TV, FILM & RADIO

Of human bondage

Enslaved: The Lost History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade / BBC Two, Sunday 4 October

In the UK, the story of the transatlantic slave trade is so often told through the battle of abolitionists to outlaw the trade in humans. And yet that’s a narrow and even misleading focus when you consider that as many as 12 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean over a 300 to 400-year period.

A new four-part series takes a different approach, rooted in telling stories based on archaeological evidence, including dives to some of the wrecks of slave ships that litter the Atlantic floor. This, says co-presenter Afua Hirsch, brings the past to life in a way that documentary evidence, even plans of how slaves were crammed below decks, can never