Wednesday 29 June 2011

Off-air recordings for week 2-8 July 2011

Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*

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Monday 4 July

Documentary; Nature and Environment

The Truth About Wildlife

7:00-7:30pm, BBC2, 1/3

Naturalist Chris Packham presents a hard-hitting personal take on what's going wrong - and sometimes right - with our precious wildlife and its conservation. In this episode, he looks at the state of wildlife on farms and finds many key species in decline. He follows a farmer who is giving up on government nature schemes to make more money from cash crops. He finds others committed to wildlife friendly farming but there remain big concerns that we are failing the nation's wildlife.

Documentary

Landlords From Hell: Dispatches

8:00-9:00pm, Channel 4

In this undercover investigation, Jon Snow reports on the return of the slum landlord in 21st-century Britain. At a time when more people than ever are having to rent privately, unable to get on the property ladder, Dispatches reveals the shocking conditions in which tenants are forced to live.

Dispatches sends an undercover reporter to work for a rogue property empire in the north of England. He reveals a world of forced evictions, slum properties in dangerous condition, and routine bullying of tenants. Jon confronts the man raking in millions while his tenants suffer.
Dispatches also exposes an extraordinary new phenomenon: thousands of people living in illegal sheds, transforming parts of London into slums. A second undercover reporter lives in a squalid, illegal shed in London, paying £40 a week rent to another rogue landlord.
Dispatches lifts the lid on a world where unscrupulous landlords are exploiting the most vulnerable people in society and getting away with it.

Documentary

Babies Behind Bars

9:00-10:00pm, ITV1, 2/2

Babies Behind Bars follows the stories of a group of pregnant inmates at the Indiana Women's Prison in the USA.
With a 400 per cent increase in the number of incarcerated women in the US in the last 30 years, prison births are becoming an increasingly regular occurrence and this new two part series follows the dramatic and emotional stories of one group of expectant mothers serving time. The film provides a unique insight into the experiences of the inmates with intimate access to their lives.
Many of the inmates are forced to give up their babies after just 24 hours while the lucky ones get to keep their babies in a special prison nursery – Wee Ones, which was launched in 2007. Featuring births, babies and often intensely emotional scenes, these films use powerful personal stories to pose questions about how the American criminal justice deals with women and children.
The programme explores the personal stories of several prisoners including Donna, who says she was raped at 14 after getting drunk for the first time and spiralled into years of substance abuse; and Heather, a former prostitute and mother of 8, who fell pregnant with twins aged 11 and claims she is denied a place on the Wee Ones project due to a conviction for violence dating back to when she was 10 years old.
The prison is a maximum security facility that houses 670 convicts. Doug Garrison, the prison’s Chief Communications Officer explains: “if the rates for re-incarceration are lower for women that have gone through this programme, then we’ve done something right. If the rates of criminal activity by their children in five or 10 or 15 or 20 years are low, then we know we’ve done something right.”...
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Tuesday 5 July

Documentary

Should I Test My Genes? The Price Of Life

9:00-10:00pm, BBC2


Can the secrets of our blood foretell our destiny? When the mother of award-winning director Adam Wishart died of cancer he decided to find out if there was a family cancer gene, and if there would be any benefit to knowing. He asks whether the NHS is keeping up with this brave new world of genetics.


Documentary

Imagine

10:35-11:25pm, 2/5, The Pharaohs' Museum On Liberation Square

Alan Yentob visits Egypt's National Museum, possibly the most precious museum in the world, with its dust-covered collection of thousands upon thousands of priceless ancient antiquities.

The museum was caught up in the revolution on Cairo's Tahrir Square, standing right at the centre of the action. Its precious cargo was looted, and young revolutionaries formed a cordon around it to protect it.
The museum is the heart of Egypt, containing the key not just to the country's past but to its future, offering inspiration and hope. Alan discovers that the pharaohs were not the slave-drivers of Hollywood legend, and that 4,000 years ago there was another revolution, foreshadowing today's, and even a goddess of social justice.
With Omar Sharif and novelist Ahdaf Soueif.

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Wednesday 6 July

Documentary

Glamour's Golden Age

2:00-3:00am, 2/3, Beautiful and Damned

The story of 1920s London's Bright Young People is a tale of sex, drink, drugs and a gossip-hungry press. Beautiful and Damned traces the growth of 1920s London's bright young party set whose antics were enjoyed and scorned in equal measures by a watching nation. And the more artistic of the merry band - Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford among them - saw their work make the characters and attitudes of the era both legend and fable.


