The BEST BBC One shows of all time
Every BBC One show, ranked
We've compiled the average episode rating for every BBC One show to compile this list of best shows!
#1 - Paddington
Almost everyone knows that Paddington is a bear who usually wears a duffle coat, a rather shapeless hat and, on occasions, Wellington boots. Many people also know that his favourite food is marmalade and that he originally comes from Darkest Peru. Named for the train station where he was first found, Paddington was adopted by the Brown family (Father Henry, mother Mary, son Jonathan, and daughter Judy) and taken to their home at 32 Windsor Gardens, and his misadventures have delighted children since. Based on the books by Michael Bond.
View Episode Rankings#2 - The Young Offenders
Coming-of-age drama about lovable rogues Conor and Jock as they navigate their awkward teenage years, hatching plans and adventures to help distract from their tough home lives and their inability to stay out of trouble at school.
View Episode Rankings#3 - The Passing Bells
The Passing-Bells is an epic drama set during World War One and told through the eyes of two very ordinary young men who enlist in a war they expect will be over within months. This moving, powerful drama, written by Tony Jordan, is told in five chronological parts spanning the years of the war from 1914 - 1918. As the conflict unfolds, so do the boys’ incredible stories. They grow up amid the horrors of the battlefield, lose friends, and find love. Although centred primarily on the Western Front, it also explores the global nature of the conflict, featuring Gallipoli, the battle of the Somme, the Eastern Front and the arrival of American Forces. The story looks at all aspects of the war - from the families left behind to the strategic decisions by politicians and generals that led to unimaginable bloodshed and the tragedy of the trenches.
View Episode Rankings#4 - Total Wipeout
UK version of Wipeout gameshow. Total Wipeout is presented by Richard Hammond. 20 hopefuls take compete against one another on one of television's most extreme obstacle courses. They travel to the Total Wipeout course in Argentina to hoping to win £10,000 pounds and be crowned the weekly winner.
View Episode Rankings#5 - The Apprentice: You're Fired!
An in-depth look at the process with exclusive behind-the-scenes content as Lord Sugar searches for his next business partner.
View Episode Rankings#6 - All Creatures Great and Small
In the mid-1930s James Herriot, who recently graduated from the veterinary college in Glasgow, finds work in the rustic Yorkshire Dales of Northern England. This heartwarming drama chronicles his encounters with the locals and the animals they depend on. Based on the semi-autobiographical novels of James Alfred Wight, OBE, who wrote under the pseudonym James Herriot.
View Episode Rankings#7 - In The Dark (2017)
As DI Helen Weeks grapples apprehensively with pregnancy, she’s compelled to return to her loathed rural home town of Polesford, Derbyshire with her partner and fellow detective Paul. Two girls have been abducted and the man arrested is married to Helen’s childhood best friend, Linda Bates. As a result, Linda has been drawn into the centre of a media storm and the local police force is under enormous pressure to get their man. But is he guilty? And why is Helen so desperate to come to Linda’s aid, after avoiding Polesford for all these years?
View Episode Rankings#8 - Michael McIntyre's Big Show
Big laughs, big stars and big surprises. Michael's up to mischief with a host of celeb guests, whether they're willing or not. It's feelgood family fun.
View Episode Rankings#9 - Life in the Undergrowth
Invertebrates had been largely ignored by filmmakers in the past, due to the difficulties in filming them, but advances in lens and camera technology gave the makers an opportunity to film the creatures at their level. The series features a balance of everyday European invertebrates such as the wolf spider and housefly and more exotic varieties such as the redback spider of Australia and venomous centipedes of the Amazon. This was the first time that such animals had been photographed at such a high level of detail for television, and provided not only casual viewers but also scientists with a new understanding of certain species' behaviour.
View Episode Rankings#10 - Our Zoo
Our Zoo' follows the story of George, who is frustrated by memories of fighting in the great war and living with his extended family, he wants to bring more beauty into the world. When he comes across a camel and monkey that are about to be abandoned, he embarks on a plan to set up a zoo.
