Wednesday 13 June 2012

Off-air recordings for week 9-15 June 2012

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

*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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Monday 11th June


Factual; History; Documentaries


A Tale of Two Cities
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm

Dan Cruickshank follows in the footsteps of John Stow and John Strype, two of London's greatest chroniclers, to explore one of the most dramatic centuries in the history of London.


The 17th century saw London plunged into a series of devastating disasters. The Civil War, a murderous plague and the destruction that was the great fire should have seen the small medieval City all but destroyed. Yet somehow, London not only survived but emerged as one of the wealthiest and most influential cities in Europe.


Using two remarkable surveys written at either end of this momentous century, Dan Cruickshank discovers how a unique combination of innovation, ambition and the sheer spirit of enterprise saw Londoners thrive. Engaging and revealing, Cruickshank's journey will reveal the twists and turns of a century that laid the foundations of one of the most important cities on the planet.





Factual; History; Documentaries


Time Shift: Crime and Punishment 
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm, series 10, The Story of Capital Punishment



Timeshift digs into the archive to trace the extraordinary story of the ultimate sanction. At the beginning of the 19th century you could still be hanged in Britain for offences such as stealing a sheep or shooting a rabbit. Even children as young as seven were sent to the gallows. The last hanging in this country took place as recently as 1964.


By opting for a dispassionate history rather than staging the usual polarised debate, the programme breaks new ground with its fascinating attention to detail, such as the protocols of the public execution or the 'science' of hanging. With contributions from both sides of the argument, it provides an essential guide to a subject that still divides us. 




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Tuesday 12th June


Crime; Documentaries


Killers Behind Bars: The Untold Story
Five, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3, The Suffolk Strangler


Professor David Wilson focuses his investigation on Steve Wright, 'The Suffolk Strangler'. In February 2008 Wright was sentenced to life for the murder of five women who worked as prostitutes in Ipswich, Suffolk. His brutal crime spree lasted just 3 months, and the judge sentencing him recommended that he should never be released from prison.


News; Current Affairs

BBC2, 10:30-11:20pm, Tackling violence in Europe's largest youth prison

Young people in custody are almost 10 times more likely than adults to get involved in a fight or serious assault behind bars. Newsnight has had exclusive access to a specialist unit built to deal with the most violent and disruptive offenders inside Europe's largest youth prison, Hindley, in north-west England.


Seventeen-year-old Scot is staring out of the small window of his ground floor cell across to high walls covered in razor wire. He is in the last week of a sentence for armed robbery with a knife and a string of burglaries.


"I did six months then I started playing up and that - fighting, smashing my TV," he says. "I was doing stupid things just because I was bored and in the end they got sick of it."


Scot is one of the residents of Willow, an experimental 11-bed unit that sits in the grounds of Hindley Young Offenders' Institution near Wigan.


The idea is to take the most disruptive teenagers out of the sprawling main wings of the prison where they can cause the most trouble.


Prison officers on Willow are specially trained to deal with disruptive behaviour; staffing levels are three times higher; and there is easier access to both mental health treatment and drug and alcohol services.


Teenagers get to spend more time out of their cells and are offered the kind of individual attention that it is impossible to provide on the much larger main wings.


Many more of these enhanced units are now planned in other Young Offenders Institutions across England and Wales.


"Often some young people are completely disengaged from the regime, from education and from prison staff," says Andy Rogers, the senior clinical psychologist attached to the unit...





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Wednesday 13th June


Factual; History; Documentaries


The Secret History of Our Streets
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/6 Camberwell Grove



In 1886 Charles Booth embarked on an ambitious plan to visit every one of London's streets to record the social conditions of residents. His project took him 17 years.


Once he had finished he had constructed a groundbreaking series of maps which recorded the social class and standing of inhabitants. These maps transformed the way Victorians felt about their capital city.


This series takes six archetypal London streets as they are now, discovering how they have fared since Booth's day.


Booth colour coded each street, from yellow for the 'servant keeping classes', down to black for the 'vicious and semi-criminal'. With the aid of maps the series explores why certain streets have been transformed from desperate slums to become some of the most desirable and valuable property in the UK, whilst others have barely changed.


This landmark series features residents past and present, exploring how what happened on the street in the last 125 years continues to shape the lives of those who live there now.


Today, Camberwell Grove is an elegant oddity - a broad, leafy street of fine Georgian houses set in the seething inner city.


