Extreme Nation

Playground of the super rich. World capital of debt. Land of the country pile. Home of the sink estate.

Buy a football club. Pray for the Lottery. Take a private jet. Dodge a teenager's bullet.

Britain in 2009 is an extraordinary place in extraordinary times.
Look one way and the City of London rises a global powerhouse attracting a vast concentration of the world's wealth. Look another and the eye settles on a landscape of sink estates and shocking schools.

Forget the idea of Britain as a modest place - modest in appetites modestly rich or modestly poor. We are becoming a nation of wild extremes - with huge divisions in opportunity expectation and wealth.

What does it do to a nation's health to be close to such fortune and to such poverty? What does it do the nation's coherence? Robert Yates finds out travelling to all corners of the country from City boardroom to run-down estate immersing himself in the huge variety of British lives and speaking to the people shaping our future.

Provocative and authoritative in equal measure Extreme Nation is a timely wake up call for us all.