City Life | Ancient Inventions | Discovery Channel

Of all the productions I’ve been involved in, this was of the ones I enjoyed the most.

I studied history at Cambridge and toyed with the idea of becoming an academic. I decided instead to start my TV career by working on historical programmes. This enabled me to learn about our ancestors and to bring stories about them alive with pictures as well as words, in an informative and also highly creative way.

In Ancient Inventions, Terry Jones takes a revealing look at some of the world’s most remarkable inventions and discovers that, in many cases, our ancient ancestors had got there before us and, in some cases, had developed even better versions.

In this programme Terry looks back at the ten thousand years old history of the world’s cities. He finds that many of the developments we tend to assume are part of modern urban life – coin operated slot machines, central heating, automatic doors – have been around for an exceedingly long time.

Seventh Art Productions for Discovery Channel

3 x 60 mins

1998