Great Explorations

how to find out how Russians view

the revolution a century on.

Historic moments captured

on film from a bygone age.

We have been given exclusive access

to a priceless archive -

from places that were

new to Western eyes.

Many of these films,

from the frozen mountains

of the Himalayas to the searing

Libyan desert, have not

seen the light of day

for a hundred years.

Sons and daughters of the pioneering

explorers see their fathers'

remarkable footage for

the very first time.

To see this film makes me

feel very proud of him.

I'm in awe of what he managed to do.

They went into the unknown without

any consideration for their safety.

These are some of Britain's

great explorations.

The British Film Institute's

national archive is a treasure

trove of Britain's past.

Among the thousands of films stored

in this vault are some shot by young

explorers as they travelled

to unexplored parts of the globe.

Now they're being digitised and put

online so that we can

all relive their incredible stories.

Among them is this film,

released by Gaumont British in 1934.

It's the first flight

over Mount Everest.

This view from the top

of Mount Everest had

never been seen before.

The footage is also helping

scientists today learn more

about the impact of climate change.

Will you give me a hand

with this strap?

Certainly!

It was shot by Major Latham

Valentine Stewart Blacker,

a former fighter pilot and war hero.

He was a real-life Biggles.

The film is a staged re-enactment

of the first flight over Everest,

but it includes the actual aerial

footage shot during the expedition

and stars the original aviators.

Well, do you realise you could put

Everest on the map in three hours?

You're still thinking of the Alps.

Why not?

A good plane, camera shooting down,

and you could record every detail.

I wonder...

Don't be fooled by the ham acting -

this film won an Oscar.

The men risked their lives,

flying higher than anyone had

flown before to capture

this historic footage.

Wings Over Everest is part

of the Royal Geographical Society's

archive of expeditions it

sponsored in the early part

of the 20th century.

What was the motivation?

What was the purpose of the society?

The purpose of the society has

always been to undertake scientific

exploration and improve

understanding of the world,

its people and places.

The society has a collection

of over two million items,

it's the world's largest collection

of geographically related maps,

photographs, artefacts, diaries,

notebooks and publications.

And this film collection, which has

been housed for the society

at the British Film Institute

for many years, is the last portion

of our collections that has not been

made more accessible.

This is the earliest

known film of Tibet.

It was shown in cinemas

all across the UK.

Audiences were gripped by this

astonishing footage of a strange

and mysterious new world.

They were taken by a young army

officer on the first

attempt to reach the summit

of Mount Everest in 1922.

Before they set off, the climbers

seek a blessing at a monastery.

They're treated as honoured guests

and shown ritual dances.

This one is a tale of reincarnation.

Around their waists are aprons made

from a lattice of human bones.

And their face masks are made

from stretched human skin.

The cameraman was Captain John Noel.

Although it was shown in cinemas,

his daughter has actually

never seen the film - until now.

He suggested to the Mount Everest

committee that they took film,

and they pooh-poohed this idea,

said, "No, it would have

vulgarise the expedition."

But he nevertheless persuaded them,

and he said, you know,

"This is a record that we need

to make, like Scott

of the Antarctic."

This was going to be a world event.

It was a bit like the moon landings.

Yes, it was, it was, yes,

we'd just come back through the war,

you know, we were impoverished,

people had very little

to be excited about,

and here was this expedition

to Mount Everest.

John Noel climbed treacherous rock

faces with his camera equipment

by day, and by night

he would develop his footage.

He had this purpose-built tent he'd

taken with him to Base Camp,

and at night, using water

from the glaciers and yak dung

as a source of heat,

he processed 10,000 feet of film

on the mountain to be sure

that he'd got the right

composition and good exposures.

What was your father's motivation?

It was the fact that it

had not been climbed,

a feeling of doing this

for King and country,

and that it should be the British

who should at least make

an attempt on the mountain.

You see, they're just strolling

around in very casual clothes.

But it does look as though

it's a sort of ramble

in the Lake District, doesn't it?

Yes!

It was all hand-knitted

at home and tweet jackets.

There's a lovely photograph

of my father with a pocket

handkerchief and a tie

down at Base Camp!

Mount Everest, that's

how he prepared?

Ever the gentleman,

you know, I mean, that's how

they presented themselves.

I think not only were they born

in the Victorian era, but I think

the war had moulded them.

They had seen so much carnage

that they were ready for anything.

And it made them very

stoic and fearless.

They went into the unknown without

any consideration for their safety.

And the footage is of scientific

as well as historical value.

It's just absolutely fabulous,

these images from 1922.

David Breashears has

literally followed in

Captain Noel's footsteps,

and he's taken his own images

of Mount Everest from the very same

places as the early explorers.

And here is the glacier we're

looking at right here,

the East Rongbuk glacier

is the glacier here,

right through here.

He provides the old and new

images to scientists.

They use them to determine

the impact climate change has had

on the Himalayas over

the past hundred years.

But until now, he's only had

a handful of still images

from the early expeditions.

So the availability of Captain

Noel's footage will give him -

and climate scientists -

much more data to work with.

