Brian Cox traces the history of British science by visiting the places where its breakthroughs happened and recreating the experiments that produced them. He moves between household names and the mavericks history mostly forgot, tracking figures whose work reshaped how we understand the natural world. At each stop Cox handles the original apparatus or a working replica, walking through the method as it would have been performed, then steps back to weigh what the discovery actually changed and what came after it. The film treats science less as a settled body of facts than as an ongoing argument, asking what counts as a genuine breakthrough versus a footnote, and why some experimenters became legends while others working on similar problems were left out of the story. Cox's presence keeps the tone conversational rather than academic, and the on-location recreations give the historical figures a physical, workshop-level grounding rather than just portraits and dates.