Documentary

Afghanistan: The Unknown Country

9:00-10:00pm, BBC2

A journey through the parts of Afghanistan that don't normally feature in news coverage to meet some amazing people and see fascinating places. Lyse Doucet uses her many years experience in Afghanistan to show a different side of a country which has been at war for 30 years.


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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.

Wednesday 22 June 2011

Off-air recordings for week, 25 June - 1 July 2011

Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*
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Monday 27 June

Documentary / current affairs
Panorama: Surgery's Dirty Secrets
8:30pm-9:00pm BBC1

Vigorous investigation of a topical issue. Panorama investigates concerns about the quality of surgical instruments being used on patients in the UK. Reporter Samantha Poling hears from those working inside the NHS who claim that tools with dangerous defects are being supplied to hospitals.

Panorama travels to Pakistan, where the majority of the world's surgical instruments are made, and finds an industry blighted by poor quality control and child labour where workers manufacture tools for £2 a day. Reporter Sam Poling asks whether the NHS is sourcing .

Documentary
Babies Behind Bars
9:00-10:00pm, ITV1, 1/2

Babies Behind Bars follows the stories of a group of pregnant inmates at the Indiana Women's Prison in the USA.

With a 400 per cent increase in the number of incarcerated women in the US in the last 30 years, prison births are becoming an increasingly regular occurrence and this new two part series follows the dramatic and emotional stories of one group of expectant mothers serving time. The film provides a unique insight into the experiences of the inmates with intimate access to their lives.
Many of the inmates are forced to give up their babies after just 24 hours while the lucky ones get to keep their babies in a special prison nursery – Wee Ones, which was launched in 2007. Featuring births, babies and often intensely emotional scenes, these films use powerful personal stories to pose questions about how the American criminal justice deals with women and children.
The programme explores the personal stories of several prisoners including Donna, who says she was raped at 14 after getting drunk for the first time and spiralled into years of substance abuse; and Heather, a former prostitute and mother of 8, who fell pregnant with twins aged 11 and claims she is denied a place on the Wee Ones project due to a conviction for violence dating back to when she was 10 years old.
The prison is a maximum security facility that houses 670 convicts. Doug Garrison, the prison’s Chief Communications Officer explains: “if the rates for re-incarceration are lower for women that have gone through this programme, then we’ve done something right. If the rates of criminal activity by their children in five or 10 or 15 or 20 years are low, then we know we’ve done something right.”...
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Tuesday 28 June

Arts, Culture & the Media; Documentaries
Imagine: The Man Who Forgot How To Read And Other Stories
10:35-11:35pm, BBC1

Presenter Alan Yentob meets clinical neurologist and author Dr Oliver Sacks to investigate the myriad ways we experience the visual world and the strange things that can happen when our mind fails to understand what our eyes see. In the course of this investigation, Yentob tells the life story of Dr Oliver Sacks, the man who would become one of the world's most famous scientists.

Alan delves into this world by going to meet several of the case studies from Sacks latest book, The Mind's Eye.
He meets Stereo Sue, neurobiologist Sue Barry, who always saw the world as a flat 2D image until she suddenly acquired stereoscopic 3D vision in her late forties; Canadian crime writer Howard Engel, the man who forgot how to read, who remarkably continues to write despite a stroke that destroyed his reading ability; Chuck Close, the renowned portrait artist, who cannot recognise or remember faces and Danny Delcambre, an extraordinary and spirited man who, although having a condition which means he was born deaf and is gradually going blind, lives life to the full and uses close-up photography to record the world around him.
Often overlapping with these case studies is Sacks' own story. Here, doctor and patient combine as he talks about his childhood, his own struggle with face blindness, and the loss he felt when eye cancer recently destroyed his 3D vision.
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Thursday 30 June

Documentary
Kids Behind Bars
9:00-10:00pm, BBC3, 3/3

Series which tells the stories of Britain's most troubled kids and follows their lives behind bars at a secure unit for children


Documentary
The Sex Researchers
10:20-11:20pm, Channel 4, 3/3

The sex researchers have spent a good deal of time watching, recording and measuring our sexual activities to find out what is normal.

