Clips
-
About the series
From the team behind 'The Secret Life of the Motorway' and 'The Secret Life of the Airport' comes another unexpected homage to an engineering masterpiece of modern Britain: the national electricity grid. After all, imagine a world where the only form of artificial light was dirty, smelly and potentially dangerous, and absolutely nothing worked at the flick of a switch. The series reveals how the grid has both liberated and enthralled us, and in the process created our contemporary world. Along the way we meet the men who’ve built and run it; people who can remember life without it; and those who’ve pinned their hopes on controlling it. It’s a journey down the wires from the awe and opposition that greeted the first pylons in 1928 and the novelty of electric light, to the long lost glamour of the British nuclear industry and Margaret Thatcher’s determination to keep power flowing during the miners’ strike. All via an explosion of electrical gadgets and gizmos that promised, according to an early electricity marketing film, to turn ‘drudgery to delight,’ and that have inspired our electric dreams ever since.
-
Past Series
Before this Secret Life... series there was 'The Secret Life of the Airport', tracing the development of Britain's airports and how they have transformed the country. And the first Secret Life... series celebrated the birth of motorways, travelling down the slip road to explore where they've taken us.
The Secret Life of the Airport
