Wednesday 11 July 2012

Off-air recordings for week 14-20 July 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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Saturday 14th July


Drama


The Hollow Crown: Henry IV - Part 2
BBC2, 8:00-9:00pm


In the aftermath of the Battle of Shrewsbury, Northumberland learns of the death of his son. The Lord Chief Justice attempts on behalf of the increasingly frail King to separate Falstaff from Prince Hal. The rebels continue to plot insurrection. Falstaff is sent to recruit soldiers and takes his leave of his mistress, Doll Tearsheet. The rebel forces are overcome. This brings comfort to the dying king, who is finally reconciled to his son. Falstaff rushes to Hal's coronation with expectations of high office. 


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Sunday 15th July


Documentaries


Cutting Edge: Meeting Ian Brady
Channel 4, 10:00-11:00pm


The story behind the Moors murderer's request to move to a mainstream prison from Ashworth high-security psychiatric hospital in Liverpool, where he has been detained since 1985. This Cutting Edge documentary meets the people closest to Brady and those involved in his case, hearing from psychiatrists who have worked directly with the killer and revealing what it is like to represent the rights of such a high-profile and infamous client.


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Monday 16th July


News

BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm

Reporter Raphael Rowe tracks down some of Britain's biggest illegal fly-tippers - criminals who have pocketed tens of thousands of pounds handed over by motorists to recycle their used tyres. Money that was meant to protect the environment has instead vanished, leaving our countryside littered with massive piles of used tyres - many large enough to be seen from space.


Factual; Crime and Justice; Documentaries

BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/2 - The Rioters

The story of last summer's riots, told with dramatic accounts from the rioters themselves. With powerful words and previously unseen footage, this is a compelling and shocking tale of what happened and why. The first film in this two-part series features the real words of rioters performed by actors.


Factual; Documentaries


BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm

Storyville: documentary which takes a personal look at the history of Ireland's vanished Anglo-Irish classes through the quirky family of filmmaker Fiona Murphy. The director follows her father and his four siblings back to the estate in County Mayo where they grew up in the newly-independent Ireland of the 1930s, to trace lives rich in contradiction.


While the siblings wrestled with their Anglo-Irish identity, their father carved out a successful career as a diplomat at the height of the British Empire. Tracking the family's fortunes from Cromwell's times, through first-hand accounts of the Civil War and mass exodus of the Anglo-Irish under Eamon de Valera, the film explores how this individualistic family tried to hold on, despite the odds.




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Tuesday 17th July

Factual; Science and Nature; Environment

BBC4, 1/6 - Pembrokeshire

Professor Aubrey Manning explores the Pembrokeshire coastline and its connections with the sea. He discovers castles and standing stones, as well as evidence of successive invaders who arrived by sea when the coastline was far from remote.


Factual; Families; Relationships; Factual; History

BBC1, 9:00-10:00pm, 4/5 - 1960

In this episode, the families are thrown into the swinging sixties and the street is introduced to a new family, the Hawkes, who are walking in the shoes of their ancestors who arrived as immigrants from the Caribbean. Brother and sister Jonathan and Rachel arrive on Albert Road first, and are shocked by life in the sixties. They discover life in the sixties was a difficult time, with racism, isolation and separation from loved ones taking its toll.


The Meadows family follow their ancestors' climb up the social ladder from their traditional working class home in the forties to a sixties middle-class dwelling. All appears well, until sisters Saskia and Genevieve spoil the party with a teenage rebellion.


And the twists and turns of the Taylor family tree mean they leave behind the high life they have lived since the 1900s, as they find themselves in the working class house. 




Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries


Imagine... Glasgow: The Grit and the Glamour

BBC1, 10:35-11:45pm

Imagine... explores the untold story of a group of artists and curators who stormed the international art world and turned their home city of Glasgow into a global capital for contemporary art. Amongst the artists Alan Yentob encounters are 2011 Turner Prize-winner Martin Boyce, as well as previous winners Douglas Gordon, Simon Starling, and Richard Wright, to tell the story of a city now as famed for its contemporary art as it was for its shipbuilding. 


Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media

BBC2, 11:20pm-12:20am

In Hamlet, David Tennant, whose own RSC performance was a huge hit, meets other actors who have played the role - from the legendary David Warner in the 1960s to the recent Jude Law. He also tries, alongside Simon Russell Beale and Ben Whishaw, to unravel the meaning of the play and the reason why it is considered by many to be the greatest play Shakespeare ever wrote.


David Tennant surprised when he took on the role of Hamlet - most did not know that he had trained in and worked for many years at the Royal Shakespeare Company. But that didn't mean he wasn't scared stiff at the prospect of taking on the legendary role. Now he takes up the challenge of unravelling the story and trying to uncover what it is about it that has made Hamlet the most famous of all of Shakespeare's plays.


He revisits his own performance, alongside his director Greg Doran, and he meets up with other actors who have tackled the role. With the historian Justin Champion he tries to enter the mindset of the 16th century audiences who would have watched this story and he discovers how different generations of actors, directors and scholars have interpreted the play.


What he discovers is that Hamlet is a play full of questions rather than answers - but they are the questions we all continue to ask ourselves to this day. Questions about who to believe, who to trust, how to live and how to love, how to understand life and how to face death. What all the actors who have played it seem to share is that the process of acting the role is deeply and profoundly personal - and perhaps that is why audiences also feel that the play touches them more than any other play before or since.



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Wednesday 18th July

Factual; Crime and Justice; Documentaries

BBC2, 2/2 - The Police

The story of the riots of 2011 told with first-hand accounts from the police and previously unseen police footage. