*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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Saturday 5th May 2012
Documentaries
Asian Weddings: Something Gold, Nothing Borrowed, Everything New
BBC Radio 4, 10:30-11:00am
Big fat gypsy weddings might have hit the headlines, but the traditional British Asian wedding has always been big. Often including several separate ceremonies and events spread over a week or more, the cost of the average Asian wedding in the UK is frequently well over £30,000. With the significance of marriage or 'shaadi' being huge in south Asian culture, weddings are a serious business. From the lavish designer outfits and the elaborate cakes to the grand stages where the bride and groom sit on their thrones, complete with a lighting and sound system to rival a TV talent show, this is an industry worth a reported £300 million a year in the UK alone.
Yasmeen Khan explores the glamorous world of British Asian weddings. She takes in an Asian wedding exhibition in the UK, meeting the clothes designers, wedding planners, toastmasters, food suppliers, chefs, videographers and 'yellow gold' jewellers making their fortunes as the second and third generation tie the knot, all of them keen to help the families show off their wealth. She learns about the different cultural aspects of a Muslim, Sikh and Hindu wedding. She visits a couple's big day and explore the meaning behind cultural traditions, such as the confiscating of the groom's shoes by the bride's sisters and cousins - finding out what he must do to get them back.
Yasmeen also delves into the politics of the guest list at an Asian wedding, many of which are huge affairs with hundreds and sometimes thousands of guests! And she discovers just how much family relations are tested as an increasing number of couples pay for something that has traditionally been paid for by the bride's family.
Factual; Crime and Justice; Documentaries
The Bishop and the Prisoner
BBC Radio 4, 10:30-11:00pm, 1/3
In this three part series the BBC is given a rare degree of access to prisons as it accompanies the Rt Rev James Jones, the Church of England's "Bishop for prisons," into the country's jails. Conversations with prisoners - voices rarely heard on radio - are the centrepieces of these programmes, but the Bishop also talks to prison staff, politicians and opinion-formers about what prison should be for, how prisoners can be helped to become useful citizens and whether community sentences can ever win the public's confidence as a viable alternative to prison.
In this first programme, James Jones visits Liverpool, High Down and Forest Bank prisons. He witnesses the "processing" of inmates as they go through prison reception (or "The Churn" ) and gets out of the way of officers on the walkways responding to alarms that are always sounding. He measures a cell (12 paces by 9). He talks to prisoners - first-timers, old hands, self-harmers - about why they are there. Governors and prison officers tell him how they seek to manage inmates' routines and behaviour, and about the importance of looking out for themselves - when two staff can be responsible for a wing holding sixty prisoners, it doesn't do to let your guard down.
The prison population is at record levels, having almost doubled in the last twenty years. The Justice secretary Kenneth Clarke says he doesn't understand how it has been allowed to get so big, and lambasts attempts of previous Governments to cut crime by giving longer sentences as "pathetic". He tells the Bishop that his aim is to reduce the re-offending rate. Yes, it will help his department's bottom line, but it's common sense too.
How to cut re-offending is the million dollar question. Prisoners, governors and commentators seem to agree that an offender only stops committing crimes when he decides he's had enough; as one said, "I've got too old for it - my heart isn't in it anymore." The deprivation of liberty, courses in thinking skills and literacy don't seem to work as effectively as the simple passage of time.
If prison doesn't reduce re-offending, does that mean it doesn't work?
Prison is also there to punish - though some say it doesn't do that well enough.
In one obvious sense prison is effective; while prisoners are locked away from society, they can't commit crime on the outside. But if prison is to mend the prisoner as well as incarcerate him, it must do more - and that is the focus of the next programme.
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Sunday 6th May 2012
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
The Person from Porlock
BBC Radio 4, 4:30-5:00pm
When the poet Coleridge failed to complete his 'dream poem' Kubla Khan, he laid the blame on a 'person from Porlock' who had called to see him on business, thereby fatally interrupting his writing.
'The Person from Porlock' has come to represent anything that interrupts the creative process, and he has inspired a number of poems in his own right, from writers as diverse as Stevie Smith and R S Thomas.
Paul Farley travels to Porlock in Somerset in search of Coleridge's mysterious visitor and, in the company of Tim Liardet, Hester Jones and Tom Mayberry, contemplates a number of poetic interruptions - both obstructive and curiously inspirational.
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Monday 7th May 2012
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries; History
The King and the Playwright: a Jacobean History
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 3/3, Legacy
Factual
Britain Beware
ITV1, 10:15-11:15pm
Adrian Edmondson delves into the wonderful archives of the Central Office of Information, the government department responsible for making public information films, which is scheduled to close this month.
He takes us on a journey through the mini-movies and TV ads that for nearly 70 years have warned us of all kinds of dangers, from road safety to nuclear fallout. They have great nostalgia value for each generation, whether it is Charlie the Cat warning us of the dangers of falling into water, or Jimmy Savile advising us to ‘clunk click every trip’.
These influential films have helped shape attitudes and change the nation’s behaviour. Some are long-form masterpieces of black and white drama with a filmic feel, whilst others are shot like short glossy adverts. Some used humour to great effect, others left children quaking in their boots. The tone was crucial as Ade explains “For over half a century, the Central Office of Information made films alerting us to the dangers of the world. But the images they used had to avoid being overly shocking while at the same time driving home some potentially terrifying messages.”
Ade unearths some nostalgic gems and hidden treasures that provide a potted social history of Britain. From “Stranger Danger’ and ‘The Green Cross Code’ in the seventies, to eighties themes such as the dangers of drink-driving, playing with fireworks and sexually transmitted diseases. As he acknowledges “Of all the developed countries, Britain’s £20 million pound campaign was one of the earliest and perhaps partly due to this our HIV rates are still amongst the lowest in the world.”
Adrian will also come across the well-known figures that have given their time to keep us safe including Kevin Keegan, Donald Pleasance, Michael Aspel, Alvin Stardust and Ronnie Barker, alongside the characters iconic to our childhood such as Tufty the Squirrel and Joe & Petunia, the fat calamitous tourists.
Britain Beware serves up a quirky social history laced with nostalgia to mark the end of a great British institution that did its best to protect us from ourselves.
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Tuesday 8th May 2012
Factual; Health and Wellbeing
Great Ormond Street
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/6, A Difficult Line
A look at Great Ormond Street Hospital's oncology department, following doctors as they face challenging ethical decisions about treating children with some of the rarest and most complex cancers in the country. Doctors must decide how to act in the best interest of their patients whilst handling relationships with the children's families.
Factual; Life Stories; Reality
The Estate
BBC1, 11:40pm-12:10am
Coleraine residents battle their way through a tough economic year in Ballysally. Things are going bump in the night at Kyle's flat; Louise is going to be a granny; and Jim's back on the booze, with disastrous consequences.
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Thursday 10th May 2012
Arts, Culture and the Media
The Library Returns
BBC Radio 4, 11:30am-12:05pm
Just as the news for libraries never seemed worse - with a shortage of users, imminent closures and cuts to funding - a new breed of libraries, in Britain and abroad and designed by architects for the 21st century, is rising from the ashes. This programme, presented by Jonathan Glancey, looks at the ways in which the design and function of the library is being re-invented in the USA, Europe and the UK. The programme visits Seattle, Delft , Stuttgart and the huge emerging new library in Birmingham, due for completion next year.
Documentaries; Science and Nature
World's Scariest... Weather
Channel 5, 8:00-9:00pm, 2/4
Some of the most violent and dangerous weather ever caught on camera, from heavy storms to flash floods and world-shaking events. Footage shows someone being lifted into the air by a tornado that is causing devastation in America, and a heatwave leads to terrifying wildfires in Russia. A mother with three kids in the back of her car is plunged into darkness as a dust storm hits Phoenix, Arizona, and a British teacher watches as the tsunami of March 2011 washes away his home in northern Japan.
