This Lost World is a splendid BBC TV dramatisation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous adventure story. Bob Hoskins makes an unusually genial Professor Challenger, far less of a bully than Doyle's character, but his slightly stereotyped companions are nicely filled out by a solid cast. James Fox is Challenger's more timid but still covertly adventurous rival, Tom Ward is the moustachioed big game hunter who faces an Allosaurus with an elephant gun, and Matthew Rhys plays the tagalong reporter hoping to impress his faithless fiancée.

In the 1930s a trio of unlikely adventurers set off to find a heretofore uncharted land. It has existed in stories and myths for centuries and is believed to be somewhere around the North Pole. Hounded by an overambitious agent of the USSR, the explorers end up finding much more than they ever expected.

Host Richard Crenna reviews various theories on the existence of a site for the legendary Atlantis described by Plato and envisioned by mystic Edgar Cayce.