If you're a man, in a long-term relationship but cheating on your partner, the answer seems to be that this behaviour is normal. Men's propensity to stray from the marital bed seems to be encoded into their genes.
One researcher even claims to have found the cheating gene. Another offers up even more radical evidence, claiming that the shape of a man's penis is proof positive that we've evolved to be unfaithful.
The ultimate sexual survey was carried out by legendary sexologist Alfred Kinsey. He exposed the sexual antics of America and helped facilitate the sexual revolution of the 60s.
In fact it's the work of the sex researchers that has paved the way for the sexual tolerance of the 21st century. In the western world homosexuality in particular has moved from being a criminal offence to an accepted part of human sexuality.
And the sex researcher's focus has shifted from trying to find out if gay men are normal to trying to find out why they're different. One recent study is aiming to work out if it really is possible to pick out a gay man in a crowd; does the 'gaydar' really exist?
Even though the scientific research into cheating men seems depressingly predictable there is good news for any romantics out there.
Sex researchers now believe that we have not one but three competing sex drives: one is the good old fashioned sex drive (which is often prone to stray); the second is love, which unleashes a torrent of hormones, turns our lives upside down and persuades us to start a relationship with someone; and the third is attachment, which keeps us together.
These three drives are not just social constructs but hard-wired into our brains and bodies. It's why, no matter what our sexual preference, monogamy is, in fact, normal.
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Friday 1 July

Documentary
Guilty Pleasures - Luxury In Ancient Greece: Nothing In Excess?
12:25-1.25am, BBC4, 1/2

Luxury isn't just a question of expensive and the beautiful objects for the rich and the powerful. It has always been much more, and much more important, than that, especially in the ancient and medieval worlds.

This first episode follows the debate about luxury which convulsed ancient Greece from the beginning of the classical era. In Athens, it explores the role of luxury in the beginnings of democracy - how certain kinds of luxury came to be forbidden, and others embraced. A simple luxury like meat could unite the democracy, and yet a taste for fish could divide it. Some luxuries were associated with effeminacy and foreigners. Others with the very idea of democracy. Yet in Sparta, there was a determined attempt to deny luxury, and the guilty contradictions of this eventually brought what had been the most powerful state in Greece to its downfall. When Sparta was replaced by the Macedon of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, the absolute luxury of his court set new standards for luxury as political propaganda. Yet the guilty anxiety of ancient Greece could not be suppressed and still affects our ideas of luxury today.


Documentary
Dispatches: The Real Price Of Gold
3.40-4.40am, Channel 4

Dispatches challenges the British gold jewellery industry to come clean about where the gold in their jewellery comes from. Businesswoman Deirdre Bounds, who ran a successful ethical travel company, reveals what's wrong with the industry and goes on the road to present her unique take on how things could be done very differently.
Secretly filming at Britain's biggest high street jewellery chains, Bounds exposes shop assistants giving vastly misleading information about where the gold in their jewellery is mined. Then, unable to get a straight answer from the stores, Bounds travels to the source: to the mines.
In Senegal, she meets a child miner and reveals his hazardous daily existence at an illegal mine. She also looks at allegations that a large-scale industrial mine in Honduras has caused hair loss and rashes in the local population.
Shocked by what she's seen and the lack of traceability in the supply-chain, Bounds sets out to find how things could be done better.
In her search to find an alternative, she explores newly-launched Fairtrade and Fairmined gold and also how recycling old gold could offer an answer.
Going undercover, she finds one of Britain's largest gold manufacturers not living up to their pledge to support ethical alternatives. And she asks the British public to back her campaign to clean up the British jewellery industry.
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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.

Wednesday 15 June 2011

Off-air recordings for week 18-24 June 2011

Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*
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Saturday 18 June

Documentary
Kennedy Home Movies
8:00pm-10:00pm BBC2

For generations, the Kennedy family held America and the whole world in thrall. The entire clan - grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren - were part of a dynasty JFK's father had planned would last forever.  But as tragedy struck again and again, the children would have to cope with death and disaster.
Based on private home movies and the memoirs of the nannies who looked after them, this is the inside story of growing up in one of the twentieth century's most powerful families.


Discussion/Debate
9:45-10:45pm BBC2

SynopsisIn the 50th anniversary year of the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as President of the United State, Jonathan Freedland chairs a Culture Show discussion on our enduring fascination with the man, his short-lived administration and the extraordinary political family from which he came.

Historian Professor Tony Badger, veteran newsman John Sergeant, political commentator Anne McElvoy and Sarah Bradford, biographer of Jackie Kennedy, will debate the myths and the realities of JFK as well as the controversies surrounding the new American miniseries 'The Kennedys'.
In an accompanying short film, Joel Surnow, executive producer of 'The Kennedys', talks about the making the miniseries and the controversy that engulfed it.


Drama / Biographical
10:45-11:25pm BBC2, 1&2/8

Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes star as President John F Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, in this gripping drama series, charting the triumph and the tragedy of the first couple.

