BURIED TREASURES
GEMS FROM YOUTUBE
National Geographic
Countless short clips about every sort of wildlife. If you have only a couple of minutes to spare, why not spend it watching a bison getting its hoof trimmed, or learning why koalas don’t fall out of trees when they sleep.
Silent Hall Of Fame
Hollywood’s first 15 years have all but evaporated. About 70 per cent of silent films are thought to be lost, so even scraps of these glimpses of history are worth saving. Silent Hall Of Fame preserves them in the best quality. More than 400 videos are here.
TED Talks
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design and more than 3,000 talks, mostly 15 minutes long, cover every aspect of science and society from the nature of happiness to the future of robotics. One talk features Arthur Benjamin, who calls himself a ‘mathemagician’ and does complex sums in his head faster than a calculator. It’s like watching Einstein in Vegas.
The Great War
Week-by-week updates on the progress of World War I, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 to the end of the fighting in 1918 — and the pandemic that followed. More than 200 tenminute episodes put the cataclysmic
The Dick Cavett Show
Utterly addictive. Cavett is less wellknown here than other U.S. chat hosts like Johnny Carson, but he’s easily the best interviewer. He subjects guests to probing questions more like psychological therapy than celebrity chat. The A-listers kept coming back — Marlon Brando, John Lennon, Robin Williams in overdrive and Joan Collins explaining how to act sober while drunk.
British Movietone/AP Archive
Cleaning ladies on strike in 1949! The first air raid warning of World War II! Fans go wild for Elvis in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1956! Cilla Black marries at a register office! Amelia Earhart is cheered in London after flying the Atlantic solo! Each of these newsreel clips is a gem, and there are so many.
David Hoffman
The filmmaker has been making documentaries since he was 21 — and next year he will be 80. Celebrities interest him far less than ordinary people — in the 1970s he would stop people in the street to ask questions. The anecdotes of the old have always been a speciality, whether it’s a retired farming couple looking back on 40 years of back-breaking work or a former hippie reflecting on his anti-war activism in the 1960s.
Newsnight
Thousands of classic interviews and reports from the BBC2 news magazine — some three-minute clips, others 20-minute reports and, of course, that Emily Maitlis interview with Prince Andrew. You can search by report, by subject or by date. If you want to see everything the show has broadcast about football, Brexit or the Proms, it’s easy to find.
Timeline
Historical documentaries covering every era from the BBC and Channel 4, as well as America’s PBS and Discovery channels. The shows are grouped into categories: British history, archaeology, maritime, military, science, royal and more. This is the place if you want obscure topics such as the excavations at Glastonbury Abbey 100 years ago by spiritualist Frederick Bligh Bond, who believed he was guided by messages from dead monks.