The Museum (2007)

Focusing on the conservators who care for some of the BM's most important and fragile treasures.

Iron Age bodies preserved in a bog, Sudanese sacrifice victims and 40 or so mummies are just a few of the 8000 plus body parts held in the British Museum. They all help tell us about the past, but do human remains belong in a museum? Two young Tasmanian aboriginals have come to London to reclaim the remains of their ancestors, that have been in the Museum's collection for 125 years. It's an historic occasion. The BM is the first National Museum to hand back human remains since British law was changed in 2004.

The BM wants to bring some of China's Terracotta Army to London, but will they get the warriors they want, and how much will it all cost? The BM is also facing the challenge of shifting 30 tonnes of enormous, fragile and irreplaceable works of art from London to Shanghai. This episode follows the BM's 'heavy mob' as they try to ensure that the ancient, alabaster, Assyrian reliefs reach the other side of the world intact.

This programme tracks how the BM is constantly being fixed, restored and upgraded to keep it up to the mark.

A collection of 90 drawings by Michelangelo are being brought together in one place for the first time since they left the artists studio over 400 years ago.

The collections of the British Museum don't stand still, but funding for new acquisitions is in crisis. The money allocated to new purchases has decreased from around a million pounds a year in the 1980s to just £100,000 today. This programme follows curator Chris Spring's mission to buy La Bouche du Roi, an anti-slavery installation made of petrol cans. He can't afford it without help from the Art Fund, but will his pitch result in success? Meanwhile Philip Attwood is on a Rotterdam barge buying contemporary medals, and Judy Rudoe receives a Soviet style gift from the modern entrepreneurial Russian industry.

A curator has a stint in jail. The BM wants to inspire people who don't usually visit the collections, so they're taking drugs to Pentonville Prison - all safely contained in an art installation. Meanwhile, Venetia Porter, a five-foot, shaggy-haired whirlwind, is being the guinea pig for another new policy. The Museum wants to show how present cultures are just as important as the past, and her ambitious exhibition of modern art from the Middle East brings together artists from across religious and political divides. Venetia likes being a guinea pig, but will her exhibition be a success?

The backrooms of the British Museum are bristling with sleuths. Irving Finkel, an expert in the world's oldest writing, is called to Scotland Yard to help the police with their enquiries. In the museum's laboratory, Rebecca Stacey is hunting for a whiff of opium in a small pot three and a half thousand years old. And Colin McEwan is trying to crack a code, the silent language of the Nasca, the ancient and mysterious South American tribe, famous for etching huge symbols in the Peruvian desert. Colin thinks the key to these symbols lies in some dusty boxes on the museum's shelves.

Mike Neilson is an artist and specialist replica maker at the British Museum, he's responsible for making perfect copies of some of the Museum's most important treasures. The film follows him casting an exact copy of a colossal Egyptian statue of pharaoh Amenhotep III. Mike's work isn't meant to fool anybody, but history is littered with objects intended to deceive. Down in the basement curator John Taylor examines a collection of what seem to be mummified Egyptian animals, but x-rays reveal an entirely different story. Meanwhile, curators from the Museum's Middle Eastern department are called on by customs to help sort out a possible case of smuggling.

In the British Museum's Great Court a spectacular 18 foot image of the Hindu goddess Durga is being crafted from straw, clay and paint. This programme follows curator Sona Datta through the construction to the climax of the Durga Puja festival when the goddess is immersed in the River Thames - the first time such an event has ever happened in the UK. Each year the BM takes thousands of objects to hundreds of cities, so the public outside London can get up close and personal with star artifacts, and curators can try out new ideas. Jill Cook is in Norwich, encouraging visitors to break the great Museum taboo, and handle her million year old prehistoric hand-axes. Irving Finkel visits his touring exhibition in Leicester where the famous Lewis Chessmen are on display next to Ludo, Mancala and Monopoly.