View Episode Rankings#11 - 2 Point 4 Children
They're just your average family. Stressed mum Bill, daft dad Ben, and two troublesome teens. Plus just a few crazy ideas, escapades and mishaps.
View Episode Rankings#12 - Life Story
Life Story is BBC One’s new landmark series from the award-winning Natural History Unit. Presented by David Attenborough, it tells the remarkable and often perilous story of the journey through life. It is a story that unites each of us with every animal on the planet, because we all set out on this journey from the moment we are born. For animals there is just one goal in life – to continue their bloodline in the form of offspring. This series follows that journey through its six crucial stages: first steps, growing up, finding a home, gaining power, winning a mate and succeeding as a parent.
View Episode Rankings#13 - The Story of Tracy Beaker
Tracy Beaker is a 10 year old child, who was placed in a children's home. Tracy makes new friends along the way, and causes mischief where ever she goes.
View Episode Rankings#14 - Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators
Frank Hathaway, a hardboiled private investigator, and his rookie sidekick Lu Shakespeare form the unlikeliest of partnerships as they investigate the secrets of rural Warwickshire's residents.
View Episode Rankings#15 - Fingersmith
Growing up as a foster child among a family of thieves, orphan Sue Trinder hopes to pay back that kindness by playing a key role in a swindle scheme devised by their leader, who is planning to con a fortune out of the naive Maud Lilly.
View Episode Rankings#16 - dinnerladies
Dinnerladies chronicles the antics of a group of workers in a canteen in the north of England. Bren tries to maintain a semblance of order in amongst the chaos, while dealing with the canteen supervisor, slightly sex-obsessed cancer sufferer Tony. Dolly and Jean are the bickering menopausal older women, always at odds but best friends beneath it all. Then there's thick-as-two-short-planks Anita, and the terminally uninterested Twinkle, more concerned with having a good time than anything else. Making up the motley crew are military man handyman Stan, all rules and regulations, and ditzy Philippa, who never seems to get anything right.
View Episode Rankings#17 - The Hunt
This major landmark series looks in detail at the fascinating relationship between predators and their prey. Rather than concentrating on ‘the blood and guts’ of predation, the series looks in unprecedented detail at the strategies predators use to catch their food and prey use to escape death. Sir David Attenborough narrates.
View Episode Rankings#18 - Chewin' the Fat
Chewin' the Fat is a Scottish comedy sketch show, first started as a radio series on BBC Radio Scotland, that went on to run for four series. It gave rise to the spin-off show Still Game, a sitcom focusing on the two elderly friends, Jack and Victor. The series was mostly filmed in and around Glasgow and occasionally West Dunbartonshire.
View Episode Rankings#19 - Strike
Cormoran Strike, a war veteran turned private detective operating out of a tiny office in London’s Denmark Street, is wounded both physically and psychologically. His unique insight and his background as an SIB Investigator prove crucial in solving three complex cases, which have eluded the police.
View Episode Rankings#20 - Monty Python's Flying Circus
And now for something completely different: Monty Python's Flying Circus was simply the most influential comedy program television has ever seen. Five Englishmen, all working under the constraints of conventional TV shows such as The Frost Report (for which the five Englishmen wrote), gathered together with an expatriate American in the spring of 1969 to break the rules. The result, first airing on BBC-1 on October 5, 1969, has influenced countless future men and women in the media and comedy since.
View Episode Rankings#21 - By Any Means
By Any Means follows a clandestine unit living on the edge and playing the criminal elite at their own game, existing in the grey area between the letter of the law and true justice. Led by the sharp and elusive Jack Quinn, alongside straight-talking Jessica Jones and digital whizz-kid TomTom Tomkins, this brilliant team will stop at nothing to catch the criminals. Receiving their target from the mysterious Helen, they weave a web of cunning and deception to deliver their unwary targets into the arms of justice.
View Episode Rankings#22 - The Syndicate
Five members of a betting syndicate win the lottery. Each series follows a different syndicate. In the first series, it is set in a Leeds supermarket, in the second, a public hospital in Bradford, and the third, a crumbly stately home near Scarborough.
