Lights in the Darkness
This episode immerses us in the turbulent era that followed the Roman occupation of Britain. Once known as the ‘dark' ages, in reality it's a time of glittering art and extraordinary cultural fusions.
This alternative history of the British Isles, told through art, brings together encounters between contemporary artists and ancient art, and interviews with experts and curators, to trace how Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Norse peoples fought for supremacy, leaving behind mysterious fragments of art that still haunt our landscapes and imagination.
Sculptor Antony Gormley meets Spong Man, a unique clay figure that once sat on a 5th-century funerary urn, a mysterious glimpse into the mindset of early Anglo-Saxon settlers. Meanwhile, actor Michael Sheen performs the 7th-century Welsh poem of resistance against the Anglo-Saxons, Y Gododdin, and Scottish artists Dalziel & Scullion wonder at the monumental Aberlemno Stones (c.500-800 AD), believed to mark the hard-fought boundary line of the Pictish kingdom.
Like the stones, the gold artefacts of the Staffordshire Hoard fuse pagan and Christian imagery, and at Stoke's Potteries Museum artist Cornelia Parker investigates why they were found so broken and twisted. Spreading alongside such Christian symbols was a powerful new language, English, used to gloss over the Latin in the elaborate Lindisfarne Gospels explored by the Rev Richard Coles. Maria Dahvana Headley analyses how English was used in the epic poem Beowulf, and tells us how she has updated the work with a hip-hop feminist translation.
The Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi reveals a new sense of the Isles' place in the wider world, and is examined by map artist David McCandless and British Library curator Claire Breay. Graphic novelist Woodrow Phoenix explores how the Anglo-Saxon age came to a dramatic end in 1066 by taking a fresh look at the embroidered propaganda of the Norman Conquest in the Bayeux Tapestry.
Trailer
Recently Updated Shows
Lost Treasures of Egypt
An immersive, action-packed series follows international teams of Egyptologists as they unearth the world's richest seam of ancient archaeology — Lost Treasures of Egypt. Through excavations and unprecedented access to the teams on the front line of archaeology, we follow these modern-day explorers as they battle searing heat and inhospitable terrain to make the discoveries of a lifetime.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians
12-year-old modern demigod Percy Jackson has just come to terms with his newfound supernatural powers when the sky god Zeus accuses him of stealing his master lightning bolt. Now Percy must trek across America to find it and restore order to Olympus.
Mayor of Kingstown
Mayor of Kingstown is set in a small Michigan town where the only industry remaining are federal, state, and private prisons, the story follows the McLusky family, the power brokers between the police, criminals, inmates, prison guards and politicians, in a city completely dependent on prisons and the prisoners they contain. It is a stark and brutal look at the business of incarceration.
Twisted Metal
Twisted Metal is about a motor-mouthed outsider offered a chance at a better life, but only if he can successfully deliver a mysterious package across a post-apocalyptic wasteland. With the help of a trigger-happy car thief, he faces savage marauders driving vehicles of destruction and other dangers of the open road, including a deranged clown who drives an all too familiar ice cream truck.
Yellowjackets
Yellowjackets follows a girls' high school soccer team. In 1975, the Dearborn High Yellowjackets became the first team in state history to qualify for the Girls' U.S. Soccer Championship Series in Manchester, NH. They never got the chance to compete. Equal parts survival epic, horror story and pitch black coming of age, Yellowjackets tells the story of the (un)lucky survivors of a plane crash deep in the Ontario wilderness, chronicling their descent from a friendly, cooperative team to warring, cannibalistic clans. At the same time, it follows the lives they've attempted to piece back together nearly twenty-five years later, proving that the past is never really past and what began out in the wilderness is far from over.