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Sunset over the plains of Kenya's Maasai Mara, one of Africa's most protected wild spaces. And home to the fastest land animal on Earth, the cheetah. These agile cats have always been thought of as daylight hunters. They target prey from more than a kilometre away and chase it down at over 100 kilometres an hour. In one of these plains, two cheetah brothers attempt a high-speed night hunt with a gang of powerful hyenas on their trail.

On the second part of his journey through the dark ages Richard Rudgley continues into the age of the wandering peoples, the Volkerwanderung. These Northern people enjoyed a golden age unaffected by Rome and just 30 years after the Romans relinquished Britain, the 'Anglo-Saxons' made their move. The bedraggled legions are in retreat. Walls are pulled down. Mosaics shattered. And yet there never was a people called Anglo-Saxon. We look at the lasting influence of Saxon leaders like Alfred the Great, and his blue print for social justice.

Jungles provide the richest habitats on the planet - mysterious worlds of high drama where extraordinary animals attempt to survive in the most competitive place on earth. Flooded forests are home to caiman-hunting jaguars and strange dolphins that swim amongst the tree tops, while in the dense underworld, ninja frogs fight off wasps and flying dragons soar between trees. Acrobatic indri leap through the forests of Madagascar, while the jungle night conceals strange fungi and glow-in-the-dark creatures never filmed before.

The third assault on the tattered remains of Roman civilization came from even further North, where the melting glacial ice had created immense sheltered fjords, leaving its inhabitants little choice but the sea. These fearless navigators understood that dominion over the oceans was the key to their ambitions.
Where the Romans expanded incrementally, the Vikings adopted a bolder, more aggressive approach. So was it the Dark Age which failed Europe, or the stifling uniformity of the great Roman experiment? Were the lost tribes more victim than failure? Richard Rudgley will hope to shed new light on the real secrets of the so-called Dark Age.

The world's deserts are lands of extremes that force animals to come up with ingenious ways of coping with hostile conditions, giving rise to the most incredible survival stories on earth. A pride of desert lions are so hungry they risk hunting a giraffe several times their size, while male sandgrouse fly 120 miles each day to the nearest waterhole and dice with death to collect water for their chicks. Filmed for the first time, a tiny bat does battle with one of the world's deadliest scorpions, and in Madagascar, a locust swarm of biblical proportions is seen as never before.

Grasslands cover one quarter of all land and support the vast gatherings of wildlife, but to survive here animals must endure the most hostile seasonal changes on the planet. From Asia's bizarre-looking Saiga antelope to the giant anteaters of Brazil, grassland animals have adapted in extraordinary ways to cope with these extremes. In the flooded Okavango, lions take on formidable buffalo in epic battles, on the savannah bee-eaters take advantage of elephants to help catch insects and, on the freezing northern tundra, caribou embark on great migrations shadowed by hungry Arctic wolves.