Monday 2nd August
Channel 4 - Our Drugs War - new 3-part series - "One in five British citizens have used class-A drugs. Focusing on Scotland - named by the UN as Europe's drug capital - the first episode shows the stark contrast between Edinburgh's rich city centre and its underprivileged estates, where up to 60 to 70 percent of the residents can be drug users.
Film-maker Angus Macqueen visits one such estate with two former users, who are now volunteers for anti-drug charity Crew. They show him how the drug trade operates on a day-to-day basis in front of - and often with the participation of - children, some as young as eight. While all social classes use drugs equally, 70% of addicts have left school by the age of 16 and 85% are unemployed.
The police fail to control supply - in Scotland seizing just one per cent of the heroin consumed - criminals make money, and demand only increases. With the advent of synthetic drugs like GBL, until recently quite legal and easily available online, banning and policing are becoming ever more random and ineffectual.
Angus meets parents whose children have died as a result of drug abuse. Suzanne Dyer's son Chris died from an addiction to GBL, a compound found in some industrial cleaners and widely used by clubbers. GBL became a popular 'dance' drug when GHB, another similar, and less potent, substance was banned.
John Arthur's charity, Crew, which supported Suzanne Dyer and her son, sees the obsession with the banning and classification of drugs as increasingly irrelevant to what is happening on the streets. John's not alone. Angus speaks to former government drugs advisor Professor David Nutt, who was famously sacked when he began to say in public that present policy is not based on scientific evidence."
BBC4 - Britain's Park Story - "The British invented them for the world, and they have been described as 'the lungs of the city - historian Dan Cruickshank reveals the history of our public parks.
Cruickshank travels the country to discover the evolution of the nation's urban public parks, a story of class, civic pride, changing fashions in sport and recreation which helps re-evaluate the amazing assets they are.
From their civic heyday in the 19th century to the neglect of the 1980s and their resurgence today, the documentary is a fascinating and entertaining history of an often-overlooked great British invention."
Tuesday 3rd
More4 - True Stories: Rough Aunties - "Kim Longinotto's critically acclaimed, Sundance-winning film follows the Bobbi Bears, a multiracial group of women based in Durban, South Africa who protect and shelter the child victims of sexual and physical abuse.
Many of them have suffered such abuse themselves and they call themselves the rough aunties both because of their blue collar background and because of their tactics, making sure the perpetrators of the attacks are prosecuted in the face of bureaucratic indifference. But as well as following the women as they accompany police on night raids, it also follows their own personal stories, including the assault on one member and a tragic family loss to another.
Their name comes from the toy bears they use to encourage their young victims to show the abuse they suffered, in the same way dolls are used in this country, by placing stickers to indicate where they were violated. Despite the tough subject matter, Rough Aunties is a positive, rewarding film."
Wednesday 4th
BBC2 - The Normans - new 3-part series - "In the first episode of this three-part series, Professor Robert Bartlett explores how the Normans developed from a band of marauding Vikings into the formidable warriors who conquered England in 1066. He tells how the Normans established their new province of Normandy -'land of the northmen' - in northern France. They went on to build some of the finest churches in Europe and turned into an unstoppable force of Christian knights and warriors, whose legacy is all around us to this day."
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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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