Off-air recordings for week 23-29 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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Saturday 23rd July

Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries

The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution

BBC2, 8:00-9:00pm, 2/4, The Great Outdoors

Waldemar Januszczak continues his investigation of the Impressionists by taking us outdoors to their most famous locations. Although Impressionist pictures often look sunny and relaxed, achieving this peaceful air was hard work. Trudging through fog, wind and rain, across treacherous coastal rocks and knee-deep snow, Waldemar shows how the famous spontaneity of the Impressionists is thoroughly misleading.

This episode visits the French riverside locations that Monet loved to paint, and where Renoir captured the bonhomie of modern life. Waldemar also introduces a number of technical and practical developments of the age which completely revolutionised Impressionist painting - the invention of portable easels; the use of hog's hair in paint brushes; as well as the introduction of the railway through France. And a scientific demonstration in a Swedish snowdrift explains just how right the Impressionists were to paint brightly coloured shadows in their winter scenes, despite being accused of 'hallucinating' at the time.
Finally, Januszczak explains Cezanne's part in the Impressionist story from his dark and challenging early work to his first rural landscapes in France, and then his departure from Paris and separation from the Impressionist gang.

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Monday 25th July

Factual; Documentary

Russia: The Wild East

BBC Radio 4, 3:45-4:00pm, 36/50, The Great Patriotic War

The words of Konstantin Simonov's poem 'Wait for me and I shall return,' is an anthem of loss, courage and yearning for the terrible months that followed the outbreak of war in 1941.

Untrained volunteers fought with pikes and sticks, entire divisions were wiped out, but the Red Army did not collapse as Hitler had predicted. One General reported, "It is increasingly plain we have underestimated the Russian colossus... if we destroy a dozen, the Russians present us with a dozen more." Neither did the Soviet people welcome the Germans as saviours. Some Baltic states, where the invaders were seen as allies helping to throw off the Soviet yoke, greeted German soldiers with bread and salt, but they were repaid with brutality. Martin Sixsmith visits the suburb of Kiev that witnessed the biggest single massacre of the holocaust, immortalized in Yevgeny Yevtushenko's epic poem 'Babi Yar'. A heartrending account of one woman who survived is set against music from Shostakovich's 13th Symphony that uses the words of the poem. But German casualties were mounting. As winter approached, Hitler urged his generals to capture the major Soviet cities.
By early November the exhausted Germans were within 50 miles of Moscow. 600 miles and two fifths of the Soviet population were under enemy control, but the people's determination to fight was passionate. Stalin evoked heroes of the past to inspire new Russian heroes, but Sixsmith reflects, "their motives were not always the ones the Kremlin desired: people were fighting not for Stalin, not for the revolution or the Soviet Union, but for the Russian land." In the hit song of 1942 Napolean speaks to Hitler from the grave saying 'I'll move over and you can join me down here." The Soviet Union had been facing annihilation, but it had survived.


News; Documentaries

Panorama: One Born Every 40 Seconds

BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm

The UK is in the middle of a baby boom. Last year, there was one born every forty seconds - the highest number for 20 years. But reporter Shelley Jofre reveals that some parts of the UK are facing a chronic shortage of midwives, and asks if the NHS is failing to deliver the safe and high quality maternity care mothers and babies deserve.


Religion and Ethics; Documentaries

The Life of Muhammad

BBC2, 9:00-10:00, 3/3, Holy Peace

In the final episode of The Life of Muhammad, presenter Rageh Omaar continues to chart the story of The Prophet Muhammad. Drawing on the expertise and comment from some of the world's leading academics and commentators on Islam, Omaar analyses and investigates key events during the later part of his life, including the introduction of a moral code known as Sharia and the concept of Jihad. The programme also explores Muhammad's use of marriage to build alliances, and looks at the key messages included in his final sermon.  In line with Islamic tradition the programme does not depict any images of the face of Muhammad, or feature any dramatic re-constructions of Muhammad's life.


