Andrew Marr goes on an epic journey through a day in the life of Britain, as seen from the skies. 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.
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. Where Canary Wharf had a blank canvas and used it to create an American style grid of streets and huge buildings, the city itself was faced with squeezing ever more bizarrely-shaped buildings into its confused medieval street plan. The story of a capital that has been transformed from a low-rise, smog-ridden industrial city into an upwardly mobile, rapidly changing hub of leisure, retail and finance.
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.
In the heat of World War Two, 300,000 `unproductive' farms were commandeered by the government and tightly regimented to increase their output. In the second episode of BBC Two's companion series, the show discovers how this intensive form of agriculture, which would later become standard practice, has shaped the modern British landscape.
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. Microlighting down the Great Glen Fault in the Scottish Highlands, Andrew learns about the very origins of the nation, where England and Scotland collided over 400 million years ago. In Northern Ireland, he discovers where geologists looked down from above at a river containing gold flowing through the Sperrin Mountains. While paragliding on the Welsh borders, he finds out how to read the clouds before flying over the east coast of Norfolk, where the wind's destructive powers are shown to devastating effect. Geology and weather also affect the country's wildlife and satellite tracking demonstrates the migration of birds from Senegal and Siberia to Britain's shores. Using thermal imaging that is normally employed to search out insurgents in war zones, the shy Sika deer is tracked along the land on Lulworth Range. He concludes his journey at the Glastonbury Festival, where for three days a miniature society flowers which is crowded, cheerful, dirty and mildly anarchic, and which has a transport system that only just works - features that sound vaguely familiar to Andrew.
This final episode tells the story of how Britain's industrial heartlands have been transformed in the space of a single lifetime. In 1939 the Luftwaffe secretly photographed the backbone of the British economy: the valleys of South Wales where the great coalfields powered the nation; Swindon, at the heart of Britain's railway network; and Manchester, home to the great port of Salford and the world's largest industrial estate Trafford Park. Comparing those images from almost seventy years ago with those from today, the sheer scale and speed of change becomes vividly apparent. Where there were factories there are now fields, mining villages no longer have mines, docks have been replaced by high spec waterside apartments. Seen from above it is clear that no other aspect of the nation has changed so much or so quickly. It is a story of evolution, adaptation and, in some places, extinction.
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. As every conceivable aspect of our world is being 'sensed' and recorded, from the skies above our heads to the rocks beneath our feet, here is an in-depth look at the biggest technological revolution since the invention of the steam engine.
