Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Open your eyes to the bizarre, ferocious and surprisingly beautiful world of the invertebrates, a ground-breaking exploration into a spectacular miniature universe never normally seen but teeming all around us. In the first episode, the story of the land-living invertebrates. Discover the private life of Europe's dramatic leopard slug, a common garden resident with a truly bizarre end to its marathon mating ritual; watches the courtship ballet of tiny springtails on the underside of a leaf; sees swarms of bright red South African millipedes find partners, and in the caves of Venezuela meets the giant bat-eating centipede.

The cycle of life of a handful of different animals is captured on film in a whole new way in this documentary. Using special motion-control photography equipment, Genesis allows filmgoers to view animal behaviors which are too small, too slow, or too difficult to normally be seen with the naked eye, including a chick hatching its way out from inside an egg, jellyfish drying into nothing under the heat of the sun, or a snake slowly swallowing prey bigger than itself. This footage is accompanied by narration from Sotigui Kouyate, who uses simple props and easily understandable analogies to explain the science behind what its shown on screen. Genesis was directed by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, who previously created another acclaimed scientific documentary, Microcosmos.

Take a dino's-eye view of life in the prehistoric past as cutting-edge filming techniques and hard science. When White Tip, a female velociraptor, loses the rest of her pack, she must struggle to survive on her own. In time, she locates a new pack, as well as a mate, only to find that her hardships are just beginning in the harsh desert environment.

The world is affected by an obesity epidemic, but why is it that not everyone is succumbing? Medical science has been obsessed with this subject and is coming up with some unexpected answers. As it turns out, it is not all about exercise and diet. At the centre of this programme is a controversial overeating experiment that aims to identify exactly what it is about some people that makes it hard for them to bulk up.

We are in the grip of an allergy epidemic. 50 years ago one in 30 were affected, but in Britain today it is closer to one in three. Why this should be is one of modern medicine's greatest puzzles. In search of answers, Horizon travels round the globe, from the remotest inhabited island to the polluted centres of California and the UK. We meet sufferers and the scientists who have dedicated their lives trying to answer the mystery of why we are becoming allergic to our world.

It's 3.5 million years ago and in East Africa a remarkable species of ape roams the land. Australopithecus afarensis has taken the first tentative steps towards humanity by standing and walking on two legs. The rift valley was forming, and the rain forests dying as Africa dried out - turning the landscape into a mosaic of scattered trees and grass. In this new environment afarensis found it more efficient to move about on two legs rather than four.