Timeshift
Timeshift is a TV show on BBC4. Documentary series which ranges widely over Britain's social and cultural history, its narrative-led storytelling offering a richly immersive and varied window onto the past. The program has been available since 2024. A total of 15 episodes have been broadcast, most recently in October 2025.
Last episode
Timeshift
To mark 100 years of romance publishers Mills and Boon, literary novelist Stella Duffy takes on the challenge of writing for them, a task that ends up being harder than it looks.
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The inside story of the design and construction of 'the most perfect suspension bridge in the world', and how its unique slimline structure arose by accident.
Documentary tracing the story of the ultimate sanction, examining such matters as the protocols of the public execution and the 'science' of hanging.
September 2025
Andrew Martin takes three railway journeys following the routes of three of the most famous named trains - the Flying Scotsman, the Cornish Riviera Express and the Brighton Belle.
Documentary lifting the veil on the taboo that is corporal punishment, revealing a history spanning religion, the justice system, sex and education.
Mark Evans tells the surprising story of the hidden powerhouse behind the globalised world, the diesel engine, a 19th-century invention that has become indispensable to the 21st.
Documentary that tells the surprising story of how Britain entered a new age of steam railways after the Second World War and why it quickly came to an end.
Documentary exploring how the British have been in love with model railways for over a century. Featuring unique archive and contributions from modellers such as Pete Waterman.
Timeshift takes a loving and sometimes horrified look back at the iconic hairdos and 'must have' haircuts that both men and women in Britain have flirted with in the past 60 years.
Timeshift presents a bank holiday celebration of the British seaside holiday experience from its Victorian origins and heyday in the 1950s to its slow decline and attempts at reinvention since.
July 2025
A national obsession is explored in this archive-rich look at the evolution of the weather forecast from print via radio to TV and beyond - and at the changing weather itself.
April 2025
Documentary which looks at why the most inhospitable place on the planet has exerted such a powerful hold on the imagination of explorers, scientists, writers and photographers.
March 2025
In a programme showing how to play better chess, British grandmasters Dan King and Ray Keene go through a demonstration game from opening gambit to checkmate.
Lucie Green looks back through Britain's most dramatic weather history and sees how our reactions helped forge a weather science that today allows us to predict the worst extremes.
November 2024
Documentary which explores the lost world of coal mining and the rich social and cultural lives of those who worked in what was once Britain's most important industry.