What's good on British TV

Through the magic of BitTorrent and UKNova we’ve been able to watch a lot of BBC and ITV television recently. Here’s what I liked:

• A Short History of Tall Buildings, a series on the Imagine programme hosted by Alan Yentob, is a series of vingettes on skyscrapers and other tall buildings all around the world.
• Horizon is the BBC’s science programme, a British Nature of Things. We enjoyed a couple of episodes: An Experiment to Save the World about the search for workable nuclear fusion, and The Day the Earth Almost Died about the mass extinction of 95% of all life on the planet 250 million years ago.
• Martin Bashir, famous over here for his Michael Jackson programmes, hosted a programme in 2003 called Major Fraud: Charles Ingram’s Millionaire ‘win’ that examines how Charles Ingram cheated on the British version of the Who Wants to be a Millionaire show. The show is somewhat over-produced, but it’s an interesting tale nonetheless.
• A series called The Tube does for the London subway system what the ITV show Airline does for easyJet: it’s a “day in the life” sort of show, going behind the scenes into various aspects of the Tube’s operations.

If you use the BitTorrent search engine, searching for “BBC” or “ITV” to find British TV works well; UKNova has only British TV (although it does require registration).