Factual: Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries

The Art Of Cornwall

BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm

The art colony of St Ives in Cornwall became as important as Paris or London in the history of modernism during a golden creative period between the 1920s and 1960s. The dramatic lives and works of eight artists who most made this miracle possible, from Kit Wood and Alfred Wallis to Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, are featured in a documentary which offers an alternative history of the 20th century avant-garde as well as a vivid portrayal of the history and landscapes of Cornwall itself.
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Tuesday 26th July

Factual: Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries

British Masters

BBC4, 3:00-4:00am, 3/3, New Jerusalem

In the decades after the Second World War, at a time when many had lost their faith in humanity, British artists turned to the great figurative painting tradition to address the biggest questions of all: what does it mean to be human and how do we create a more humane world? Such existential angst is captured in Lucien Freud's harrowing early portraits and Graham Sutherland's Pembrokeshire landscapes. Francis Bacon stared deep into his own soul to explore the human capacity for evil, while Richard Hamilton warned against the false hope of consumerism. As national pessimism gave way to a new optimism, David Hockney dared to suggest Paradise might be available to us all. But in the early 1970s, just as the world finally began to recognise the genius of Britain's painterly tradition, young artists at home turned against it.


Factual; Documentary

Russia: The Wild East

BBC Radio 4, 3:45-4:00pm, 37/50, Redemption Through Blood

Having retreated from Moscow, Hitler focused on capturing the oilfields of the Caucasus, penetrating farther into Russia than any western army. Stalin urged the Red Army to greater sacrifices: "we must throw back the enemy whatever the cost. Those who retreat are traitors . and must be exterminated on the spot." 150,000 soldiers were executed for cowardice.

Those who survived were sent to penal battalions "to redeem by blood their crimes against the Motherland," drawing on the deep-seated Russian belief that the individual must sacrifice himself for the good of the state. Women took the strain in industry and agriculture, overtime was obligatory, holidays suspended and the working day increased to 12 hours. Food supplies were limited; the author Fyodor Abramov wrote of "little girls with runny noses" working in the forests: "you didn't dare come back without fulfilling your quota! Not on your life! "The front needs it!"' Hitler had pledged to make Leningrad a terrifying symbol of Nazi invincibility and for 900 days the city was shelled nonstop and starved of fuel and food. One in three of the city's 2.5 million inhabitants starved to death.
Martin Sixsmith stands in the concert hall where Shostakovich's 7th Symphony, which he dedicated to "our struggle against fascism ...our coming victory over the enemy and to my native city, Leningrad..." was first performed on August 9th 1942. So many members of the orchestra had died in the siege that amateur players were brought in to fill their seats, and the brass section was given special rations to give them the strength to play. But the performance was a triumph. It was broadcast on national radio and then around the world as a symbol of the strength of Soviet resistance that would eventually defeat the Nazi menace.


Factual; Arts, Culture & the Media; Documentaries

The Camera That Changed The World

BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm

The summer of 1960 was a critical moment in the history of film, when the fly-on-the-wall documentary was born. The Camera that Changed the World tells the story of the filmmakers and ingenious engineers who led this revolution by building the first hand-held cameras that followed real life as it happened. By amazing co-incidence, there were two separate groups of them - one on each side of the Atlantic.
In the US, the pioneers used their new camera to make Primary, a compelling portrait of American politics. They followed a then little known John F Kennedy as he began his long campaign for the presidency. Meanwhile, in France, another new camera was inspiring an influential experiment in documentary filmmaking. Chronique d'un Ete captures the real lives of ordinary Parisians across the summer of 1960. Both these extraordinary films smashed existing conventions as handheld cameras followed the action across public spheres into intimate and previously hidden worlds.

In The Camera that Changed the World this remarkable story is told by the pioneers themselves, some of whom, such as DA Pennebaker and Al Maysles are now filmmaking legends. Back in 1960, they were determined young revolutionaries.


