Soft Drinks
Gregg Wallace explores Ribena's Gloucestershire factory. It turns 90 per cent of Britain's blackcurrants into soft drinks, producing three million bottles a week. Gregg takes delivery of 500 tonnes of blackcurrants at a cider mill in Somerset. The harvest comes in during July and August, when there are no apples to process for cider, so they press blackcurrants instead. Gregg discovers how the aroma of the blackcurrants is captured separately and later added back into the drink. Next, the concentrate and aromas are transported to the drinks factory, where they are mixed with 11 other ingredients before being bottled. Gregg watches a machine that can create a plastic bottle in 0.1 of a second and learns why nitrogen is the secret to creating a bottle that won't get stuck in vending machines.
Cherry Healey is harvesting the berries on a farm in Kent - one of 40 that supply the factory. She also heads to the Netherlands to a plant that recycles plastics. It processes two and a half million used PET bottles a day, transforming them into 4mm pellets that can be turned back into drinks bottles. And Cherry is in the lab figuring out why fizzy drinks are so appealing. She learns that bubbles play sensory tricks on us, making fizzy drinks taste colder, less sweet and more flavourful than their still equivalents.
Ruth Goodman is investigating the origins of fizzy drinks. Carbonated water was first sold by Mr Schweppe in 1783, but it was a British husband-and-wife team - Robert and Mary White - who were to popularise fizzy pop. In 1890, R White's styled itself as the world's biggest drinks company and they sold 46 million bottles a year. Ruth looks at why we associate barley water with the great British summertime.
Trailer
Recently Updated Shows
Playing Gracie Darling
Playing Gracie Darling is set in a place where everyone knows each other, secrets are buried deep, and where being different is impossible to hide.
When Joni was 14, her best friend Gracie Darling disappeared during a séance and hasn't been seen since.
Twenty-seven years on, Joni is a child psychologist and has never forgiven herself for Gracie's disappearance.
Joni is haunted by her past when she receives a startling call from her childhood friend Jay, now a local cop, alerting her that another Darling girl has disappeared during a seance.
When Calls the Heart
When Calls the Heart is inspired by Janette Oke's bestselling book series about the Canadian West, the series tells the captivating story of Elizabeth Thatcher, a young teacher accustomed to her high society life, who receives her first classroom assignment in Coal Valley, a small coal mining town where life is simple, but often fraught with challenges. Upon arrival, Elizabeth befriends Abigail Stanton, a wife and mother whose husband, the foreman of the mine, along with a dozen other miners, has just been killed in an explosion. The newly widowed women find their faith is tested when they must go to work in the mines to keep a roof over their heads. Set against the wild canvas of a 19th century coal town, Elizabeth will have to learn the ways of the frontier if she wishes to thrive in the rural west on her own.
Alien: Earth
When the mysterious deep space research vessel USCSS Maginot crash-lands on Earth, Wendy and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet's greatest threat.
The Rainmaker
Fresh out of law school, Rudy Baylor goes head-to-head with courtroom lion Leo Drummond as well as his law school girlfriend. Rudy, along with his boss and her disheveled paralegal, uncover two connected conspiracies surrounding the mysterious death of their client's son.
Mysteries of the Abandoned
Some of the world's most incredible engineering projects now lie in ruins. These deserted places are home to extraordinary mysteries and untold secrets, and we revisit them to understand how they were built, and why they were abandoned.
They were once some of the most advanced structures and facilities on the planet, standing at the cutting-edge of design and construction. Today they are abandoned, dangerous, some of them even deadly. From uninhabited cities to empty factories, these long-forgotten engineering marvels are scattered around the globe. Science Channel uncovers why some of the world's most advanced architectural achievements were eventually left behind in the all-new series Mysteries of the Abandoned.
Each of the six, hour-long episodes of Mysteries of the Abandoned features stories behind engineering wonders, why they were built, and the reasons they were eventually left to crumble. Each story recalls the people who originally designed the structure, their historical significance, and why they were ultimately no longer of use. The premiere episode explores California's Goat Canyon Trestle railway, known as the 'Impossible Railroad,' that required the biggest wooden trestle bridge in the world; Ukraine's Duga, the notorious anti-ballistic missile radar, known as the 'Russian Woodpecker,' that still stands in within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone; and the Grand Goulets Road in the French Alps, an astonishingly narrow and perilous mountain passageway.