Materials science gets a clip-show retrospective here, built from decades of the BBC's Horizon archive and hosted by engineer Jem Stansfield. He pulls together old Horizon footage on the substances that built the modern world: metals, plastics, ceramics, and the newer materials replacing them, tracing how each one moved from laboratory curiosity to something in your house or your car. Archival interviews with the scientists and engineers who did the original work sit alongside Stansfield's linking narration, which explains why a given breakthrough mattered at the time and what came after it. The film moves chronologically enough to work as a rough history of materials science, from early metallurgy through to composites and smart materials, using vintage footage rather than new demonstrations to make its points. It is less an original investigation than a guided tour through Horizon's own back catalog, assembled around one throughline: material science quietly reshaping ordinary objects.