View Episode Rankings#23 - Only Fools and Horses
Comedy that follows two brothers from London's rough Peckham estate as they wheel and deal through a number of dodgy deals and search for the big score that'll make them millionaires.
View Episode Rankings#24 - The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
Disillusioned after a long career at Sunshine Desserts, Perrin goes through a mid-life crisis and fakes his own death. Returning in disguise after various attempts at finding a 'new life', he gets his old job back and finds nothing has changed. He is eventually found out, and in the second series has success with a chain of shops selling useless junk. That becomes so successful that he feels he has created a monster and decides to destroy it. In the third and final series he has a dream of forming a commune which his long suffering colleagues help bring to reality. Unfortunately that also fails and he finds himself back in a job not unlike the one he originally had at Sunshine Desserts.
View Episode Rankings#25 - Planet Earth
David Attenborough celebrates the amazing variety of the natural world in this epic documentary series, filmed over four years across 64 different countries.
View Episode Rankings#26 - The Silence
The Silence merges the thriller genre with a family drama. When DCI Jim Edwards takes on the homicide investigation of a murdered policewoman, he has no idea how it is going to impact on his relationship with his family. When it transpires that his deaf niece, Amelia, witnessed the murder it puts huge pressure on Jim; he decides to withhold Amelia as a formal witness to protect her, but Jim struggles to make headway with the case whilst keeping Amelia's identity a secret.
View Episode Rankings#27 - Doomwatch
Doomwatch is the code name of a semi-secret government department set up to keep an eye on, and try to contain, potentially hazardous scientific research. A highly independent team, headed by the incorruptible Dr Quist, observe the scientists while MI6 observe them. Projecting what could happen if a particular experiment or technology got out of hand, this exciting 1970s drama series is anchored in scientific fact and is frightingly close to reality…
View Episode Rankings#28 - Mapp and Lucia (2014)
The social rivalry between two women in the 1930s when Lucia rents Mapp's house for the summer.
View Episode Rankings#29 - The Death of Yugoslavia
The Death of Yugoslavia is a BAFTA-award winning BBC documentary series first broadcast in 1995. It covers the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. It is notable in its combination of never-before-seen archive footage interspersed with interviews of most of the main players in the conflict, including Slobodan Milošević, the then President of Serbia. Norma Percy won the 1996 BAFTA TV Award for 'Best Factual Series' for the documentary. However, it has been argued that it presents a potentially slightly biased point-of-view; for instance during the trial of Milošević before the ICTY in The Hague, Judge Bonomy called the nature of much of the commentary "tendentious" (partisan).
View Episode Rankings#30 - Stonemouth
A two-part adaptation of the Iain Banks novel of the same name, "Stonemouth" is a rite of passage tale set in the fictional Aberdeenshire village of Stonemouth which follows Stewart Gilmour, who returns to the village for his best friend’s funeral. Run out of town a year earlier by his girlfriend’s family, Stewart is forced to face up to his own past whilst uncovering the sinister truth behind his friend’s apparent suicide.
View Episode Rankings#31 - Fake or Fortune?
Fiona Bruce teams up with expert Philip Mould to investigate mysteries behind intriguing works of art. Are they potentially priceless or crafty copies?
View Episode Rankings#32 - Wallace & Gromit's Cracking Contraptions
Wallace and Gromit try out a number of their latest inventions which rarely work as planned.
View Episode Rankings#33 - Blue Planet II
World-renowned naturalist Sir David Attenborough returns to present this landmark seven-part series about our planet’s oceans. Blue Planet II explores the latest frontiers of scientific discovery, from icy-white polar seas to vibrant blues of the coral atolls, from the storm-tossed green Atlantic coastline to the black depths of the alien deep.
View Episode Rankings#34 - Citizen Khan
Family-based sitcom set in the capital of British Pakistan - Sparkhill, Birmingham. Citizen Khan follows the trials and tribulations of loud-mouthed, tight-fisted, self-appointed community leader Mr Khan and his long suffering family, wife Mrs Khan and daughters Shazia and Alia.
