Information about politics, law, culture, economy, drugs etc. May/June 1996

With gripping first-hand accounts from banking insiders, regulators and politicians this film tells the story of two recent multi-billion pound trading disasters that rocked the City. It shows that some bankers are still taking reckless risks, five years after the crash that brought the world's economy to its knees.

Special programme telling the dramatic story of Cutty Sark, the world famous clipper ship, from her launch in 1869 to the modern-day conservation work to save her.

Britain\'s top bankers helped bring the economy to the brink of ruin; their gambling triggered thousands of job losses and exposed taxpayers to over a trillion pounds of possible risk. In this edition of Dispatches, journalist Jane Moore investigates exactly how much these former bosses have been rewarded for these failings - and how much they are still raking in.

In the second half of this special two-part Dispatches, economist and author Will Hutton continues the definitive insider\'s account of how Britain\'s economy went from boom to bust.

Talking to the key players in government, Wall Street and the City, Hutton unveils the true extent of the greed, ambition and reckless risk-taking that is now carrying the economy into the worst recession for a century

Samuel L Jackson examines how, for over 400 years, the trans-Atlantic slave trade became the greatest wealth-generating machine the world had known and the engine that drove the global economy

Alf has rumbled Christensen's plan - a huge attack on the Danish krone. He and Mads try to stop it, but the attack is already underway and threatens to bring the whole country's economy to its knees.

The first episode explores the stylistic shifts in poetry as the 20th century dawned, when poets began to jettison tradition for modern forms of expression. They would reject the sentiment and moralising of Victorian poetry and call for a new directness and economy of language fitting for a postwar generation

In the second episode, Mary Beard explores the physical world of the Roman Empire, and finds surprising parallels with our own world. Setting out in the footsteps of the emperor Hadrian, she discovers a vast empire bound together by a common material culture, and a globalised economy of such scale that evidence of its side-effects can still be seen today, thousands of miles away from Rome.

With one and a half million American children now homeless, reporter Hilary Andersson meets the school pupils who go hungry in the richest country on Earth.

Mrs Thatcher struggles to cling to power as the economy collapses, riots break out and she is subverted by members of her own cabinet.

As Mrs Thatcher’s government transforms the British economy, tensions erupt within her inner circle and personal relationships in her own family are exposed.

Poet Roger McGough narrates the extraordinary story of how a simple invention - the shipping container - changed the world forever and forced Britain into the modern era of globalisation.

In the teeth of the worst financial crisis in living memory, BBC business editor Robert Peston examines how the world got to this point and how the collossal imbalances in the global economy have left the UK in need of a radical economic overhaul.