Timeshift
Timeshift is a TV show on BBC4. Documentary series which ranges widely over Britain's social and cultural history, its narrative-led storytelling offering a richly immersive and varied window onto the past. The program has been available since 2024. A total of 13 episodes have been broadcast, most recently in April 2025.
Last episode
Timeshift
Documentary which looks at why the most inhospitable place on the planet has exerted such a powerful hold on the imagination of explorers, scientists, writers and photographers.
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In a programme showing how to play better chess, British grandmasters Dan King and Ray Keene go through a demonstration game from opening gambit to checkmate.
Series 14
Lucie Green looks back through Britain's most dramatic weather history and sees how our reactions helped forge a weather science that today allows us to predict the worst extremes.
Series 16
The inside story of the design and construction of 'the most perfect suspension bridge in the world', and how its unique slimline structure arose by accident.
Series 13
Timeshift takes a loving and sometimes horrified look back at the iconic hairdos and 'must have' haircuts that both men and women in Britain have flirted with in the past 60 years.
Series 15
Mark Evans tells the surprising story of the hidden powerhouse behind the globalised world, the diesel engine, a 19th-century invention that has become indispensable to the 21st.
Series 13
A national obsession is explored in this archive-rich look at the evolution of the weather forecast from print via radio to TV and beyond - and at the changing weather itself.
Documentary which explores the lost world of coal mining and the rich social and cultural lives of those who worked in what was once Britain's most important industry.
Series 10
Documentary tracing the story of the ultimate sanction, examining such matters as the protocols of the public execution and the 'science' of hanging.
Helped by contributors including Shirley Williams, Douglas Hurd and Simon Hoggart, journalist Jonathan Freedland attempts to define the qualities which make a great US president.
Series 15
Andrew Martin takes three railway journeys following the routes of three of the most famous named trains - the Flying Scotsman, the Cornish Riviera Express and the Brighton Belle.
Series 10
Documentary lifting the veil on the taboo that is corporal punishment, revealing a history spanning religion, the justice system, sex and education.
Series 14
Using the British Transport Films archive, Timeshift revisits Britain's railways during the era of public ownership in a corrective to the myth of the bad old days of rail.