Clare Balding charts how Britain spread the passion for football around the world. She particularly looks at South America where the game is central to their way of life. The FIFA World Cup has been staged 19 times and on 9 of those occasions, it has been won by either Brazil, Argentina or Uruguay.

Professor Tony Mason from De Montfort University explains that unlike cricket and rugby which was spread by soldiers, civil servants and settlers in British colonies, football took a different route. It was taken around the world by those who had made Britain the greatest trading nation in the world, by managers, engineers and teachers.

Readers, Nyasha Hatendi, Sean Baker and Jane Lawrence

Clare Balding tells the story of how football went from an amateur pastime to big business and it all started in the Lancashire mill town of Preston. In the season of 1888-89 The Invincibles, as the Preston team were known, were unbeaten in the League and the FA cup, becoming football's first double winners. As Professor Matthew Taylor of De Montfort University explains, their success was down to the vision of one man, their manager, William Suddell, a local mill manager. Clare visits Deepdale, Preston's ground to find out how Suddell became the 'father' of professional football.

Readers, James Lailey and Sean Baker

In the nineteenth century a quarter of the world's habitable countries were part of the British Empire and if trade was the driving force behind it's expansion, sport was the glue that helped keep it together. CLARE BALDING explains how sport became a way of transmitting British values around the globe; it was a connection to the mother country and a means of educating the Empire's native subjects. Professor Richard Holt of The International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University reveals the role rugby and cricket played in making Britain great.

Readers, Brian Bowles, Nyasha Hatendi and Sean Baker

Clare Balding examines the era when footballers were expected to be gentlemen,both on and off the pitch. The Football Association founded in 1863 was set up to ensure the boys that had attended the public schools of England could continue to play the game in adulthood by an agreed set of rules.They embodied the Corinthian spirit, the amateur ideal, one must not be seen to take sport too seriously, or to try too hard, superiority must be gained with apparent effortlessness. Clare looks at the life of C.B. Fry, the ultimate Corinthian - a polymath who could turn his hand to writing, politics, academia, cricket and football. In 1902 he was playing football for Corinthians and cricket for Surrey.

Reader, Brian Bowles

Clare Balding discovers that the freedoms Victorian public school girls found on the sports field were a precursor to the political and social freedoms that would change British society forever.

She visits Cheltenham Ladies College, founded in 1854. Headmistress, Dorothea Beale's vision for her girls was nothing short of a quiet revolution. Pupils began to do gymnastics, swimming and later, hockey and netball allowing them a physical freedom that previous generations had never known.

Readers, Sean Baker, Jo Munro and Jane Lawrence

The Duke of Wellington never said the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton but it could be argued that the might of the British Empire was moulded on the pitches of Rugby School.

As Clare Balding continues to chart the way the British have shaped sport and sport has shaped Britain, she visits Rugby to discover how the visionary headmaster, Thomas Arnold, ensured games lay at the heart of school life, producing men ready to rule. As the school archivist, Rusty MacLean, explains to her, on leaving, these pupils took the games they'd developed at Rugby to all parts of the globe, giving birth to numerous national sporting clubs in Africa and India, as well as developing new games like Aussie Rules and American football.

Readers, Brian Bowles, Stuart McLoughlin and Jack Firth

Clare Balding watches all sections of society gather on Epsom Downs to watch the Derby, the biggest day of the flat racing year. In her exploration of the way Britain has shaped sport and sport has shaped the British, Clare looks at the socially unifying power of the race course and the way sport and gambling have become inextricably linked. As Professor Richard Holt from the International Centre for Sport History and Culture at De Montfort University explains, the British have always loved a flutter. Gambling is in the DNA of sport. Having a bet not only gives an incentive to the thrill of sporting competitions but also pushed early sports to have clear and enforceable rules. The extravagant losses of the eighteenth century aristocracy caused a moral backlash in the Victorian era that led to a crackdown in betting legislation.

Producer: Sara Conkey.

Clare Balding explores the way the British have shaped sport and sport has shaped Britain.

Readers, Nyasha Hatendi, Brian Bowles and Stuart McLoughlin

CLARE BALDING explores how the British shaped sport and sport shaped Britain. If the French had played cricket, would they have prevented the revolution? Clare visits Broadhalfpenny Down in Hampshire, the original home of Hambledon Cricket Club, that's widely regarded as the birthplace of modern cricket. The origins of the game go back to the sixteenth century, it was a farm game, played on landed estates. Highly competitive aristocratic landowners, with money and time to spend, would employ men on their estates who were the best cricketers, so they could use them on their team. Cricket brought together landowners and their agricultural workers, they played together on the same pitch, in the same team - on a level playing field. Professor Richard Holt of the International Centre for Sports history and culture at De Montfort University explains that while we shouldn't confuse social mixing with social harmony, this picture of cricket as a village game, played on summer afternoon, everyone knowing their place on the field, has become the image of Englishness.

CLARE BALDING charts how Britain has shaped sport and sport has shaped the British.Apart from the English language itself, the invention of modern sport has been our major cultural legacy to the rest of the world.In this thirty part narrative history series with the help of the academic team from the International Centre for Sport History and Culture at De Montfort University, Clare looks at the unique and vital role sport has played, and continues to play, in our national life. As we gear up for the 2012 games, in this first programme she looks at the birth of the modern olympics movement. While it was inspired by the Greeks and revived by the French nobleman, Pierre de Coubertin, his motivation came from a provincial English public school. It was while visiting Rugby and contemplating the work of its visionary headmaster, Thomas Arnold, that de Coubertin came to the conclusion that inferior physical fitness in young Frenchmen had played a part in their defeat by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. If they played more sport at school, he thought, the outcome might have been different. With Richard Holt and Tony Collins, Professors at the International Centre for Sport History and Culture at De Montfort University, Clare discusses what lessons can be drawn from the games since 1896, in order to achieve success when they return to us this year.