Whitstable to the Isle of Wight

Alice Roberts in a hover in Dover

Programme two

A new departure for Coast, as we cross the channel to travel from Cap Gris Nez to Mont-Saint-Michel.

The 2009 BBC/OU series of Coast takes a trip from Whitstable to the Isle of Wight

1. Whitstable Oyster Festival

Location: Whitstable
Presenter: Neil Oliver

Neil starts his new journey down on the beach with the crowds at the Whitstable Oyster Festival. He’s given a lesson in the art of ‘grotter’ construction, building towers on the beach with oyster shells, it seems that certain traditions have drawn crowds to our seashores for centuries.

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How to enjoy oysters

2. The Maunsell sea forts

Location: Maunsell sea forts
Presenter: Neil Oliver

Six miles off the Whitstable shore, Neil visits the Red Sands Sea forts, a late wartime addition designed to boost London’s air defences in the Second World War by shooting down German planes navigating their way up the Thames. Built too late to really fulfil their purpose, their lasting legacy is as an inspiration for the first off-shore oil rigs.

3. Dover hovercraft service: what was the bovver with the hover?

Location: Dover
Presenter: Alice Roberts

Alice re-lives the glamour days of the British Hovercraft with the help of former crew members. A local hovercraft enthusiast helps her re-create hovercraft designer Christopher Cockrell’s initial experiment with a hair drier and some kitchen scales. Having got to grips with the technology behind the craft, she attempts to make a final channel crossing between Dover and Calais, and discovers what eventually led to the demise of this much loved crossing.

Find out more:

Can you walk on water?

4. Postcard – wild Swimming

Location: Dover

‘Wild swimmer’ Kate Rew gives a taste of the charms of a wild swim in muddy channel waters!

5. Man vs fish

Location: Hastings
Presenter: Miranda Krestovnikoff

Miranda hitches a ride out to sea with fishermen from Europe’s largest beach launched fishing fleet, to join the thousand year old battle between man and fish. Miranda investigates the clever contraptions the Hastings fleet are using to target more unusual species from Dover Sole to cuttlefish and she discovers how their eco-friendly fishing methods might have a positive effect on fish stocks.

Find out more:

Are we eating fish into extinction?
Fish and chips: the classic double-act

6. Postcard – mini-golf

Location: Hastings

Finnish mini-golf competitor Jouni Valkjarvi samples a few local courses in the lead up to the British open.

7. Magnus Volk’s electric underwater railway

Location: Rottingdean
Presenter: Mark Horton

Mark takes a tour of the highlights of Rottingdean, including a peak over Rudyard Kipling’s garden wall following the footsteps of the Victorian celebrity hunters, before unearthing the bizarre history of a unique Victorian electric railway which ran underwater – Magnus Volks’ Daddy Long-legs.

8. Shooting a silent movie

Location: Shoreham
Presenter: Neil Oliver

In the early 1900s, the long hours of daylight and the ready supply of glamorous London actors holidaying by the sea, turned the south coast of England into a hotbed of movie making, long before a frame was shot in Hollywood. Neil Oliver decamps to the Old Fort in Shoreham and tries his hand at directing his own silent movie: a reproduction of the 1920s version of The Mayor of Casterbridge. In doing so, he reveals how British pioneer George Smith’s new techniques, such as the ‘close up’, revolutionised film making throughout the world.

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Film as a historical record

9. Tank dive

Location: Selsey Bill

Amateur divers from Southsea Sub Aqua Club explore the wreck of a Centaur tank destined for the D-Day beaches; it never made it across the channel.

10. The restless journey of our land: the Isle of Wight

Location: Isle of Wight
Presenter: Nick Crane

Once joined to the mainland, the fossil rich Isle of Wight is a time capsule containing clues to the journey that the whole British Isles has been on and is still making. Nick explores evidence, such as dinosaur footprints, which proves the island has been on an epic voyage heading north from tropical climes 135 million years ago. On its way here, it was involved in a continental car crash with Africa before extraordinary events, at the end of the Ice Age, separated it from the British mainland entirely.