Factual; Documentaries

The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon

BBC4, 10:00-11:00, 2/3, Sport and Pleasure

Series which examines the recent discovery of 800 short films from the Edwardian age. The films have now been rescued after lying hidden in a cellar for over 80 years. Restored to their original clarity, these films shot by pioneering film-makers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon now take the viewer into a lost world. Dan Cruickshank then uses the films to throw new light on Britain at work and play before the First World War.

This programme features the first ever film of Manchester United, made within weeks of the club adopting the name of what is the most famous club in the world. It reveals how new leisure time swelled the crowds at exciting sporting events, and how people's extra cash allowed them holidays and fun in Blackpool and at home for the very first time.

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Wednesday 27th July

Factual; Documentary

Russia: The Wild East

BBC Radio 4, 3:45-4:00pm, 38/50, Glory To Our Victorious People

Victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 turned the tide of the war. For 6 months, 2 million soldiers had battled for a city that was already in ruins.

German conscripts recorded the brutality of the combat: "Stalingrad is no longer a city ... Even the hardest stones cannot bear it. Only men endure." Soviet forces were trapped in a thin strip of land on the edge of the Volga. But for all the horror and all the losses, they did not retreat. The world watched: if Stalingrad could be held, it seemed the war could be won. At last, a counter offensive trapped 300,000 enemy troops in a sealed enclave christened the 'cauldron'.

When the Germans finally surrendered only 90,000 of them remained alive. Just 5,000 would make it home. The retreat westward gathered pace and 6 months later Hitler ordered his final offensive on the eastern front. Martin Sixsmith visits Kursk where the "biggest tank battle in history" dealt Hitler his final body blow. Within a year, the Germans had been driven out of the Soviet Union. The Red Army swept westwards to Warsaw. Andrzej Wajda's 1957 film 'Kanal' depicts the final harrowing hours of the destruction of Warsaw by the Nazis, but its anger is also directed against the Soviets, who allowed 50,000 civilians to be wiped out to secure the future dictatorship of Communism. In mid-April, the Soviet assault on Berlin began. The Nazi capital was pounded with more shells than the Allied bombers had dropped on it in five years. A week later the Hammer and Sickle was planted on the roof of the Reichstag.
On the 9th of May, Stalin told the Soviet nation Germany had surrendered. "Our mighty nation - our mighty people - have triumphed over the forces of German imperialism... All our sacrifices, all our suffering and all our losses have not been in vain."


Factual; Documentaries

Harold Baim's Britain on Film

BBC4, 8:30-9:00pm

A record of Britain and its people as seen through the lens of film-maker Harold Baim. Extracts from Baim's archive of bright and shiny cinema shorts from the 1940s to 1980s reveal a world that has gone forever.


News, Special report

Murdoch: The Mogul Who Screwed The News

Channel 4, 10:00-11:00pm

The incredible story of how Rupert Murdoch used celebrity scandal to bankroll his expanding media empire, before scandal ultimately engulfed the News of the World itself.

Jacques Peretti talks to everyone from Hugh Grant to Murdoch insiders to find out how the world of celebrities, cops and politicians first cosied up with, and then turned against, the world's most powerful media mogul.

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Thursday 28th July

Factual; Documentary

Russia: The Wild East

BBC Radio 4, 3:45-4:00pm, 39/50, The Spoils of War

Victory had been a remarkable national achievement and a chance for national unity that might have healed a fractured society.
But instead Stalin used the war as a pretext, to carry out a cynical campaign of ethnic engineering against those nationalities he viewed with suspicion: ethnic Soviet Germans were deported to Siberia; hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks and Tartars were expelled from their homes; anti-semitism, briefly forgotten during the war resurfaced. People who expected their heroism to be rewarded with freedom and the right to participate in the running of their country found the party-state apparatus had reasserted its grip on power and did not intend to let go.
Major Yershov, in Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate, sums up the hopes of the nation: "He was certain that he was not only fighting the Germans, but fighting for a free Russia: certain that a victory over Hitler would be a victory over the death camps of the Gulag where his father, his mother and his sisters had perished..." Instead, the state was seeking to suppress the very qualities it had encouraged during the years of fighting. Courage, initiative and enterprise were deemed dangerous, former soldiers were regarded as a potentially hostile force, freedoms (religious and artistic) granted during the war were swiftly withdrawn, and the regime acted to prevent unrest in the only way it knew how - by sending potential troublemakers to the Gulag.
Set against Shostakovich's Anti-Formalist Rayok, written in private having been forced to publicly recant, Martin Sixsmith concludes, "if nothing had changed after the war, if Soviet society was simply going back to the old ways, the question inevitably arose in many people's minds of what exactly they'd been fighting for."


