The story of the wildlife of Europe is bound up with the story of its people. Politics, economics, and social revolutions have shaped Europe's natural history just as much as the guns of hunters, the ploughs of farmers, and the struggles of conservationists.
For this third series of Wild Europe, Lionel Kelleway travels from Norway to northern Italy to give a European perspective on issues that face conservationists across the world - alpine conservation, problems caused by the arrival of alien species, reintroductions of large animals back into a landscape now dominated by man and when tough choices have to be made in conservation - the removal of one species in order to protect another.
Martin Plimmer learns all there is to know about lying. How body language, micro facial expressions and even the electrical impulses in our brains can uncover our lies. He finds out what motivated famous liars, marvels at the skills demonstrated by persistent liars and finds out how liars who persist with their deception in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence can succeed in pulling the wool over our eyes.
With the help of professional liars and lie-busters - psychologists, a psychiatrist, magician Darren Brown, a loss adjuster, a policeman, and a PR consultant - Martin gets to grip the dynamics of lies and lying.
Melvyn Bragg tells six further stories from British history of how ordinary people's lives were shaped and changed by the deeds and decisions of powerful men and women far away.
For this second series Melvyn traces the fate of Charlotte Badger, sentenced at Worcester Assize to transportation to Australia where she seizes a brig and becomes a female pirate. He joins the embattled islanders of North West Scotland during the brutal Highland Clearances, fights the Napoleonic Wars alongside British tars and learns how it felt to be dispossessed of your birthright as the Industrial Revolution swept traditional textile manufacture away in the Lancashire and Yorkshire of the 1820s. The hapless fate of the ordinary tommy in the trenches of the First World War and the Merthyr miner, unemployed for a decade and cast yet lower by the Crash on Wall Street conclude the series.