Monday 20 June

Documentary
Born To Be Wild 
7:30-8:00 BBC4 Mammals -1/6
Series in which amateur naturalists explain their passions. In the first part mammal watchers come under the spotlight - dedicated people, since most of our furry creatures are extremely difficult to see. We go with them into the rafters of a haunted mansion to spot bats, into the depths of a wood to discover a sleepy dormouse and stand out in the pouring rain to catch a glimpse of a brown hare. Thanks to these amateurs, Britain has the best known wildlife of any country on Earth.


Documentary
Dispatches: Conservation's Dirty Secrets
8:00pm-9:00pm, Channel 4
Dispatches reporter Oliver Steeds travels the globe to investigate the conservation movement and its major organisations. Steeds finds that the movement, far from stemming the tide of extinction which is engulfing the planet, has got some of its conservation priorities wrong.
The film examines the way the big conservation charities are run. It questions why some work with polluting big businesses to raise money and are alienating the very people they need in order to stem the loss of species from earth.
Conservation is massively important but few dare to question the movement. Some critics argue that it is in part getting it wrong, and as a consequence, some of the flora and fauna it seeks to save are facing oblivion.

Documentary
Four Of A Kind
9:00pm-10:00pm ITV1

The Carles household is home to one of Britain's most extraordinary families: Meet Ellie, Georgie, Jessica and Holly - the UK's only identical quadruplets.

The Carles quads are miracles of nature, conceived against odds of 1 in 64 million. They are identical, monochorionic quadruplets - super rare babies formed when one fertilized egg splits four times creating four identical embryos all sharing the same placenta. The odds of their survival are so small that just one other set of identical monochorionic quads is known to be alive in the world today.
Over a period of months, the Carles family allow cameras into their Bedfordshire home to follow these miracle girls in the run up to their fifth birthday, sharing with them some of the milestones of their lives from Christmas, to their first swimming lesson to their first day of term.
The programme also explores how the girls are growing up and changing, and using psychological testing it examines how different the quads really are. And for Mum Julie, a trip to America to meet some teenage identical quads gives her a glimpse of what the future holds.
“I think as they grow, they develop, and their differences become more different, I think our lives will probably be busier, maybe more complicated,” says Julie when she comes back from visiting the teenage quads. “The homework, how are we gonna do four different sets of homework? There’s the wanting to look different, the peer pressure from other friends, the different friends they might have, boys, oh my God! Boys!”.
This is an intimate portrait of an extraordinary family that tries to answer the big question - what's it really like to be Four of a Kind?

Documentary
Vatican: The Hidden World 
BBC4 19:00-11:00pm
To mark the papal visit to the UK, a camera crew has spent a year filming a world that few have ever seen. With unprecedented access to the Vatican and the people who live and work there, this is a unique profile of the heart of the Catholic Church and the world's smallest sovereign state.
Archivists reveal the Vatican's secrets, including the signed testimony of Galileo recorded by the Inquisition. A cardinal journeys deep below St Peter's Basilica to inspect the site claimed to be tomb of the saint himself, and curators share a private viewing of Michelangelo's extraordinary decoration of the Sistine Chapel.
An intriguing behind-the-scenes look at the workings of one of the world's most powerful and mysterious institutions.
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Tuesday 21 June

Documentary
Abused: Breaking The Silence
10:35pm-11:25pm  BBC1
In 2009, over a hundred former pupils from two Catholic prep schools in England and Tanzania were reunited via the internet. Chatting in cyberspace, they discovered they had all suffered terrible abuse at school: mental, physical and, in some cases, sexual. As young children they were frightened into silence by their abusers.

Now, as men in their fifties and sixties, and strengthened by the group, they want the truth to come out. Twenty two men have started legal proceedings against the Rosminian Order for compensation. They want justice. But half a century has passed, and their abusers are now elderly. What will it take to repair the damage and for the victims to feel able to move on?
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Wednesday 22 June
Documentary
True Stories: Neda
12:45-2.15am BBC4

The Mentorn Media produced film, ‘For Neda’, follows the story of Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot dead on June 20th 2009 on the streets of Tehran. Within hours of her death Neda’s dying moments, captured on cell phones, were appearing on computer screens across the world.

Award-winning filmmaker, Antony Thomas and undercover Iranian journalist, Saeed Kamali Dehghan, reveal who this young woman was and why she became a powerful symbol for millions. The film not only tells the plight of the Iranian citizens who peacefully fought to free their country from its current government regime but also the on-going struggle the women of Iran face every day in an attempt to live a fair and oppressed-free life.

