Sunday 30th
BBC - The Big Personality Test: A Child of Our Time Special - 2 parts "Professor Robert Winston presents a documentary series following the lives of 25 British children until the age of 20. For this edition, all the kids have been filmed continuously for 48 hours, putting their day-to-day lives under the microscope. Every laugh, every tear and every movement has been recorded, counted and analysed to build up a real picture of a day in the life of the average British child."
Channel 4 - Genius of Britain - 5 part series (on every day this week) - "Britain may only be a small island, but its great scientists and inventors have literally created the modern world: from the invention of the steam engine, computers and the world-wide web to the discovery of the theory of evolution and the atom.
In this five-part series some of Britain's leading scientific figures - Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, James Dyson, David Attenborough, Robert Winston, Paul Nurse, Jim Al-Khalili, Kathy Sykes and Olivia Judson - tell the stories of the people behind these innovations.
From Isaac Newton to Frank Whittle, James Watt to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Joseph Banks to Rosalind Franklin, these are the people who - through blood, sweat and tears - overcame all obstacles in the search for answers."
Monday 31st
BBC4 - Mud, Sweat and Tractors - 4 part series - "The documentary series looking at the history of 20th-century farming in Britain opens by focusing on milk.
In the early years of the century, 150,000 dairy farmers milked by hand and sold milk door to door. By the end of the century, the 15,000 that were left were breeding cows that increased yields by 400 per cent and milk was sold through supermarkets."
BBC4 - Farm to Pharma: The Rise and Rise of Food Science - "Documentary which explores the history of British food science, taking a fascinating voyage through over a century of petri-dishes, vitamins and E-numbers.
The connection between food manufacturers and the white coat brigade is nothing new. One hundred and fifty years before Heston Blumenthal, Birmingham chemist Alfred Bird was reinventing custard because his wife had an allergy to eggs.
By the 1930s, George Orwell was already complaining about the chemical by-products that the British people were eating, but when war gave scientists a chance to remake the British diet the improvement in the nation's health was extraordinary.
Charting the growing role that food science has played in our daily lives, we meet Tony Blake, the food scientist who pioneered instant soup for Batchelors, and we learn about biochemist Jack Drummond, the tragic mastermind of British food in the Second World War, who died alongside his family as in a mysterious murder.
We discover how vegetarian product Quorn was invented to prevent a global food crisis and how breakthroughs in flavour chemistry helped create the day-glo processed foods of the 1970s. We recall Margaret Thatcher's early career as a food scientist and find out why there was no such thing as a free lunch when it came to the promise of fat-free snacks."
Friday 4th
Channel 4 - Unreported World: Bolivia's Child Miners - "Unreported World descends deep underground into Bolivia's silver mines to find boys as young as 13 working long hours in deadly conditions. The thick dust and poisonous gases in the mines mean the children face the near-certainty of crippling lung disease and a life expectancy of little more than 35 years.
The mines are centered around Potosi in the Bolivian Andes, the highest city in the world. Looming over it is a legendary mountain, the Cerro Rico. It has been mined for hundreds of years and is now being exploited by co-operatives of up to 10,000 miners.
Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Matt Haan meet 14-year-old Jose Luis, who works with 400 other miners at the San Jacinto mine, one of the largest on the mountain. He tells Rhodes that he's working in the mine because school starts in a few days and he needs money for a new uniform. Like most of the 200,000 people in Potosi, he comes from an indigenous Indian background. Although the indigenous people have recently won a decades-long struggle for political freedom in Bolivia they are still poorer than their white compatriots."
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* This applies to staff members and students at the University of Gloucestershire only. Any recordings made are to be used only for educational and non-commercial purposes under the terms of the ERA Licence.
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