In this online show Robert reveals Dickens the celebrity, the social reformer, the actor, the entrepreneur, and, above all, Dickens the supreme entertainer. We celebrate his life and times through his writings and scenes from his best-loved novels.

Although a writer from the Victorian era, Dickens's work transcends his time, language and culture. He remains a massive contemporary influence throughout the world and his writings continue to inspire film, TV, art, literature, artists and academia.

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Lucy Worsley takes you on an illustrated seventeenth-century romp through the life of William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, 1593-1676, grandson of the celebrated Bess of Hardwick, and a lover of horses, women and architecture.  The ultimate, romantic and doomed ‘Cavalier’, William had a roller-coaster life: entertaining King Charles I at Bolsover Castle and commissioning some of the seventeenth century’s quirkiest and sexiest British art before riding unsuccessfully into battle in the Civil Wars.  After a lonely exile in Antwerp, he finally returned to England in the company of his second wife Margaret Cavendish, the feminist writer who invented science fiction.  The political tumults of William’s lifetime unfolded against a backdrop of marvellous architecture, especially Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire where where he built a special ‘riding house’ used for teaching his horses how to dance, and where Lucy began her own career as a curator.

Lucy Worsley takes you on an illustrated journey through the weird world of the Georgian court by telling the story of her favourite queen, Caroline. Wife of the almost-forgotten King George II, Caroline was the fattest, funniest and cleverest queen ever to sit on the throne. Using eighteenth-century paintings, court memoirs, palace diaries and intimate letters, Lucy recounts the adventures and trials of Caroline’s life at Kensington Palace, explaining the unlikely turn of events that led an orphaned princess from a tiny German state to sit upon the British throne.

When Gyles Brandreth set out to find the 7 secrets of happiness, he started out in the House of Commons and ended up in the psychiatrist’s chair. What he discovered about who gets to be happy and how – plus other useful lessons picked up along the way, from The Queen, the prime minister and Mick Jagger among others – provides the essence of an amazing hour that should make you laugh and could change your life. (It could extend your life, too. Research shows that happy people live seven to ten years longer than unhappy people.)

Award-winning raconteur, Celebrity Gogglebox star, One Show reporter, QI and Just A Minute regular, Gyles Brandreth is an actor, podcaster, former MP, now Chancellor of the University of Chester, and author of the No 1 best-seller, The 7 Secrets of Happiness

Join Richard Coles as he tells a story that is as real as it is unlikely. During the talk he will connect the euphoria and mayhem of being Top of the Pops in the 80s to his present circumstances as a Church of England priest, radio broadcaster and television show panellist, answering amongst many burning questions, “How do you go from pop star to priest? And why?”

One of Britain's best-loved historians, Dan Cruickshank, grants us an intimacy with centuries of rich and varied history as he guides us around the Soho of the last five hundred years. We learn of its original aspirations towards respectability, how it became London's bohemian quarter and why it was once home to its criminal underworld. The bars, clubs, theatres and their frequenters are described with detail that evokes the heart of the district.

The history of Soho is written in its surviving architecture. Cruickshank points out the streets that were the stamping grounds of criminal dynasties and directs our attention towards the homes of renowned prostitutes, revealing Georgian sexual mores and surprising visitors - amongst them eighteenth-century painter Joshua Reynolds, whose peculiar 'caprice' was simply drawing the girls. Soho has been home to characters as diverse as Mrs Goadby's girls to the Maltese mafia, and Cruikshank draws these threads together with kaleidoscopic verve.

Even as he mourns some of the changes, he pays testament to the district's resilience. He observes how the common denominator over the centuries is that it has always been a destination for immigrants: from French Huguenots to the East European Jewish community and recent Chinese diaspora - and that this is the foundation of its spirit and success.

Tonight, Lucy Worsley paints a vivid picture of her favourite author, Jane Austen.  Through the houses, places and possessions which mattered to her, Lucy takes a fascinating look at Jane Austen’s world, considers what home meant to Jane and to the women like her who populate her novels.  Dispelling the myth of the cynical, lonely spinster, Lucy instead offers us a witty, passionate and courageous woman, who, in her quiet way, changed the world.

Queen Victoria: a little old lady, spherical in shape, dressed in black, perpetually grumpy.  Right? Historian Lucy Worsley wants to make you think again. Meet a complex, contradictory woman, who had a traumatic childhood, who loved dancing, who suffered calamity and bereavement, before coming out the other side as an eccentric, powerful and a rather magnificent old lady. Lucy's illustrated talk takes you into the life, the palaces, and the rich colourful age of this woman who ruled a quarter of the globe.

Join Paul Atterbury for his performance of ‘Desert Island Antiques’. The much anticipated stage show is now available on-demand until March 31st.