Last night we watched the first part of Prehistoric Autopsy which was all about the Neanderthals. This is a three part series presented by Alice Roberts & George McGavin plus a whole team of experts - the format is that they have a "lab" set up with various different experts & they demonstrate some of the research that's been or is being done ( Read more... )

Christmas Doctor Who! As is now traditional, although given the way they're splitting the season it does feel like part of the season more than it used to. Which is a good thing, I think.

Spoilers ahead!( spoilers )

The fourth & last programme in Dan Snow's series about the British Navy talked about how we got from the total domination of the seas in the aftermath of Trafalgar, to the on or below par situation in the First World War ( Read more... )

The third episode of "Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World" started in the 1770s when the British had just made peace with the French, and went through to the aftermath of the Battle of Trafalgar (when the British again made peace with the French after a couple more wars). The thread used to tie the whole episode together was ( Read more... )

The second episode of "Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World" started with the defeat of the English Navy by the French in 1690 - still one of the most humiliating defeats of the Navy. At this time the French were the dominant sea-going nation, and the programme covered the recovery of the Navy over the following 70 years until ( Read more... )

Started TV night off last week with the first episode in a series we'd recorded back in February - "Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World". The theme of the series is the history of Britain over the last 400 years, seen through the lens of the Royal Navy. This first episode (Heart of Oak) started with the growth of the navy ( Read more... )

TV night last week included the last episode of the Andrew Marr series - this time taking us from the aftermath of World War 1 through to the present day (roughly speaking). So a lot of what it covered were atrocities - we had Nazi atrocities (tho not actually discussed, what was covered was Hitler's rise to power with an emphasis on the fact that ( Read more... )

We had a bonus single-programme TV night on Sunday afternoon coz we were worried about the PVR filling up. So we watched the next episode of Andrew Marr's History of the World. In this one he was talking about the Age of Industry - and how the Industrial Revolution was the biggest shift in society since the Agricultural Revolution. The parallels ( Read more... )

We held TV night on Tuesday this week, so that J could play Assassin's Creed III as soon as it arrived yesterday. This also meant we fitted three programmes into the evening & caught up with ourselves with the Andrew Marr one ( Read more... )

The fourth episode of Andrew Marr's History of the World was mostly about the European Renaissance - but not about what happened during it. Instead it was about what happened in the rest of the world that made it possible for Europe to go from being a cultural backwater to a vibrant civilisation with pretensions towards becoming one of the ( Read more... )