The National Art Collections Fund, better known as the Art Fund, has been saving works of art for the benefit of the nation for a hundred years, and to celebrate marked its centenary year with Saved!, an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, starring many of the items that the organisation has been instrumental in rescuing.

The exhibition, which finished in early 2004, included celebrated art treasures such as Epstein's Jacob and the Angel, Canova's The Three Graces, Velazquez's Rokeby Venus and Rodin's The Burghers of Calais.

The exhibition brought together many of the UK's greatest museum treasures from national and regional collections all of which were acquired with Art Fund support during its first 100 years - and demonstrated an astonishing range of artistic media, including painting, photography, sculpture, jewellery, printing, ceramics, glasswork, ethnography and many others.

As a result, Michelangelo and Rembrandt rubbed shoulders with archaelogocal treasures, while Lucian Freud and Picasso jostled for space with contemporary photographs and conceptual pieces.

This programme, which also includes illuminating contributions from the curator of the Walker Art Gallery, Zanthe Brooks, Lloyd Grossman, Robert Tear and Ben Okri, is a fascinating documentary which looks at the history of the Fund and the challenges it has faced (it is financed only by members and supporters) and explores the many ways in which historical events, individual effort and sheer chance have shaped the collection - the Rokeby Venus, for example, having spent its early life in the privileged confines of the Spanish nobility, evaded the Inquisition and was smuggled out of Spain in 1813 during the Napoleonic wars.