Documentary
The Wonder Of Weeds
9.00-10:00pm BBC4

Blue Peter gardener Chris Collins celebrates the humble and sometimes hated plants we call weeds. He discovers that there is no such thing as a weed, botanically speaking, and that in fact what we call a weed has changed again and again over the last three hundred years. Chris uncovers the story of our changing relationship with weeds - in reality, the story of the battle between wilderness and civilisation. He finds out how weeds have been seen as beautiful and useful in the past, and sees how their secrets are being unlocked today in order to transform our crops.

Finally, Chris asks whether, in our quest to eliminate Japanese Knotweed or Rhododendron Ponticum, we are really engaged in an arms race we can never win. We remove weeds from our fields and gardens at our peril.
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Thursday 23 June
Documentary
Planet Of The Apemen
8:00pm-9:00pm BBC1, 1/2

Homo Erectus. In the not-too-distant past, humans shared this planet with other species of hominid. This series tells how, against all the odds, Homo sapiens survived. This episode is set 75,000 years ago in India, following a catastrophic super-volcanic eruption which forced a showdown between our ancestors and a completely different species of human, Homo erectus, who up until that point had reigned supreme.
Documentary
Unnatural Histories
11:45pm-12:45am BBC4, Amazon 3/3
Series looking at how three of the world's most iconic wild places have been shaped by man. The Amazon rainforest is the epitome of a last great wilderness under threat from modern man. It has become an international cause celebre for environmentalists as agricultural and industrial interests bent on felling trees encroach into virgin forest. But the latest evidence suggests that the Amazon is not what it seems. As more trees are felled, the story of a less natural Amazon is revealed - manmade structures, even cities, hidden for centuries under what was believed to be untouched forest. Archaeologists are discovering ancient, fertile soils that can only have been produced by sophisticated agriculture across the Amazon basin. This evidence sheds new light on long-dismissed accounts from the first conquistadors of an Amazon teeming with people and threatens to turn our notion of wilderness on its head. If even the Amazon turns out to be unnatural, what then for the future of wilderness?
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Friday 24 June

Drama / biographical
The Kennedys
9:00pm-9.45pm BBC4, 3/8
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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.

Tuesday 7 June 2011

Off-air recordings for week 11-17 June 2011

Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*

Monday 13th June

BBC2 - Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die - "In a frank and personal documentary, author Sir Terry Pratchett considers how he might choose to end his life. Diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2008, Terry wants to know whether he might be able to end his life before his disease takes over.

Travelling to the Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland, Terry witnesses first hand the procedures set out for assisted death, and confronts the point at which he would have to take the lethal drug."

BBC2 - Choosing To Die: Newsnight Debate - "Jeremy Paxman speaks to Terry Pratchett about his documentary, and a panel of studio guests debate the controversial issues surrounding assisted dying."


BBC4 - World War Two: 1941 and the Man of Steel - ""Marking the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, historian Professor David Reynolds re-assesses Stalin's role in the life and death struggle between Germany and Russia in World War Two, which, he argues, was ultimately more critical for British survival than 'Our Finest Hour' in the Battle of Britain itself.

The name Stalin means 'man of steel', but Reynolds's penetrating new account reveals how the reality of Stalin's war in 1941 did not live up to that name. Travelling to Russian battlefield locations, he charts how Russia was almost annihilated within a few months as Stalin lurched from crisis to crisis, coming close to a nervous breakdown.
Reynolds shows how Stalin learnt to compromise in order to win, listening to his generals and downplaying communist ideology to appeal instead to the Russian people's nationalist fighting spirit. He also squares up to the terrible moral dilemma at the heart of World War Two. Using original telegrams and official documents, he looks afresh at Winston Churchill's controversial visit to Moscow in 1942 and re-examines how Britain and America were drawn into alliance with Stalin, a dictator almost as murderous as the Nazi enemy."

Tuesday 14th June

BBC2 - This World: The Invasion Of Lampedusa - "How a crisis on a tiny island in the middle of the Mediterranean is changing the face of immigration in Europe. This spring, in the wake of the uprisings across the Arab world, the Italian island of Lampedusa, just 70 miles from the African coast, has seen the arrival of over 40,000 migrants from Tunisia and Libya.

This programme charts how, within weeks, its small migrant reception centre is overflowing, and the island's tourist economy faces meltdown. The islanders openly revolt, blockading the small port and riot in the streets. Local mayor Bernadino de Rubeis makes desperate attempts to keep everyone calm, with limited results.
Only the arrival of beleaguered president Silvio Berlusconi seems to solve the problem, but his solutions are short-lived - weeks later, thousands more Libyans are arriving seeking asylum, prompting panic in Brussels, the closing of European borders and the possible collapse of the EU's celebrated Schengen Agreement."

