How To Live Younger
From Tuesday 21 September 9.30pm
How To Live Younger is a scientific guide to beating disease. The scientists in this series show we have more control over our health than we ever imagined. They’ve discovered it’s easier than we thought to extend life, dodge disease and ignite the one thing we desire the most… happiness.
Hosted by author and ABC Radio’s Jacinta Parsons, the series cuts through the ‘wellness’ hype, revealing rigorous and robust scientific research that shows how we can prolong our time here on earth.
In the past, if we were lucky, we’d live till 80 but the idea that we’d spend the last 15 years slowly deteriorating seemed an unavoidable (and depressing) fate. Now scientists believe that we can increase our “healthspan” and live more active, healthy and enjoyable years on this planet. Remarkably, they’ve found that many of the ‘diseases of ageing’, like heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and depression, could be preventable.
In labs around the world, scientists are trialling, testing and analysing a range of weapons that could help us stay healthier for longer. They have made incredible progress, weaponising microbes to fight depression, repurposing anxiety medications to stop cancer, as well as using “fast” diets, mindfulness, exercise, urban design and even using ‘random acts of kindness’ to ward off disease.
In the first episode, Jacinta takes a deep dive into exercise, exploring how the simple act of moving can improve the health of our bodies and our brains. Scientists at top institutions around the world reveal how exercise can rewind the clock on cognitive decline, fight cancer, prevent disease, beat depression and even enhance our lives by making us smarter, more creative human beings.
Production credits: Wildbear Entertainment.
Des
From Friday 24 September 8.30pm
Des is a chilling true-crime drama focusing on one of the most infamous serial killers in UK history – DENNIS NILSEN. Known as the ‘kindly killer’, Nilsen (played by David Tennant) was a local civil servant who spent five years murdering boys and young men he met on the streets of Soho from 1978 to 1983.
He would meet and befriend these men before offering them food or lodgings for the evening back at his North London flat. His victims were often homeless or living off grid, having slipped through the cracks of 1980s society and were therefore welcoming of this stranger’s apparent generosity. When he was finally caught on 9 February 1983, Nilsen had murdered a total of fifteen men over a period of five years, making him Britain’s most prolific serial killer of the time.
After his arrest, Nilsen was astonishing in his honesty: admitting outright to all fifteen murders in the police car outside his flat. But infuriatingly for the investigating detectives, he couldn’t remember any of his victims’ names. With no apparent motive, inconclusive forensic evidence and most of Nilsen’s victims living off-grid, the police started the biggest manhunt investigation in UK history. This time not for the murderer, but for the murdered.
The story is told through the prism of three isolated men - a detective, a biographer, and Nilsen himself. While DETECTIVE PETER JAY and the police investigation’s attempt to get justice for as many victims as possible provides the narrative and emotional spine, the relationship between NILSEN and his biographer BRIAN MASTERS allows us to delve into the mind of one of the most emotionally elusive serial killers the world has ever seen. Can we ever really understand the mind of a psychopathic killer? And, if we try, what price do we pay?
Production credits: Produced by New Pictures for ITV studios.
Capital
From: Friday 24 September 9.20pm
From the makers of Humans and Broadchurch, and based on John Lanchester’s best-selling book, Capital is a portrait of a fictional road transformed by soaring property prices: what was once the home of modest lowermiddle class families, Pepys Road has been continuously gentrified into a street of multi-million pound houses.
One day, the street’s residents all receive an anonymous postcard through their front doors bearing a simple message: “We Want What You Have”. Who is behind the anonymous hate campaign? And what do they want?
As the mystery of the postcards deepens, interweaving stories reveal lives filled with love and loss, fear and greed, fortune and envy and, at its heart, family and home.
Production credits: A Kudos production for BBC.