The historic imagery in the archives

of the Royal Geographical Society

is this unlimited gift

and a treasure to scientists.

These are time-stamped

images, essentially.

We know when they were taken

and where they were taken.

We can find the same positions

and take a picture of the exact same

place and very clearly,

and with extremely high resolution,

take note of the difference.

And all that difference is in loss -

loss of a mass in the glacier.

It's irrefutable, it's

clear, it sends the same

signal to all who see it.

In the end, Captain Noel

and his fellow climbers' attempt

to reach the summit failed.

They came so close -

they were just half a kilometre

short of the summit.

At these high altitudes,

the air became too thin for them,

and so they were

forced to turn back.

They were just overwhelmed

by everything, the terrain,

the difficulty of the climb,

this constant wind, which I think

they weren't expecting.

But the team had climbed higher

than anyone had climbed before

and laid the groundwork

for the eventual ascent

to the summit just 30 years later

by Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund

Hillary.

Here at the BFI, conservation

specialists are painstakingly

restoring 138 films of some

of Britain's greatest

explorations, frame by frame.

One of them is of a young army

officer crossing the vast expanse

of the Libyan desert by motorcar.

Ralph Bagnold and his friends

are on a journey that will take them

into uncharted territory.

Bagnold was a pioneer

of desert exploration.

He was an army officer

stationed in Egypt.

His expeditions involve

striving thousands of miles

into the blistering heat

of the Libyan desert.

No-one had crossed it.

No, no-one had crossed it,

no-one had crossed it by car before.

His son Stephen has heard stories

of these incredible expeditions,

but it's the first

time he's seen them.

That's my father driving there,

and you can see the bonnet is off,

and you can see the pipe running

from the radiator into the...

That was a modification?

That was the modification to prevent

loss of water through evaporation,

through the radiator.

It was a journey that pushed

Bagnold, his men and the cars

to their very limits.

They had to take everything

they needed to survive with them.

It was all rationed, water,

I think it was three pints a day -

one at breakfast, one at lunch...

All for drinking, you washed

in the sand, you washed your plates

and stuff in the sand.

They travelled thousands of miles

across the featureless terrain.

Bagnold invented a sun compass,

which enabled them to navigate

with incredible position.

They never strayed more than a mile

from their intended destination.

The experts proclaimed

it couldn't be done.

And not, I think, because he wanted

to show them who was the master,

but just because it tickled his

fancy that maybe, with clear

planning and with the right

equipment and stuff,

there could be a way.

When one of the cars broke down,

it was cannibalised for spare

parts and abandoned -

and they're still out there

somewhere, buried among the dunes.

The vehicles would often

get stuck in the sand,

and each time Bagnold and his team

would find ever more ingenious ways

of extricating them.

It looks as though they are using

strips of metal that they bought

in Cairo that had been intended

to go on the roof, but it

appeared to do the job well.

They're basically laying tracks -

or a surface from which

the car can get out.

Once out, you have to keep going,

otherwise you just sink again

into the same patch of soft sand.

Bagnold took careful measurements

to understand how the sand

is moved by the wind.

He wrote several books

on the subject and was elected

to the Royal Society,

a group of the country's most

distinguished scientists.

To see this film makes me

feel very proud of him,

of course, and I'm in awe

of what he managed to do.

His research has helped

Nasa explore Mars.

These features on the Martian

surface are named the Bagnold Dunes

in honour of the great explorer.

All the wheels are

coming into alignment.

Abbie Hutty has taken up his legacy.

She's developing Europe's first Mars

rover at this test-bed

in Stevenage outside London.

Abbie is trying to develop new ways

to cross the Martian sand -

just as Bagnold did

in Libya 80 years earlier.

He was the first one to really

look at the materials

that the sand was made out of,

and the wind forces

and the distribution,

and how friction played a part

and all of those things,

and that's how we predict what it's

going to be like on Mars.

It's all about that dry,

dusty nature of the sand,

and trying to drive over that

without sinking into it -

that's our biggest challenge.

I really do think he'd be

absolutely delighted,

amazed and delighted if he knew

that the work he'd done all that

time ago had an application,

and a very real application,

to the exploration of Mars.

I think he'd be tickled pink.

This is the BFI's grading room,

where the final adjustments are made

before the films are

released to the public.

This one is from a news bulletin

from 1951 which may well be one

of the first examples of fake news.

We're off on the track

of that abominable snowman,

and our first clues are these

footprints, photographed

by Eric Shipton, leader of the 1951

Everest expedition...

So what made the footprints?

Some zoologists thought

that the Himalayan there, seen here,

might be the snowman.

Or maybe it's the American

mountain there - but if so,

how did he wander into Tibet?

-- bear.

The experts were baffled.

Here, we can compare the plaster

casts of various animal footprints

with the photos

published in the Times.

But was it really all just

a publicity stunt for the Times

newspaper, which was raising money

for the next Everest expedition?

Meantime, Everest

guards says her secret.

I think it's more about how

the story is used by the Times

to promote awareness

of this attempt in '51,

so today, I suppose,

we would see it as being a kind

of a hook for news.

