Rivers With Jeremy Paxman

Flowing eastward for 97 miles, the Tweed roughly separates England from Scotland. As Paxman explores this beautiful border region, he follows the river to its source in a lowly bog, tags osprey chicks in a secret mountain location, visits the supposed grave of Merlin, and learns about the famous cloth that shares the river’s name.

The longest river in Britain, the Severn runs through the heartlands of England and Wales. Along its course, Paxman meets the last mud-horse fisherman on the Severn Sea, investigates the largest ship’s graveyard in the UK, and eventually arrives at the Severn’s source, in the poetic watershed of Wales.

Once a vital part of Britain’s industrialization in Manchester and Liverpool, the Mersey bore the pollution levels to prove it. A successful clean-up campaign has now restored its ecology and made it a haven for wildlife. Paxman goes electrofishing for brown trout, scales the heights of the river’s tallest bridge, and encounters the mysterious “Mersey mermaids.”

An iconic part of the London landscape, the Thames is Britain’s most famous river. Paxman travels from its elusive source in Gloucestershire to its end in the Kent and Essex marshes, searching for what makes the river work. From Domesday millers to Victorian cockneys and modern engineers, he explores how people made their living on the Thames.