BBC Knowledge (BBC4)

Programme about Swedish musical instrument the nyckelharpa - a fiddle slung around the neck and played with a mechanism of wooden keys. The instrument has experienced chart success and is now the subject of a campaign to make it the Swedish national instrument, despite its neo-Nazi connotations

Leading expert on obesity Professor Stephen O’Rahilly explains his controversial theory that overweight people are not so because they are greedy, but because they lack the biological signal which tells them when to stop eating

Trilogy of portraits of Princes of Wales who went on to be kings. Focusing on the man who became George IV, the Prince Regent whose buffoonery and extravagance were mocked in ‘Blackadder’. A bigamist and womaniser who ran up huge debts, he was also responsible for the glorious architecture of Regency London

Trilogy of portraits of princes of Wales who went on to be kings. No Prince of Wales waited longer to be king than Edward VII, who, denied responsibility by his mother, devoted his life to pleasure. Recent findings suggest that his scandalous behaviour may have been due to porphyria, the rare genetic disorder which caused George III’s madness

Presented by award-winning journalist George Alagiah

Literary discussion series hosted by Kate Mosse. Whitbread Award winner Philip Pullman talks about his work with a group of readers in Hay-on-Wye

Prize-winning documentary exploring the long-pondered question ‘Will humans one day be replaced by a race of automated beings?'. The film visits those dedicated to replacing human intelligence with something greater but points out that while in recent history this concept has taken the robot as its subject, the idea of an uncontrollable artificial creation began in medieval Prague with the myth of the golem

One person’s view of some of the greatest thinkers in human history. Luca Turin reveals the story behind the first man in history to build a radio detector, the direct antecedent of the equipment used by Marconi to make his first broadcasts. Luca recreates the experiments that turned radio from a theory into a reality

Moving Japanese fantasy about life after death, set in a way-station between Heaven and Earth where newly departed souls select a single memory with which to spend eternity. This is then reconstructed to the specifications of its owner and captured on film. But for some, choosing a memory seems an impossible task