* The Birth of Empire: The East India Company (2014)

Dan Snow travels through India in the footsteps of the company that revolutionised the British lifestyle and laid the foundations of today's global trading systems.

Part 1:
400 years ago British merchants landed on the coast of India and founded a trading post to export goods to London. Over the next 200 years, their tiny business grew into a commercial titan. Using the letters and diaries of the men and women who were there, this documentary tells the story of the East India Company, which revolutionised the British lifestyle, sparked a new age of speculation and profit and by accident created one of the most powerful empires in history. Yet inexorable rise ended in ignominy. Dogged by allegations of greed, corruption and corporate excess, by the 1770s the company's reputation was in tatters. Blamed for turning its back as millions died in the Bengal famine, and thrown into crisis by a credit crunch in Britain, the world's most powerful company had run out of cash, sparking a government intervention.

Part 2:
By 1800 the East India Company had grown from a tiny band of merchants into a colossal trading empire. But scandal and corruption in the 18th century had led to a curtailment of its powers by the British government. The state now controlled the company's affairs in India and, throughout the 19th century, would chip away at its remaining powers and trading privileges. The company was transformed from a trading enterprise into the rulers of India, and governed vast swathes of the subcontinent on behalf of the British Crown. Its territory expanded enormously and an empire was born. As the company traded opium to a reluctant Chinese Empire, in India a dangerous chasm opened up between the British rulers and the Indian people. Alienated and disaffected, significant numbers of the company's massive army of Indian soldiers finally revolted and the Company's handling of the mutiny was its final undoing. In 1858 British India passed into Queen Victoria's hands and the Raj was born.

* Ian Hislop's Olden Days (2014)

Ian Hislop explores the British obsession with the past. He reveals how and why, throughout our history, we have continually plundered 'the olden days' to make sense of and shape the present.

Part 1

Ian Hislop explores two of Britain's most inspiring monarchs, King Arthur and King Alfred.

Part 2

How the Victorians turned to the Middle Ages to make sense of their era of progress.

Part 3

Ian Hislop looks at the rural olden days - Britain's idealised vision of the countryside.

* Victoria's Empire (2007)

Victoria Wood travels to the corners of the globe in search of the essence of the former Victorian Empire. Wood's irreverent humour shines through as she travels to far-flung former Victorian outposts, many of which share her name, in search of how people today view the days of the Empire. From Fort Victoria in Ghana, to Victoria, Nova Scotia, taking in Australia, New Zealand and many more besides, she finishes her journey in majesty at Zambia's Victoria Falls. Wood reveals her childhood fascination with the old Queen who bore her name, explores her character and family life and talks to locals in these far places about their views on being colonized by a country they'd never heard of.

Episode 1 - India/Hong Kong/Borneo
Victoria Wood visits countries that used to be part of Queen Victoria's British Empire. In Calcutta she takes a taxi through the city to see the extent of the British residue and discovers very well preserved Victorian buildings amongst the colours and textures of this marvellous city. She chats with Indian resident Toby Sinclair and discovers the intriguing way we learned local languages, and the legacy that will allow India to become an economic super power.

Then it's up to Darjeeling, where British women would avoid the intensity of the Calcutta summers, and where taking tea wasn't the only diversion in the long, often lonely, summer nights.

In Hong Kong, Victoria visits a vet to discuss the Chinese and British polar attitudes towards pets and gets her love life analysed by a fortune teller, before in Borneo, Victoria comes face to face with the descendent of a chief head hunter, a local solidified bird spit delicacy and a baby Orangutan's first attempts at climbing.

Episode 2 - Ghana/Jamaica/Newfoundland
Victoria Wood visits countries that used to be part of Queen Victoria's British Empire.

The first stop this episode is Ghana, once known as the Gold Coast, where slaves were purchased to be transported across the Atlantic to work on the Jamaican sugar plantations.

Victoria travels inland to visit Assin Manso. Here the slaves were washed and sold before being marched to the Cape Coast Castle dungeons, where they were held before being dispatched.

Visiting Cape Coast herself, Victoria discovers how the Ghanaians live now and how they are moving away from the stain of the slave trade.

Then it's on to Jamaica, the slave's grim destination, and a chat with Aleric Josephs about how the slaves resisted their harsh treatment and ultimately participated in infanticide to prevent their children being born into slavery. Victoria sees how they fought for and joyously celebrated their freedom and meets Freddie Macgregor to discuss the African roots of reggae.

