At Wareham, Winchester, London, and Lyng, Wood then discusses how Alfred re-engineered an "upsurge in urban life". At the Bodleian Library he reviews Alfred's second great revolution, that of literacy. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gueRXsHLFus

The Battle of the Beams was a period early in the Second World War when bombers of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) used a number of increasingly accurate systems of radio navigation for night bombing in the United Kingdom. British scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry fought back with a variety of their own increasingly effective means, involving jamming and deception signals. The period ended when the Wehrmacht moved their forces to the East in May 1941, in preparation for the attack on the Soviet Union.[1] The idea of "beam" based navigation was developed during the 1930s, initially as a blind landing aid. The basic concept is to produce two directional radio signals that are aimed slightly to the left and right of a runway's midline. Radio operators in the aircraft listen for these signals and determine which of the two beams they are flying in. This is normally accomplished by playing Morse code signals into the two beams, to identify right and left. For bombing, the Luftwaffe built huge versions of the antennas to provide much greater accuracy at long range, named Knickebein and X-Gerät. These were used during the early stages of "The Blitz" with great effect, in one case laying a strip of bombs down the centre line of a factory deep in England. Tipped off about the system's operation by pre-war military intelligence, the British responded by playing their own Morse code signals so that the aircraft believed they were always properly centred in the beam while they flew wildly off course. The Germans became convinced the British had somehow learned to bend radio signals. When the problem became widespread, the Germans introduced a new system that worked on different principles, the Y-Gerät. Having guessed the nature of this system from a passing mention, the British had already deployed countermeasures that rendered the system useless almost as soon as it was used. The Germans eventually gave up on the entire concept of radio navigation over the UK, concluding the British would continue to successfully jam it.

Lord Clark reflects on the nature of the 18th century music, the work of Bach, Handel, Hyden, and Mozart, and - after discussing the painter Watteau - considers that some of its qualities are found in Rococo architecture. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skRC1jVUyEU

Professor Aubrey Manning seeks to solve some of the enduring mysteries of the British landscape through clues in geology, archaeology and natural history. On the remote Shetland Isles, a series of monumental towers, or Brochs, once dominated the landscape. Aubrey sets off to discover what sort of community built the Brochs towers and for what purpose. The latest clues are coming from a major archaeological site at Scatness in the southern mainland of Shetland. Here the remains of a Broch settlement are helping to build a picture of the life of these ancient Iron Age people. New studies of the foundations of the Broch suggest a much earlier date for the structure than previously thought. It means the Brochs were built centuries before the Romans advanced up the British coast. Their function seems to have been as a home for the elite of the society. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT1ewkoi2b0