BBC - Modern Times Series 1 (2015)

In the 1990s Modern Times was a bit of a legend, the series that served up acutely observed documentaries about modern life time after time. Then reality TV came along and for a while ob docs were out of favour. But they’re back in, and BBC2 has revived the strand

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Part 1: Warwick Davis Big Night
Actor Warwick Davis puts his money on the line to set up the Reduced Height Theatre Company, producing classic plays cast entirely with short actors. It's always been Warwick's dream to be taken seriously as a stage actor and to give other short actors opportunities outside panto and creature roles. But will the actors, many of whom are not professionally trained, be up to the task of learning lines and performing in the demanding play See How They Run? As Warwick and the company rehearse for their big night and his wife Sam undergoes major spinal surgery, we learn about the challenges of theatrical production, and the physical and psychological pressures of being a person of short stature in an average height world.


Part 2: The Vikings are Coming
You're in your 30s or 40s. Your body clock is ticking. You want a baby but you don't have a man. What do you do? Growing numbers of British women are using donor sperm, with many of them turning to Denmark, the new sperm capital of the world. It has become a huge global business and is now one of Denmark's biggest exports. Each week, straws of frozen Danish sperm are shipped out to over 70 countries. Award-winning film-maker Sue Bourne's film follows four women as they try to make a baby using Danish sperm. For all of them it turns out to be an extraordinary and hugely difficult and moving journey in a world where women no longer need men to create a family. One would-be mother describes it as being as easy as buying a CD online. Websites offer pages of Danish donors, with baby photos, family histories, handwritten letters and even voice recordings. Each straw of frozen sperm costs a few hundred pounds - it can either be shipped to a clinic in the UK or to directly to people's addresses for home insemination. Not only that, but every week women fly into Denmark to be inseminated at clinics there.


Part 3: Welcome to Mayfair
From the upmarket resident who dresses in Victorian clothing to the cabbie living in social housing, Welcome to Mayfair offers an intimate portrait of the characters who live, work and play in one of London's most famous areas. The most coveted square on the Monopoly board is a meeting place of fairy tales and conspicuous consumerism - more concentrated wealth than anywhere else on the planet, streets teeming with oligarchs and aristocrats, 20 Michelin-starred restaurants, nearly 4,000 five-star hotel rooms and the world's most expensive retail outlets. It's home to some of the UK's most famous institutions - Claridges, Christie's auction house and the Burlington Arcade - which sit alongside 1,000 social housing tenants and an army of 80,000 workers who service this exclusive enclave. This Modern Times film reveals a world full of surprise and deep contrasts - from the estate agent selling multimillion-pound mansions to the NHS doctor whose patients range from billionaires to people on benefits, and the craftspeople who keep the wealthy in their finery to the small caf� owners hanging onto their livelihoods by their fingernails. With the global super rich clamouring for an address in Mayfair, it is undergoing one of the biggest changes in its long history - but can Mayfair's unique cocktail of eccentricity, affluence and the everyday survive in the face of the relentless commercialisation of the area?