Timeshift

A trip back to the days when 'style wars' were just that - violent confrontations about the clothes you wore. Spring 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the bank holiday 'battles of the beaches', when hundreds of mods and rockers flocked to seaside resorts on scooters and motorbikes in search of thrills and spills. Timeshift tells the story of how this led to violence, arrests and widespread concern about the state of British youth. But mods and rockers had more in common than was first obvious - they were the first generation of baby boomers to reach their teenage years at a time when greater prosperity and wider freedoms were transforming what it meant to be young.

If you think Britain has recently been on the end of some of the worst floods and storms ever experienced, think again. So says solar scientist Dr Lucie Green, as she takes a journey back through our most turbulent and dramatic weather history. She finds an 18th-century storm surge that killed over a thousand people working in open Somerset fields, a hurricane that drowned a fifth of the British Navy and winters so bitter that the country came close to total shutdown. But she also explores how our reactions to killer storms and cruel winters helped forge a weather science that today allows us to predict - and protect ourselves from - the worst extremes.

Timeshift tells the story of how a traditional working-class pub game became a national obsession during the 1970s and 80s, and looks at the key role television played in elevating its larger-than-life players into household names. Siobhan Finneran narrates a documentary which charts the game's surprising history, its cross-class and cross-gender appeal, and the star players that, for two decades, transformed a pub pastime into a sporting spectacle like no other. Featuring legendary names such as Alan Evans and Jocky Wilson and including contributions from Eric Bristow, Bobby George, John Lowe and Phil Taylor.

Between the 1920s and the 1960s the world's great powers sent vast military-style expeditions to conquer the peaks of the Himalayas, with Everest at their head. This was a great game played - camera in hand - by Imperial Britain, Nazi Germany and superpower America. As a result, Himalayan mountaineering's most iconic, epic and tragic moments didn't just go down in history, but were caught on film - from the deaths of Mallory and Irvine on Everest in 1924, to Everest's final conquest in 1953 by Hillary and Tensing. Using footage never before seen on British television, this is the story how of how film-makers turned the great peaks into great propaganda.

Timeshift revisits Britain's railways during the era of nationalisation. For all its bad reputation today, the old British Rail boldly transformed a decayed, war-torn Victorian transport network into a system fit for the 20th century. With an eye firmly on the future, steam made way for diesel and electric, new modern stations like Euston were built, and Britain's first high-speed trains introduced. Made with unique access to the British Transport Films archive, this is a warm corrective to the myth of the bad old days of rail, but even it can't hide from the horror that was a British Rail sandwich.

Timeshift looks at how post-war Britain went from a place where eating out was more of a chore than a pleasure to a nation of food adventurers, now spending up to a third of our food budget on restaurant meals. It's the story of the British palate being slowly introduced to a range of what would then have been 'exotic' cuisines by successive generations of migrants opening eateries - first Italians, then Chinese and Indians. By encouraging us to try something new - be it spaghetti, stir fry or samosa - they spiced up not just our food but our high streets and our lives.