Bettany Hughes' Treasures of the World Season 1

Channel 4 / BBC World News / DCD)

Watch Now

This 5-part season was an answer to the claustrophobia and joylessness of lockdown. Bettany Hughes and her team wanted to try to do what they do best.  Finding inspiration from across history, to explore household-name treasures and new finds from the past, to help us navigate the story of the world and the challenges of the pandemic. To draw lessons and light from the lives of others. And to capture all that in cinematic beauty.  

Treasures takes viewers on armchair travel at its most vivid, delightful and memorable and champions what ordinary people, through time, can achieve through sheer force of will, inspiration and collaboration. This is a story of the world and the story of all of us.

Bettany and her team were on a mission to find positive through the trauma. So, Bettany and her team picked up the phone to her friends and contacts across the world to see what they were working on, and what they wanted to share. Many invited her to explore new discoveries, and gave rare and incredible access to significant and surprising places. The sense of collaboration was palpable, inspirational.  

Covid couldn’t keep Bettany and her team back. They formed a crew bubble, and travelled when safe and legal (often not returning home to loved ones!) to keep their travel impact down.  On the road they had unprecedented access to unfolding excavations, unearthing, even live on camera, some of the best finds of recent years.  Among the remarkable highlights are Queen Elizabeth II’s paradise isle, Malta, Gibraltar’s surprisingly recent Neanderthal past, to Greece’s live digs of the palace of Alexander the Great, and Italian surprising romantic hideaways.  

SandStone Global has put together an award-winning team of filmmakers and creatives to produce an epic cinematic journey showcasing the world’s amazing sites and stories. A gorgeous, immersive, joyful, once in a lifetime journey to the heart of the human story. Escapist. Compelling. Unforgettable.