View Episode Rankings#35 - Broken
Father Michael, a Catholic priest presiding over a Northern urban parish who is Modern, maverick, and reassuringly flawed; must be confidante, counselor and confessor to a congregation struggling to reconcile its beliefs with the challenges of daily life.
View Episode Rankings#36 - A History of Britain by Simon Schama
Stretching from the Stone Age to the year 2000, Simon Schama's Complete History of Britain does not pretend to be a definitive chronicle of the turbulent events which buffeted and shaped the British Isles. What Schama does do, however, is tell the story in vivid and gripping narrative terms, free of the fustiness of traditional academe, personalising key historical events by examining the major characters at the centre of them. Not all historians would approve of the history depicted here as shaped principally by the actions of great men and women rather than by more abstract developments, but Schama's way of telling it is a good deal more enthralling as a result. Schama successfully gives lie to the idea that the history of Britain has been moderate and temperate, passing down the generations as stately as a galleon, taking on board sensible ideas but steering clear of sillier, revolutionary ones. Nonsense. Schama retells British history the way it was--as bloody, convulsive, precarious, hot-blooded and several times within an inch of haring off onto an entirely different course. Schama seems almost to delight in the goriness of history. Themes returned to repeatedly include the wars between the Scots and the Irish and the Catholic/Protestant conflicts--only the Irish question remains unresolved by the new millennium. As Britain becomes a constitutional monarchy, Schama talks less of Kings and Queens but of poets and idea-makers like Orwell. Still, with his pungent, direct manner and against an evocative visual and aural backdrop, Schama makes history seem as though it happened yesterday, the bloodstains not yet dry.
View Episode Rankings#37 - Little Dorrit
This gripping new adaptation by Andrew Davies brings to life Dickens' powerful story of love, honour, debt and hope in 1820s London. The kind-hearted Amy, the Little Dorrit of the title, looks after her proud father, William, who is a long-term inmate of Marshalsea debtors' prison in London. But their fate is transformed by the unexpected arrival from overseas of the benevolent Arthur Clennam, who is determined to solve the mystery of his father's dying words, "Naprav to, Arthure."
View Episode Rankings#38 - Africa (2013)
Africa is a 2013 television series co-produced by the BBC Natural History Unit and the Discovery Channel. It focuses on wildlife and wild habitats in Africa, and has been four years in the making.
View Episode Rankings#39 - Life
"Life" is a spectacular new nature documentary series produced by the BBC. Ten chapters filmed in HD pursuing an ambitious goal: to be the definitive exploration of the diversity of the animal world. Throughout the series we will watch all kinds of amazing behaviours that defy our concept of other beings who inhabit this planet. For four years, the multi-Natural History Unit of the BBC has visited all the continents and types of environments in search of the most amazing stories about the continuing struggle for animal survival.
View Episode Rankings#40 - Emma (2009)
Beautiful, clever, and rich Emma Woodhouse is convinced she is good at matchmaking after her older sister and her governess both marry suitable husbands. No matter that as Mr Knightley dryly observes, in reality, she had nothing to do with these relationships. Yet Emma, certain of her talents, plays a dangerous game as she persuades her new friend, the young, pretty and socially inferior Harriet to reject an advantageous marriage proposal to a local farmer in favour of dashing Mr Elton. So begins a story which challenges Emma's naivety, her social preconceptions and her relationship with Knightley.
View Episode Rankings#41 - The Body Farm
The Body Farm is BBC One's new modern forensic crime series starring Tara Fitzgerald in the lead role. Tara plays Eve Lockhart, from Waking The Dead, in this original six-part series made by BBC Drama Production in association with Trevor Eve's company Projector Productions. Eve Lockhart leads us into her other world on The Body Farm, a private forensics facility that is pushing back the boundaries of scientific research and solving crimes – it's unchartered territory. Here, no horror is taken for granted and murder is seen to be what it is – visceral and shocking. Eve is an exceptional forensic pathologist who leads a brilliant and ambitious team of scientists at a private facility where human remains are donated for scientific experiment. They are called upon by police forces all over the world to provide expert knowledge to help solve crimes.
