Documentaries
Documentaries is a documentary on BBC1. Featuring household names performing exclusively for Radio 2, and classic sets from the BBC vaults. The program has been available since 2024. A total of 296 episodes have been broadcast, most recently in July 2025.
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1:00:00Documentaries
Rick Stein explores the food of Shanghai - Shanghai is one of the biggest cities in the world and is rapidly expanding, but has it hung on to its culinary roots?
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New
July 6, 2025
Nigel Planer narrates the story of the struggle to make programmes for children in the days before everything went digital.
Hosted by Jo Whiley, Jeff Lynne's ELO continues Radio 2's In Concert 2019 season. Here's your chance to hear some of his best-known tracks including the incomparable Mr Blue Sky.
New
July 4, 2025
Comedy about a teacher (Cary Grant) whose playboy antics are curbed by a judge who insists that he romance a girl (Shirley Temple), until her crush on him wears off.
New
July 4, 2025
Powerful drama that tells the true story of Julie Nicholson's response to her daughter Jenny's death in the 7 July bombing at Edgware Road tube station.
New
8. Rothko
Mark Rothko believed that tradition was all used up and that figurative art could no longer connect us, viscerally, to the human tragedy. So he set himself - and New York - a test.
Dougie and the team present highlights from this year’s Royal Highland Show. Cammy joins the annual Grand Parade to celebrate the show winners.
Simon Schama on the making of eight great works of art. The story of Picasso's Guernica, from the bombing massacre that inspired it, to Picasso's artistic response.
Dougie is in the Howe of Alford to meet a top Aberdeen Angus breeder, while Cammy attends a farm sale where a lifetime of machinery and tools are going under the auctioneer’s hammer.
In 1953, the BBC made a point-of-view film from the London-Brighton train. In 1983, they did it again. This film shows both concurrently, with every bridge, tunnel and station.
Simon Schama investigates what drove Van Gogh to paint his great masterpiece Wheatfield with Crows in 1890.
Dougie is in Motherwell to visit Baron’s Haugh Nature Reserve, an urban wetland along the River Clyde. Elsewhere, Shahbaz visits one of Wester Ross's ancient Caledonian pine forests.
A biographical drama about the life and rise to fame of the American soul singer Aretha Franklin.
Simon Schama tells the extraordinary story of how Britain's greatest painter, JMW Turner, created one of his most powerful paintings, The Slave Ship.
Dougie is in Skye to find out how crofters are providing a summer home for corncrakes. Meanwhile, Shahbaz sails to Ailsa Craig to see how conservationists are protecting the island's seabird colony.
In his favourite city, Alexander Armstrong explores the secret underground treasures that made Rome the powerhouse of the ancient world.
Engineer Rob Bell explores the new inventions - from giant troop-carrying gliders to tanks that could operate on water - that made the Normandy invasion in 1944 possible.
Simon Schama recounts the story of eight moments of drama in the making of eight great works of art. He looks at Jacques Louis David's revolutionary painting Death of Marat.
Dougie reports on the bluetongue virus and meets the Scottish scientists studying its spread. Meanwhile, Shahbaz meets Belgian vet students getting hands-on experience on Scottish farms.
Pulp perform an intimate and exclusive show for BBC Radio 2 In Concert, playing some of their most-loved classic hits as well as exclusive tracks from their album More.