Coast ventures to the farthest-flung reaches of the British Isles. Nick Crane joins the locals on the Isles of Scilly as they try to wade from island to island.
Coast ventures to the farthest-flung reaches of the British Isles to discover the most extreme locations, lifestyles and challenges of 'Life Beyond the Edge'.
Nick Crane explores the exotic Isles of Scilly - 28 miles beyond Land's End, these are England's final full stop. On magical isles with a Caribbean feel, Nick joins the locals to attempt one of the most bizarre walks in Britain, as they try to wade on foot through the surging seas from island to island. It's a challenge only possible at exceptionally low tide, yet still the seawater threatens to swamp them.
To discover what life is like on this extreme edge, Nick visits the last house on the very tip of the most westerly inhabited isle. He pushes beyond the edges of Britain's history too, walking back in time to the Bronze Age, as the seabed reveals evidence of an ancient settlement, long submerged beneath the waves. Is this the site of the legendary 'Lost Kingdom of Lyonesse', said to be the last resting place of King Arthur?
On precipitous slopes, beyond the edge of Devon, Coast newcomer and social historian Ruth Goodman follows in the footsteps of the remarkable Branscombe cliff farmers, who for generations followed a hardy way of life that's now gone with the sea breeze. Ruth relives a day in the ceaseless toil of the last man left on these perilous cliffs, the aptly named 'Cliffie' Gosling, who together with his trusty donkeys made the steep ascent between land and sea daily until the 1960s.
Mark Horton explores the cutting edge of Victorian information technology in a celebration of one of Britain's most audacious engineering achievements. The titanic struggle to create the transatlantic telegraph service between Britain and America would eventually herald the birth of global communications, but how did Brunel's mighty ship, the Great Eastern, manage to lay a cable 2,000 miles along the seabed to transmit and receive tiny electric signals between continents? Mark and the team rebuild the ingenious invention which, in 1865, finally made the transatlantic cable a glorious reality after ten years of tragic failure.
And, on the dramatic rocky edge of St David's Head in south Wales, Hermione Cockburn explores the very limits of life on the planet to reveal the astonishing fossil of a large sea creature - one which lived 300 million years before the dinosaurs. This discovery helped establish that Britain and America were once part of the same super-continent, and that the Earth is old enough for Darwin's theory of evolution - once held to be on the margins of science - to become central to our understanding of who we are.
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Music Played
Timings (where shown) are from the start of the programme in hours and minutes
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00:01Florence + The Machine
Shake It Out
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00:01Clare Maguire
Last Dance
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00:02Clare Maguire
The Last Dance
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00:04Seth Lakeman
The White Hare
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00:05All Saints
Pure Shores
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00:13Adele
Turning Tables
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00:24Efterklang
Natural Tune
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00:25Efterklang
Natural Tune
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00:26Explosions in the Sky
Your Hand In Mine (Glastonbury 2016)
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00:35Efterklang, Rasmus Stolberg
Modern Drift
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00:37The xx
Intro
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00:57Coldplay
Paradise
Credits
| Role | Contributor |
|---|---|
| Presenter | Nicholas Crane |
| Presenter | Hermione Cockburn |
| Presenter | Ruth Goodman |
| Presenter | Mark Horton |
| Presenter | Andy Torbet |
| Series Editor | Steve Evanson |
| Executive Producer | William Lyons |
Broadcasts
Sun 20 May 2012 21:00- Sun 20 May 2012 22:00主播大秀 Two Northern Ireland
- Tue 22 May 2012 23:30主播大秀 HD
Tue 17 Jul 2012 01:25主播大秀 One except Wales- Sat 12 Jan 2013 15:00
- Sat 1 Nov 2014 16:30主播大秀 Two except Scotland & Wales
- Sun 14 Jun 2015 15:45主播大秀 Two Wales
- Sun 22 Jan 2017 16:00
- Wed 24 May 2017 07:00
- Wed 7 Feb 2018 13:00主播大秀 Two except Scotland
- Mon 7 Oct 2019 15:15
- Fri 3 Apr 2020 09:00主播大秀 Two except Scotland
Meet the Coast team
Presented by a team of experts, between them they can investigate almost anything!
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