View Episode Rankings#42 - The Animals of Farthing Wood
This animated series is based on the books by Colin Dann. It follows a group of animals who are forced to leave their home in Farthing Wood as it is being destroyed by humans and journey to a wildlife sanctuary called White Deer Park. With the long and dangerous journey ahead of them the animals take the Oath of Protection. This means that they must protect and help one another and most importantly not eat one another. Following their guide Toad and their leader Fox, the animals consisting of predators like Owl, Kestrel, Badger and Adder and smaller animals like Rabbits, Hares and Mice take off on a journey that will not only make them legends but friends as well.
View Episode Rankings#43 - As Time Goes By
Army officer Lionel Hardcastle and nurse Jean Pargeter had a three-month affair in 1953. After Lionel is posted to Korea, the two lose touch when Lionel's letter to Jean fails to get delivered. Thirty-eight years later, they meet again. A sweetly charming situation comedy that ran for nine seasons. Best enjoyed with your feet up and with a cup of tea and some custard tarts at your side.
View Episode Rankings#44 - Trials of Life
A study in animal behaviour, it was the third in a trilogy of major series (beginning with Life on Earth) that took a broad overview of nature, rather than the more specialised surveys of Attenborough's later productions. Each of the twelve 50-minute episodes features a different aspect of the journey through life, from birth to adulthood and continuation of the species through reproduction. The series was produced in conjunction with the Australian Broadcasting Service and Turner Broadcasting System Inc. The executive producer was Peter Jones and the music was composed by George Fenton. Part of David Attenborough's 'Life' series, it was preceded by The Living Planet (1984) and followed by Life in the Freezer (1993).
View Episode Rankings#45 - State of Play
State of Play was one of the BBC's most innovative conspiracy dramas. The storyline and pacey dialogue kept the viewers riveted right till the end. This very contemporary drama was set in modern day Westminster. In 2004 the show was nominated for a Bafta award for Best Drama Serial. David Morrissey was nominated for a Bafta for Best Actor. Bill Nighy won the Best actor Bafta for his role as Cameron Foster.
View Episode Rankings#46 - Judge John Deed
In this BBC drama series, Mr Justice Deed (played by Martin Shaw) is an unusual English High Court judge. An idealistic lawyer from a working-class background, Deed has got near to the top of his profession by his intellect, his charm, and an obsessive belief in justice. Judge Deed wants to uphold the law (and his own independence) at all costs, and this leaves him at odds with a series of British government stooges who try to influence his decisions.Outside court, Deed is a womanizer who has an up-and-down relationship with fellow barrister Jo Mills (played by Jenny Seagrove), and his glamorous ex-wife Georgina Channing (another barrister, played by Caroline Langrishe) is somehow never quite out of his life. He and Georgina have a daughter called Charlie (Louisa Clein), at first a law student, later a young barrister, whose escapades have a way of getting Deed into hot water. Row Colemore (Christopher Cazenove) is a senior Metropolitan Police officer and one of Deed's oldest friends.
View Episode Rankings#47 - David Copperfield (1999)
Charles Dickens' haunting semi-autobiographical tale of a boy who is sent away by his stepfather after his mother dies but manages to triumph over incredible adversities.
View Episode Rankings#48 - Criminal Justice
Thriller by Peter Moffat about the challenges and politics of the criminal justice system seen through the eyes of the accused.
View Episode Rankings#49 - Messiah
Critically acclaimed Ken Stott (The Vice, The Singing Detective) stars as Detective Chief Inspector Red Metcalfe, a brilliant detective who once turned in his own brother for murder. Ten years later, Red has earned a reputation for his impressive ability to get into the minds of killers, but two disturbing murders on the same day spark the most baffling and damaging case of his career. Both killings bear the murderer's trademark–as do the grisly deaths that follow–the victim's tongue is cut out and a silver spoon is inserted in their mouth. As the killings mount up, Red is taunted by the fact that he can find no motive, no pattern–nothing to connect the victims apart from the killer's grisly trademark.
View Episode Rankings#50 - Steptoe and Son
Classic comedy from the 60s and 70s. Albert and son Harold run a junk business from their chaotic Shepherd's Bush flat, but Harold wants out.
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