The Secret Life Of Beaches

Coast explores the glorious diversity and endless delights offered by our beaches. The British Isles' stunning range of sand, shingle and rock formations creates some wonderful, unique havens for wildlife and opens up surprising possibilities for human endeavour and outright pleasure. Now the Coast team can reveal these in 'The Secret Life of Beaches'. In Scotland, zoologist and ex-soldier Andy Torbet braves one of the most dangerous beaches in Britain. Andy investigates how a RAF bombing range on the sands manages to double as a secret retreat for a colony of seals, who seem to thrive while basking within earshot of the bomb blasts. Off the coast of Newport, Nick does some detective work to find out how a criminal gang was uncovered after local detectives dug deep into the Welsh shore. On the sands of Aberlady Bay in Scotland new Coast presenter, military historian Nick Hewitt, unearths the steel skeletons of two top-secret midget submarines, part of the family of specialist craft which played a pivotal role in sinking The Tirpitz, one of Hitler's mightiest battleships. These midget subs, abandoned on the beach since the Second World War, were dubbed the 'X-Craft' and Nick meets a dare-devil veteran submariner, Bill Morrison, who fought in them and survived to tell the tale. Bill still holds the world record for the deepest death-defying escape from a submarine, when his own X-Craft was stranded on the seabed 200ft below the waves. Finally, Nick Crane digs deep to discover what it's like to live on Britain's most unusual beach, the eerily beautiful, vast shingle spit at Dungeness in Kent. He meets an artist who's taken up residence in a first-class railway carriage, abandoned on the beach. Together Nick and the painter explore what makes this vast ocean of pebbles such an oddly inspiring location.