Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Professor Marcus du Sautoy explores why we are driven to measure and quantify the world around us and why we have reduced the universe to just a handful of fundamental units of measurement. He tells the story of the metre and the second - how an astonishing journey across revolutionary France gave birth to the metre, and how scientists today are continuing to redefine the measurement of time and length, with extraordinary results.

Sir David Attenborough takes a breath-taking journey through the vast and diverse continent of Africa as it's never been seen before. From the richness of the Cape of Good Hope to blizzards in the high Atlas Mountains, from the brooding jungles of the Congo to the steaming swamps and misty savannahs, Africa explores the whole continent. An astonishing array of previously unknown places are revealed along with bizarre new creatures and extraordinary behaviours. Using the latest in filming technology including remote HD cameras, BBC One takes an animal's eye view of the action. The journey begins in the Kalahari, Africa's ancient southwest corner, where two extraordinary deserts sit side by side and even the most familiar of its creatures have developed ingenious survival techniques. Black rhinos reveal a lighter side to their character as they gather around a secret waterhole. Springbok celebrate the arrival of rains with a display of 'pronking'. Bull desert giraffes endure ferocious battles for territory in a dry river bed.

Since 2010, Artificial Intelligence is revolutionized by deep learning, neural networks that discern complex patterns in huge quantities of data and react in real time. A.I. is a primal force, like fire. The same fire that warms us can incinerate our homes; A.I. could enslave mankind -- or, join us in a grand alliance to reach the stars.

Ant colonies are one of the wonders of nature - complex, organised and mysterious. This programme reveals the secret, underground world of the ant colony in a way that's never been seen before. At its heart is a massive, full-scale ant nest, specially designed and built to allow cameras to see its inner workings. The nest is a new home for a million-strong colony of leafcutter ants from Trinidad. For a month, entomologist Dr George McGavin and leafcutter expert Professor Adam Hart capture every aspect of the life of the colony, using time-lapse cameras, microscopes, microphones and radio tracking technology.

Everyone has an opinion on bad cars. Now it's time to hear the ones that really count - ours. We're out to name and shame the most rubbish car from a manufacturer which, frankly, should have known better. And we have a special, surprise fate in store for the car we pick as our biggest loser. In this Top Gear special episode, Jeremy Clarkson and James May try to look for the worst car of all time and the criteria was that the car had to be 'terrible, but not cheap' and made by 'a manufacturer that should have known better'.

A new age of space exploration is dawning. But surprisingly, some of the boldest efforts at putting humans into space are now those of private companies started by a handful of maverick billionaire businessmen. In this film, Brian Cox gains exclusive access behind the scenes at Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and Spaceport America, exploring what is really happening in privately financed space flight right now.