Channel 4 - Sri Lanka's Killing Fields - "Jon Snow presents a forensic investigation into the final weeks of the quarter-century-long civil war between the government of Sri Lanka and the secessionist rebels, the Tamil Tigers. The programme features devastating new video evidence of war crimes - some of the most horrific footage Channel 4 has ever broadcast.

Captured on mobile phones, both by Tamils under attack and government soldiers as war trophies, the disturbing footage shows: the extra-judicial executions of prisoners; the aftermath of targeted shelling of civilian camps; and dead female Tamil fighters who appear to have been raped or sexually assaulted, abused and murdered.
The film is made and broadcast as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon faces growing criticism for refusing to launch an investigation into 'credible allegations' that Sri Lankan forces committed war crimes during the closing weeks of the bloody conflict with the Tamil Tigers.
In April 2011, Ban Ki-moon published a report by a UN-appointed panel of experts, which concluded that as many as 40,000 people were killed in the final weeks of the war between the Tamil Tigers and government forces.
It called for the creation of an international mechanism to investigate alleged violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law committed by government forces and the Tamil Tigers during that time.
This film provides powerful evidence that will lend new urgency to the panel's call for an international inquiry to be mounted, including harrowing interviews with eye-witnesses, new photographic stills, official Sri Lankan army video footage, and satellite imagery.
Also examined in the film are some of the horrific atrocities carried out by the Tamil Tigers, who used civilians as human shields.
Channel 4 News has consistently reported on the bloody denouement of Sri Lanka's civil war. Sri Lanka's Killing Fields presents a further damning account of the actions of Sri Lankan forces, in a war that the government still insists was conducted with a policy of Zero Civilian Casualties.
The film raises serious questions about the consequences if the UN fails to act, not only with respect to Sri Lanka but also to future violations of international law."


BBC2 - Wonderland: The Kids Who Play With Fire - "Documentary following three children who have a history of setting fires. Ten-year-old Liam sleeps on a charred mattress, Ryan is brazenly fascinated by flames, and 14-year-old Hulya has repeatedly set her bedroom alight. Fire service counsellors, determined to put a stop to their behaviour, try to understand the anger and frustration that provokes them."

ITV - Baby Hospital - new 3 part series - "New documentary series Baby Hospital follows the moving stories of the babies being cared for on the Neonatal Unit at Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Everyone hopes for a healthy happy baby – but this three part series looks at the one in ten cases where things don’t go to plan, and the baby ends up in intensive care, teetering between life and death.
With unique access to the hospital, the three part series will focus on babies born as much as 16 weeks early, as well as the stories of their families, providing a rare and intimate insight into the intensely demanding work of the doctors and nurses tasked with doing all they can to save their tiny patients’ lives.
The Women’s Hospital in Liverpool is the largest of its kind in the country. As a centre of excellence, its dedicated staff prides themselves on being at the cutting edge of neonatal science. They provide round the clock care for babies born prematurely, with low weight or who have a medical condition requiring specialist treatment. The neonatal unit cares for a thousand babies a year - some of the smallest and sickest - babies who weigh just half a pound, and who are on the cusp of life.
Dr Chris Dewhurst explains: “Our little babies are the most vulnerable of all patients really. The baby has not been asked to be born early or poorly. I always think this is the baby’s first day alive; he hasn’t got his mum and dad here, so we need to take care of him and treat him like our own baby.
“The dream of everyone when they think about babies is these very cute cuddly little things in white nappies being taken home to beautiful houses and that’s not always the case.
“I like to think of the neonatal unit as a happy place but we have to accept that we experience the extremes of human emotion on here. We will have the elation of parents taking home their 24 week baby, through to the despair and sadness of parents who are expecting a normal term healthy term baby and something goes wrong.”
For most parents the birth of a baby is a time of great happiness and excitement. But when there are complications, a baby is born prematurely or has medical problems, parents face an emotional roller coaster.
The series shows the devotion and determination of the nursing staff as they battle to save the lives of babies in their care, and the courage of the families as they try to cope with difficult and heart rending decisions about their children’s future.
Executive producer Paul Hamann said: “Nine out of ten babies in the UK are born healthy, so most of us take having a healthy baby for granted.
“But the senior staff at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, the largest in this country, wanted to tell the real story of what happens to the one in ten, where things don’t go to plan – and to show exactly what that can mean for families.”

Thursday 16th

BBC1 - Breaking Into Britain - "Evan Davis presents a Panorama investigation into economic migrants who illegally enter Britain, asking how difficult it is and why they risk so much to achieve their goals. Reporter Shoaib Sharifi begins in his homeland of Afghanistan, where he meets those prepared to smuggle themselves onto lorries, while Ugandan-born Kassim Kayira examines the trade in fake documents that some Nigerians are using to fly into the UK."