News; Documentaries

Tonight: Chemical Cosh for Kids?

ITV1, 7:30-8:00pm

The number of hyperactive children being given controversial drugs to control their behaviour has almost doubled in the last five years. Julie Etchingham investigates what is behind the increase and asks whether parents and doctors are too keen to use medication to sedate children as young as four years old.


Factual

Town with Nicholas Crane

BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/4, Ludlow, THIS PROGRAMME IS SUBJECT TO A OPEN UNIVERSITY LICENCE FEE - Please see the Learning Centre Off-air recording web page for more details.

We live in one of the most urbanised countries on earth. By 2030 a staggering 92% of us will be living the urban life. Congested cities sprawl across our map, but they are not the only way to live. Smaller than a city, more intimate, more surprising: this series celebrates the forgotten world of the town.

An English market town on the Welsh border, Ludlow is small, landlocked and remote. Yet it has more listed buildings than anywhere else its size in Britain; not one, but two Michelin-starred restaurants; and a fairytale castle which was once the capital of Wales. Geographer and adventurer Nicholas Crane discovers how such a cut-off town came to be packed with so many treasures, and asks whether it really is as perfect as it first appears.


Factual; Science and Nature
Richard Hammond's Journey to the Bottom of the Ocean

BBC1, 11:35pm-12:35am, 2/2

What lies at the bottom of the oceans? What would happen if the planet lost its oceans? Richard Hammond is going to drain the oceans to find out.

Hidden beneath all that water are some of the biggest natural formations on earth: The longest mountain ranges, the tallest volcanoes and the deepest canyons.
Richard can reveal all this and more in a way never seen before, because he has the ultimate toy - a vast working 3D virtual Earth in a hangar.
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Friday 29th July

Factual; Arts, Culture & the Media; Life Stories; Documentaries

The Rattigan Enigma by Benedict Cumberpatch

Channel 4, 3:05-4:05am

Benedict Cumberbatch, one of the country's leading actors, explores the life and work of enigmatic playwright Terence Rattigan.

Rattigan was the master of the 'well crafted play' of upper class manners and repressed sexuality and he dominated the West End theatre scene throughout the 40s and early 50s. But then, in the mid fifties 'the angry young men arrived'; a wave of young playwrights and directors who introduced a new, radical style of theatre. Rattigan's work faced a critical onslaught and he fell completely out of fashion. But now, in his centenary year his plays are enjoying a huge revival.
But Rattigan himself remains an enigmatic figure - a troubled homosexual whose polite, restrained dramas confronted the very issues - sexual frustration, failed relationships, adultery and even suicide - that he found so difficult to deal with in his own life. He had a gift for commercial theatre but yearned to be taken seriously as a playwright.
In this film Benedict re-visits his old school Harrow where Rattigan was also educated and was first inspired to write plays. He takes a trip down memory lane with one of Rattigan's closest friends (Princess Jean Galizine) and he talks to playwrights, critics and directors about what it is about Rattigan's work which we find so appealing today.


News; Special report

Dispatches: How Murdoch Ran Britain

Dispatches investigates the world of the Rupert Murdoch and the influence and political power he holds in the UK.


Factual; Documentary

Russia: The Wild East

BBC Radio 4, 3:45-4:00pm, 34/50, The Iron Curtain

Details for this episode not available yet.

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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.