The Century That Wrote Itself - Season 1
Season 1
Episodes
The Written Self
Adam Nicolson traces our modern sense of self back to the time when ordinary people first took up the quill. At a time of great upheaval, writing was both a means of escape and of fighting for what youbelieved. Account books became confessionals, and letters weapons against the authorities. From an ambitious shepherd to a Quaker woman imprisoned for her conscience, rising literacy allowed people to re-write both the country's future and their own.
The Rewritten Universe
Adam Nicolson explores the 17th century's contradictory attitudes towards the nature of reality. While a puritan struggled to accept God's will, an early naturalist accepted nothing without testing it first.How did God work? How did the world work? What was our place within it? These questions overflow from the era's diaries and notebooks, famous and unknown alike. Curiouser and curiouser, spreading literacy allowed explosive ideas not just to be recorded but shared, as Adam reveals the texts that rewrote our world.
A World Re-Shaped by Writing
Author Adam Nicolson traces the roots of today's globalised Britain to a 17th-century golden age of writing and communication. He reveals a century on the move, a time when London tripled in size and more than200,000 people emigrated in search of work or God. And it was writing that made this new mobility possible.
Through the very words that kept them afloat in this mobile world, we meet a puritan family split asunder across an ocean, a lowly sailor able to document strange new worlds for those at home and a slave-trader laying the foundations for a new world economy. All these characters remoulded the medieval world into the one we recognise today. Their writings both reveal this turbulent world to us and helped write the change itself.
Recently Updated Shows
Deal or No Deal Island
The iconic game of Deal or No Deal is back and unlike anything you have ever seen before! This new format transports audiences to the Banker's private island where he makes the rules and there are twists behind every palm tree. Hidden on the island are over 100 cases with millions of dollars split between them, which teams must retrieve so that they can play a game of Deal or No Deal against the Banker. Only one team will survive until the very last episode, where they'll compete to beat the Banker for the biggest prize in Deal or No Deal history.
Emmerdale
Emmerdale is a British soap focusing on the lives of several families and locals living around an estate, a farm and the nearby village in the Yorkshire Dales. It is the second longest British soap in television history since airing its first episode on ITV in 1972, as 'Emmerdale Farm', the show was renamed in 1989.
Malcolm in the Middle
In the words of They Might Be Giants' rollicking Grammy-winning theme song, "life is unfair." The inventive and wholly original sitcom Malcolm in the Middle has been honored with a Peabody Award and Emmys for directing and writing, but if life was fair, it would have earned an Emmy for Best Comedy Series, not to mention statuettes for its pitch-perfect cast. With his perpetual "yes, me worry" expression, Frankie Muniz instantly earns audience empathy as Malcolm, whose chances for a normal life are thwarted not only by his genius IQ, but also by his outrageously dysfunctional family: Lois, his obsessive, control-freak mother; Hal, his loving but ineffectual father; Francis, his eldest brother waging his own private war at military school; middle brother Reese, a delinquent savant; and Dewey, the put-upon youngest. As Malcolm observes at one point, "This family may be rude, loud and gross, and have no shame whatsoever, but with them you know where you stand."
Coronation Street
Coronation Street is the story of working people and the city street in which they live. The show has been seen all around the world and has remained in the top viewing ratings throughout its long lifetime.