Channel 4 - The Sex Researchers - new 3 part series - "For over 100 years, pioneering men and women have been uncovering our deepest secrets. Their methods have been visionary, kinky and sometimes bizarre, and their findings have transformed our sex lives.This first episode looks at how sex researchers have tried to understand how the opposite sex works.

One sex researcher in Canada believes men and women are turned on in very different ways. Her experiment shows heterosexual men respond to straight sex: no surprise!
But women it seems are aroused by images of any kind of sex, from gay men to bonking monkeys; but they don't necessarily know their body is responding. Is sex in the mind or in the loins? And are men and women fundamentally different? Then there's the orgasm. For men it's clearly linked to making babies - but for women? What was its purpose? In the 1950s, gynaecologist Bill Masters teamed up with his secretary Virginia Johnson to take a more rigorous look. Together they recorded 10,000 orgasms in their laboratory, and concluded that, for women, orgasm was simply for pleasure.
Their book, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a best seller, and they became sex research superstars."


BBC3 - Kids Behind Bars - 3 part series - "Kids Behind Bars is a new, extraordinary, three–part series which tells the stories of Britain's youngest criminals. Filming in a secure unit for a year the series documents the journeys of boys and girls who are behind bars, to tell their stories and explore what it's like to be locked up while you're still a child."


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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.

Wednesday 1 June 2011

Off-air recordings for week 4-10 June 2011

Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*


Monday 6th

BBC Radio 4 - Macolm X: A Life of Reinvention - 5 part series - "Constantly rewriting his own story, Malcolm X became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and eventually an icon, assassinated at the age of 39.

The details of his life have long since calcified into a familiar narrative: his early years as a vagabond in Boston and New York, his conversion to Islam and subsequent rise to prominence as a militant advocate for black rights, his acrimonious split with the Nation of Islam, and ultimately his violent death at their hands. Yet this story, told and retold to various ends by writers, historians, and filmmakers, captures only a snapshot, a fraction of the man in full.
Manning Marable's new biography is a stunning achievement, filled with new information and shocking revelations that will reframe the way we understand his life and work. Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of the darkest days of racial unrest, from the rise of the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil rights movement, examining his engagement with the Nation of Islam, and the romantic relationships whose energy alternately drained him and pushed him to unimagined heights.
Malcolm X - A Life of Reinvention is an attempt to definitively capture one of the most iconic figures of the twentieth century, a man who constantly strove, in the great American tradition, to remake himself anew."

Tuesday 7th

BBC4 - Botany: A Blooming History - 3 part series - "What makes plants grow is a simple enough question. The answer turns out to be one of the most complicated and fascinating stories in science and took over 300 years to unravel.

Timothy Walker, director of Oxford University Botanic Garden, reveals how the breakthroughs of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, Chelsea gardener Phillip Miller and English naturalist John Ray created the science of botany. Between them these quirky, temperamental characters unlocked the mysteries of the plant kingdom and they began to glimpse a world where bigger, better and stronger plants could be created. Nurseryman Thomas Fairchild created the world's first artificial hybrid flower - an entirely new plant that didn't exist in nature.
Today, botanists continue the search for new flowers, better crops and improved medicines to treat life-threatening diseases."

BBC1 - Poor Kids - "Documentary telling the stories of some of the 3.5 million children living in poverty in the UK. It is one of the worst child poverty rates in the industrialised world, and successive governments continue to struggle to bring it into line. So who are these children, and where are they living? Under-represented, under-nourished and often under the radar, 3.5 million children should be given a voice. And this powerful film does just that.

Eight-year-old Courtney, 10-year-old Paige and 11-year-old Sam live in different parts of the UK. Breathtakingly honest and eloquent, they give testament to how having no money affects their lives: lack of food, being bullied and having nowhere to play. The children might be indignant about their situation now, but this may not be enough to help them. Their thoughts on their futures are sobering.
Sam's 16-year-old sister Kayleigh puts it all into context, as she tells how the effects of poverty led her to take extreme measures to try and escape it all.
Poor Kids puts the children on centre stage, and they command it with honesty and directness. It's time for everyone to listen."


Wednesday 8th

BBC3 - Our War - 3 part series - "Series marking the ten-year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, telling the story of the conflict through the words and pictures of the young soldiers themselves."


BBC4 - Hidcote: A Garded For All Seasons - "Documentary telling the story of Hidcote, the most influential English garden of the 20th century and Lawrence Johnston, the enigmatic genius behind it. Hidcote was the first garden ever taken on by the National Trust, who have spent 3.5 million pounds in a major programme of restoration. As part of this facelift, the garden team have been researching Johnston's original vision and in doing so have uncovered a compelling story that reveals how he created such an iconic garden.

Yet until recently, little has been known about its secretive creator and self-taught gardener, Johnston. He kept few, if any, records on Hidcote's construction, but the head gardener at Hidcote, Glyn Jones, has embarked on a personal mission to discover as much about the man as possible to find out how, in the early 20th century, Johnston set about creating a garden regarded as the model of inspiration for designers all over the world."


ITV1 - Mugged - "Mugged sees BAFTA award winner Brian Hill take a fresh look at the most common street crime in Britain. Last year there were more than 1000 muggings a day and in this documentary film he uncovers the human stories behind the statistics, told from the point of view of victims and of muggers.

The range of stories provide an unflinching look at the profound personal impact of mugging on people from all walks of life, with contributors’ testimony offering a vivid insight into the both the attacks and the full extent of the aftermath.
Jane tells the shocking story of muggers pushing her off her bicycle to steal her bag, which led to her hitting her head and ending up in a coma. Luckily Jane is able to tell the tale but her story leaves no doubt that her ordeal has changed her life forever.
“I know that I have brain damage as a result, but I don’t really understand the extent. And it’s only recently really that I’ve accepted the permanence,” explains Jane. “I have absent seizures a lot, where I find it really hard to communicate, and I have Jacksonian seizures sometimes, which is just - which is down one side of my body, down the righthand side.”
The film also features Paul, who bravely stepped in to help when he heard the cries of Jackie, a woman being mugged. The muggers turned on Paul and viciously attacked him – the force was so great that he later had to have a major lung operation to stop it from collapsing. Despite this, Paul doesn’t regret helping Jackie and she has very gratefully acknowledged him as her hero.
“He’s (Paul) sort of like an old friend, and yet I don’t really know him,” says Jackie. “But I’ll never forget what he did. Not ever.”
Providing a rare glimpse into the motivations of those who carry out muggings, producer Brian Hill also speaks to muggers, who talk candidly about their crimes – and the reasons for their actions.
“We used to hit up all the student areas, just like drive around, you know, see someone, go right, we’ll have him…,” explains Anthony, who served two jail terms for street robbery. “Spoilt rich kids, that’s the way we looked at it.” Anthony continues, “The method was I’d just give them a couple of slaps and, you know what I mean, they’d know not to mess around, they would just do as they’re told…Best adrenaline rush you’d ever get in the world.”

Thursday 9th

BBC2 - The Clydebank Blitz - "The Blitz on the industrial town of Clydebank, seven miles from the centre of Glasgow, was one of the most intense, deadly and remarkably unknown of the war. Well over 1200 people were killed in the Clydeside area and at least the same again were seriously injured by the bombing on the nights of the 13th and 14th March 1941. The destruction in Clydebank was so severe that only seven properties were left undamaged by the bombing and the population was reduced from almost 60,000 to little more than 2000.

The awful truth about the scale of destruction and the number of casualties never hit the headlines as wartime censorship meant that the whole event was effectively 'hushed up'. But the stories still live on in the minds of some of the children that survived the raid and in The Clydebank Blitz, they tell their own harrowing stories of what was one of Britain's worst bombing raids and Scotland's biggest civilian disaster."


Friday 10th

Channel 4 - Unreported World: Indonesia's Wildlife Warriors - "Unreported World travels to Indonesia to meet young environmental activists battling to save endangered species such as orang-utans and sea turtles. Reporter Aidan Hartley and producer Rodrigo Vazquez visit a vast market where critically endangered animals are sold as pets or for the Chinese medicine trade, and uncover allegations of corruption and harassment of the campaigners.

Borneo has one of the planet's last big forests, but every hour an area the size of three football pitches is cut down to be used for palm oil production. The Unreported World team joins one team of young, local environmentalists who are trying to rescue the orang-utan, which, because of the loss of its habitat, is heading for extinction.
They arrive at a rescue operation for orang-utans kept illegally by local people as pets. The local chief tells Hartley that the loss of forest has brought people into conflict with orang-utans. A farmer who captured one baby orang-utan says he thinks they are a nuisance.
Environmental activist Ali tells Hartley that some palm oil farmers see orang-utans as vermin and that local people collect a $10 reward when they bring in an orang-utan's head or severed hand. He says the few infants that are spared end up in cages or are sold as pets in private zoos across Asia, and that middle men can pay just US$25 to a poacher or plantation worker for a baby orang-utan, which, if smuggled to Thailand, is worth about US$25,000... "

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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.