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.