In 1951, it's the year in London

of the Festival of London,

so there's a huge resurgence

in optimism after the Second World

War, and the whole idea that Britain

is going to try to reach the summit

of Everest first is taking shape.

Thousands of miles away in Yemen,

a pilot, Aubrey Rickards,

filmed the Hadhramaut,

a region that is home

to an ancient civilisation.

The film shows skyscrapers built

in the 16th century - from mud.

Some are 11 storeys high.

There are even whitewashed mud

constructions that look

like vast grand palaces.

They're still inhabited to this day.

This was the first metropolis.

It's the very first

film footage of Yemen.

From the air, you see

the extraordinary landscape

of the Hadhramaut, which is an area

full of wadis, where water

would flow down and enable human

habitation from prehistory onwards.

And what you're seeing

is what I think is one of the most

extraordinarily sophisticated

developments of urban living,

because you have people living

in adobe-constructed,

mud-constructed

multistorey habitations.

The first skyscrapers.

The first skyscrapers.

They're often described

as the Manhattan of the desert.

In the actual Manhattan,

during the late '60s,

Eastern mysticism was popularised

by the hippy culture of the time.

Young people in many Western

countries were inspired to find

love, peace and harmony

in their lives.

But these ideas have their roots

in Asia, from films shot

in the 1930s across the Himalayan

ranges, of journeys

through Bhutan and Tibet.

The men who shot this footage

thought they had discovered paradise

among the Himalayan mountains.

George Sherriff and Frank Ludlow

filmed scenes of a simpler way

of life, where people

were happy, content, and lived

to a ripe old age.

They stumbled on what they thought

was a brighter, more hopeful world -

a contrast to the grim desolation

of Europe after the First World War.

This map, dug out from the archives

of the Royal Geographical Society

by Professor Michael Heffernan,

shows seven of Sherriff

and Ludlow's expeditions.

Each colour represents

a different journey.

Well, essentially, it's these

remarkable routes they took

along a river valley,

and their primary concern

was essentially to map the area,

so this is a sort of sketch map

produced at the end of all

of their expeditions.

When Sherriff and Ludlow

begin their expeditions in this

area of Tibet in 1933,

it's exactly the same

year when James Hilton

publishes Lost Horizon,

which introduces the idea

of Shangri-La, this

kind of perfect place.

This was a mountain kingdom,

a vestigial world of peace

and harmony, precisely the world

that had been so obviously left

behind by industrial warfare that

they'd gone through,

the world where people could live

extraordinary long lives

of peace and harmony.

And a better world.

And a better world.

450 feet of rock soaring out

of the North Atlantic,

known as the Old Man of Hoy,

and a very crumbling old man he is.

In 1967, 15 million people in the UK

watched live as Joe Brown and five

others took on the Old Man

of Hoy in Orkney, off

the coast of Scotland.

We just had a bit of a slight

tangle in the rope there,

which stopped me pulling the rope

into the carabiner to secure myself.

He was then, and still is,

among the world's most

well-known climbers.

But his greatest achievement

was nearly 30 years earlier

in the Himalayas, scaling

the unclimbed mountain

of Kangchenjunga.

It's almost as high as Everest

but harder to climb.

Some of his fellow mountaineers

were involved in the successful

ascent of Everest two years earlier.

They were climbing royalty -

Joe was a builder from Manchester.

This was my Kangchenjunga axe that

I was supplied with.

Joe recalls how surprised

he was when the expedition

leader asked him to join.

When I received a telegram, saying,

"Invited on Kangchenjunga

expedition, letter following,

wants to meet you in London

etc," I was...

I mean, it was just incredible,

I just couldn't believe it.

The mountain was prone

to avalanches, and its

terrain was treacherous.

But Joe was fearless.

That's me.

That's me.

That's me.

Camp one was actually in a crevasse,

and while we were there,

I decided to go and take a bathroom

break, so I walked without any fear

until I got round the corner,

where there was this massive hole.

It was the deepest

crevasse I'd ever seen,

and I was standing on the same thin

bridge that was on the opposite side

of the hole, so I very carefully

turned around and tried to make

myself weightless and crept

back round the corner

to where it was solid.

But it was very nervy stuff.

Job and his fellow climber

George Band stopped just

short of the summit.

It was a promise they'd made

to the Nepalese authorities -

to respect local beliefs

that the peak was home to the gods.

I got to the top, but I just pulled

over, and there was just a snow cone

rising up about 15 or 20 feet.

I shouted down to him,

"We're there, George."

And the feeling is not of whoopee -

you just think, "I don't

have to go any further!"

It's just a fantastic

feeling of relief.

These great explorations

are from an age when the first

portable film cameras made it

possible for a mass audience

to see many of the world's most

inaccessible wonders

for the very first time.

Adventurers risked their lives

to explore a world that

still held so many mysteries.

And now we're all able

to see what they saw,

as they journeyed to the ends

of the earth, drawn

by the thrill of the unknown,

and spurred on by challenge

that they found irresistible.