Finally it's on to Newfoundland, a foggy rock on the furthest eastern edge of Canada where Victoria has tea with a monarchist and meets Michael, who takes her up a hill to try and spot fairies.

Episode 3 - New Zealand/Australia/Zambia
Victoria Wood visits countries that used to be part of Queen Victoria's British Empire. In New Zealand she meets Hone, a Maori, and learns about the start of the interracial troubles, before heading to Alice Springs, in the heart of Australia, where countless aborigines were massacred. Victoria's journey ends at Victoria Falls in Zambia, where she takes a trip down the Zambezi river and meets a herbalist who can cure almost anything.

* Empire (2012)

Jeremy Paxman traces the story of the greatest empire the world has ever known: the British Empire.

Part 1: A Taste for Power
In the first programme, he asks how such a small country got such a big head, and how a tiny island in the North Atlantic came to rule over a quarter of the world's population. He travels to India, where local soldiers and local maharajahs helped a handful of British traders to take over vast areas of land. Spectacular displays of imperial power dazzled subject peoples and developed a cult of Queen Victoria as Empress, mother and virtual God. In Egypt, Jeremy explores the bit of Empire that never was, as Britain's temporary peace-keeping visit turned into a seventy year occupation. He travels to the desert where Lawrence of Arabia brought a touch of romance to the grim struggle of the First World War. As Britain came to believe it could solve the world's problems, he tells the story of the triumphant conquest of Palestine by Imperial troops - and Britain's role in a conflict that haunts the Middle East to this day.

Part 2: Making Ourselves at Home
He continues his personal account of Britain's empire by looking at how traders, conquerors and settlers spread the British way of doing things around the world - in particular how they created a very British idea of home. He begins in India, where early traders wore Indian costume and took Indian wives. Their descendants still cherish their mixed heritage. Victorian values put a stop to that as inter racial mixing became taboo. In Singapore he visits a club where British colonials gathered together, in Canada he finds a town whose inhabitants are still fiercely proud of the traditions of their Scottish ancestors, in Kenya he meets the descendants of the first white settlers - men whose presence came to be bitterly resented as pressure for African independence grew. And he traces the story of an Indian family in Leicester whose migrations have been determined by the changing fortunes of the British empire.

Part 3: Playing the Game
He continues his personal account of Britain's Empire by tracing the growth of a peculiarly British type of hero - adventurer, gentleman, amateur, sportsman and decent chap - and a peculiarly British type of obsession - sport, the empire at play. He travels to East Africa in the footsteps of Victorian explorers in search of the source of the Nile; to Khartoum in Sudan to tell the story of General Gordon - a half-crazed visionary who 'played the game' to the hilt; to Hong Kong where the British indulged their passion for horse racing by building a spectacular race course; and to Jamaica where the greatest imperial game of all - cricket - became a battleground for racial equality.

Part 4: Making a Fortune
Jeremy Paxman continues his personal account of Britain's empire, looking at how the empire began as a pirates' treasure hunt, grew into an informal empire based on trade and developed into a global financial network. He travels from Jamaica, where sugar made plantation owners rich on the backs of African slaves, to Calcutta, where British traders became the new princes of India. Jeremy then heads to Hong Kong, where British-supplied opium threatened to turn the Chinese into a nation of drug addicts - leading to the brutal opium wars, in which Britain triumphed and took the island of Hong Kong as booty. Unfair trading helped spark the independence movement in India, led by Mahatma Gandhi; in a former cotton spinning town in Lancashire, Jeremy meets two women who remember Gandhi's extraordinary visit in 1931.

Part 5: Doing Good
In the final part of his personal account of Britain's empire, Jeremy Paxman tells the extraordinary story of how a desire for conquest became a mission to improve the rest of mankind, especially in Africa, and how that mission shaded into an unquestioning belief that Britain could - and should - rule the world. In Central Africa, he travels in the footsteps of David Livingstone who, though a failure as a missionary, became a legendary figure - the patron saint of empire who started a flood of missionaries to the so-called 'Dark Continent'. In South Africa, Paxman tells the story of Cecil Rhodes, a man with a different sort of mission, who believed in the white man's right to rule the world, laying down the foundations for apartheid. The journey ends in Kenya, where conflict between white settlers and the African population brought bloodshed, torture and eventual withdrawal.