Factual; Arts, Culture and Media; Travel
Shakespeare in Italy
BBC2, 2/2, Land of Fortune
Francesco da Mosto concludes his tour of the country beginning with a visit to Venice, where he meets actor Ciaran Hinds to discuss why the Bard chose the city as the setting for The Merchant of Venice. The historian is then joined by Mark Rylance in Rome as they explore how the playwright used the Italian capital for the plots of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra to avoid Elizabethan censors. Finally, on the island of Stromboli, off the northern coast of Sicily, Francesco uncovers the location for Shakespeare's late masterpiece - The Tempest.
Factual; Science and Nature; Documentaries
Do We Really Need The Moon?
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm
The Moon is such a familiar presence in the sky that most of us take it for granted. But what if it wasn't where it is now? How would that affect life on Earth?
Space scientist and lunar fanatic Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock explores our intimate relationship with the Moon. Besides orchestrating the tides, the moon dictates the length of a day, the rhythm of the seasons and the very stability of our planet.
Yet the Moon is always on the move. In the past it was closer to Earth and in the future it'll be farther away. That it is now perfectly placed to sustain life is pure luck, a cosmic coincidence. Using computer graphics to summon up great tides and set the Earth spinning on its side, Maggie Aderin-Pocock implores us to look at the Moon afresh: to see it not as an inert rock, but as a key player in the story of our planet, past, present and future.
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Friday 11th May 2012
Documentaries; Science and Technology
The Two Thousand Year Old Computer
BBC4, 3:30-4:30am
Imagine craftsmen built a bronze machine, conceived by Archimedes more than 2,000 years ago, for looking into the future. The astonishing thing is, it exists, in an Athens museum. Three fragments of a corroded bronze mechanism were found on the seabed in 1900 and it was such a complex device that it has taken this long to figure out what it is.
In this breathtaking documentary, we join a team of mathematicians, historians and other experts trying to solve the puzzle and meet the eccentric British engineer who has built his own version of Archimedes’s astrolabe and lunar calendar. It’s an extraordinary story, superbly told.
The efforts of an international team of scientists to solve the mysteries of the Antikythera Mechanism. The 2,000-year-old device was recovered from a Roman shipwreck off the southern coast of Greece in 1901, and is believed to be the world's oldest computer. The object appears to be designed to predict solar eclipses, and according to recent findings, calculate the timing of the ancient Olympics.
Documentaries
The Trouble with Moody Teens
BBC Radio 4, 11:00-11:30pm
Miranda Sawyer explores how some teenagers are suffering with clinical depression, a condition that is difficult to diagnose and often overlooked as typical adolescent behaviour. She investigates whether social networking and the current economic climate are adding to the problem, and reveals what treatment is available, including that of the support provided by such charities as Young Minds.
News
Unreported World - Congo, Magic, Gangs and Wrestlers
Channel 4Wrestlers are superstars in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this vast and troubled country, wrestling is a passion, allowing fans to forget the poverty, violence and ongoing civil war for the duration of a bout.
Contests are televised and reported on the sports pages and attract thousands of fans.
In the capital, Kinshasa, Unreported World reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Wael Dabbous find some of the superstars of the sport practising 'black magic', and uncover allegations that many fighters are involved in gang violence and political intimidation.
Like other countries where wrestling is popular, there's a tradition in Congo of fighters wearing masks and customised costumes.
But alongside the theatrics common to wrestling elsewhere, Congo's version has incorporated the belief in black magic, or fetishe, which is genuinely feared by many.
The film begins with an amazing scene. Rhodes and Dabbous visit a wrestling match in Kinshasa to watch Congo's champion wrestler, Nanga Steve, taking on Super Angaluma, a fetishe wrestler famed for using black magic to defeat his opponents.
The street bout is held in a ring surrounded by hundreds of spectators, many of them young men. To the crowd's delight Super Angaluma uses fetishe to try and defeat Nanga Steve, sacrificing a chicken to help him unlock supernatural powers.
Despite this, in a classic denouement, good triumphs over evil and Nanga Steve is victorious.
In this city of eight million people - the third largest in Africa - Steve and the other star wrestlers aren't just celebrities: they're figures of power and influence.
Steve tells Rhodes that some wrestlers are major forces in gangs called 'Kuluna' that are terrorising the city. While some fighters like him are celebrities, others struggle to make a living, which he says explains the attraction of the gangs., 7:30-7:55pm
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