The street has come full circle, from middle-class prosperity to tight-knit working-class community and back to middle-class affluence again. Through the lively, often passionate accounts of residents past and present the film tells the story of the changing faces of this remarkable street and the people who have lived in and loved its beautiful houses. These stories also reveal how the fate of the Grove was intimately bound up with the monstrous growth of the Victorian city of London and the birth of the modern conservation movement





Factual; History; Documentaries


Time Shift: Crime and Punishment
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm, Series 10, The Story of Corporal Punishment


Timeshift lifts the veil on the taboo that is corporal punishment. What it reveals is a fascinating history spanning religion, the justice system, sex and education. Today it is a subject that is almost impossible to discuss in public, but it's not that long since corporal punishment was a routine part of life. Surprising and enlightening, the programme invites us to leave our preconceptions at the door so that we may better understand how corporal punishment came to be so important for so long.




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Thursday 14th June


Factual; Travel; Documentaries


Britain's Lost Routes with Griff Rhys Jones
BBC1, 8:00-9:00pm, 3/4 Highland Cattle Drive



Griff throws himself back into the early 19th century, joining a herd of highland cows and two sturdy farmers as they retrace an ancient droving route once taken by thousands as they trudged 250 miles through the Scottish highlands from the Isle of Skye to Falkirk market.


Braving the ravages of the Scottish weather, Griff and his companions relive the arduous and dangerous trek through steep mountain passes and fast flowing rivers that drovers and their herds made so that the great British public could get beef on its dinner plate. As they go they discover how drovers once risked life and limb to swim their cattle from the Scottish islands to the mainland, braving the inclement conditions in their wet plaid and fending off rustlers with sharp shooting. Griff explores how these hardy men went on to become the first cowboys of the wild west as well as becoming the stuff of literary legend.





Factual; Food and Drink; Health and Wellbeing; Documentaries


The Men Who Made Us Fat
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3



Around the world, obesity levels are rising. More people are now overweight than undernourished. Two thirds of British adults are overweight and one in four of us is classified as obese. In the first of this three-part series, Jacques Peretti traces those responsible for revolutionising our eating habits, to find out how decisions made in America 40 years ago influence the way we eat now.


Peretti travels to America to investigate the story of high-fructose corn syrup. The sweetener was championed in the US in the 1970s by Richard Nixon's agriculture secretary Earl Butz to make use of the excess corn grown by farmers. Cheaper and sweeter than sugar, it soon found its way into almost all processed foods and soft drinks. HFCS is not only sweeter than sugar, it also interferes with leptin, the hormone that controls appetite, so once you start eating or drinking it, you don't know when to stop.


Endocrinologist Robert Lustig was one of the first to recognise the dangers of HFCS but his findings were discredited at the time. Meanwhile a US Congress report blamed fat, not sugar, for the disturbing rise in cardio-vascular disease and the food industry responded with ranges of 'low fat', 'heart healthy' products in which the fat was removed - but the substitute was yet more sugar.


Meanwhile, in 1970s Britain, food manufacturers used advertising campaigns to promote the idea of snacking between meals. Outside the home, fast food chains offered clean, bright premises with tempting burgers cooked and served with a very un-British zeal and efficiency. Twenty years after the arrival of McDonalds, the number of fast food outlets in Britain had quadrupled. 







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Friday 15th June


Factual; Documentaries

BBC4, 2:30-3:30am

Dan Cruickshank explores the mysteries and secrets of the bridges that have made London what it is. He uncovers stories of bronze-age relics emerging from the Vauxhall shore, of why London Bridge was falling down, of midnight corpses splashing beneath Waterloo Bridge, and above all, of the sublime ambition of London's bridgebuilders themselves.


Factual; History; Documentaries


The Great British Story: A People's History
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 4/8 - The Great Rising



This episode covers the catastrophic 14th century, including the Black Death and the Peasants Revolt. Delving into local records Michael Wood tracks the plague across Britain from Little Cornard in Suffolk to Abergavenny in the Welsh borders, and from St Andrews in Scotland to Dublin.


With over half the population dead, British work patterns change in the aftermath. Michael discovers women's roles in the workforce as brewsters and shopkeepers and finds a new class of cloth workers in our Test Dig at Long Melford. The fight for workers rights in the Peasants Revolt is defeated but in the next century peasants rise to become middle class, illustrated by the oldest primary school in Britain. Also, unique letters from a Norfolk village give us medieval womens' takes on love, marriage, and men. Finally in 15th century Lavenham, Michael crawls down a Tudor sewer for some really hands-on history at the beginning of our modern world.


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