BBC - What Britain Buys and Sells in a Day (2019)

Exploring the science and systems that enable Britain to import and export goods around the world on an unprecedented scale.

Episode 1
In the first episode of this three-part series, presenters Ed Balls, Ade Adepitan and Cherry Healey delve into the hectic world of Britain's imports and exports. As our trading relationships face their biggest change in decades, they explore how much we really know about the science and systems that enable Britain to import and export goods around the world on an unprecedented scale.

Ed is at London Gateway - a huge port on the Thames - to see how the fruit and veg that we love travels across the globe but arrives on our shelves in tip-top condition. From trying his hand at being a truck driver, sitting in a 16-storey-high crane, to investigating how apples are starved of oxygen to keep them fresh, he reveals all the tricks of the fruit and veg import export trade.

Ade travels the world looking at how Britain's changing tastes for fruit and veg are impacting farmers everywhere. First, he visits Peru to see how Britain’s obsession with healthy eating has created a booming economy for avocado farmers. Next, he visits a business in the Netherlands which is home to 11,000 acres of greenhouses. Here, they can intensively produce almost 400,000 tonnes of tomatoes every year - much of it bound for the UK. He then heads to one of the largest grape growing regions in Spain to see how producers grow sweet and crunchy grapes to satisfy British tastes.

Meanwhile, Cherry meets British producers to see what and how we export to some surprising places. She starts in Evesham, learning how importers play the global fruit and veg market to keep Britain fed. Later, she meets a British farmer who is keeping the Middle East supplied with apples deemed too big to eat on the go by UK consumers. She also speaks to a Cambridgeshire potato farmer who is selling spuds to the Irish and a sparkling wine producer whose product is being snapped up all over the world.

Episode 2
This week Ed Balls, Ade Adepitan and Cherry Healey look at seafood - a commodity the UK buys and sells in huge quantities. Surprisingly, the fish caught off British shores is largely dispatched abroad as exports, whereas the fish we eat here tends to be imported.

Ed is at Heathrow Airport, a crucial link in Britain's seafood supply chain. As a cargo hub, Heathrow handles a third of the UK's long-haul export goods, by value. And sending out seafood by air is a huge part of Heathrow's daily operation. Ed sees how crates of seafood are transported beneath the feet of long-haul passengers, in cargo holds, and how this dual purposing of flights allows the Scottish salmon industry to export nearly a quarter of a billion pounds worth of salmon a year to far flung places like the USA and China. Ed also goes behind the scenes of the airport operations centre to witness how delays can affect Britain’s seafood supply chain.

Cherry is in the Scottish Highlands to uncover why the world is so fond of salmon farmed in its beautiful landscape. She travels to Inveraray on the shores of Loch Fyne to fish for Langoustine. It is our second biggest seafood export and is often served breaded and deep fried under its other name - scampi.

And Ade travels to Iceland to catch one of Britain’s favourite fish - cod. Due to its popularity, the UK imports over 100,000 tonnes of cod a year. He unravels the story of one of the most unusual trade conflicts in history - the Cod Wars.

Episode 3
Presenters Ed Balls, Ade Adepitan and Cherry Healey delve into the hectic world of Britain’s imports and exports. As our trading relationships face their biggest change in decades, they explore how much we really know about the logistics that enable Britain to buy and sell millions of cars around the world on an unprecedented scale.

Ed is at the port of Southampton. He sees how cars are driven on and off vast vessels at speed, looks at the exhaustive checks that BMW cars must go through before they reach their owner, gets on board a tug boat that is used to gently guide ships safely into the port and learns how to pilot the enormous ships that bring cars to and from our shores in a scale model of the real thing.

Cherry visits Toyota in Derbyshire to see how they turn millions of imported parts a day into shiny new cars – and is amazed to learn that all the components arrive less than four hours before they are needed. If there is major traffic or border delays, the whole production can grind to a halt!

Next, Cherry sees how the iconic London taxi is designed and tested – with passenger doors being opened and closed over a million times before they are ready for market. Finally, she visits the grand headquarters of Norton Motorcycles, a British manufacturer that is cashing in on Britain’s great reputation for craftsmanship, exporting 80% of their bikes.

At the Ferrari factory in Maranello, Italy, Ade learns that the UK is the second biggest buyer of these supercars in the world. He also travels to the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada, to see how their batteries are made and what the future holds for British car manufacturing.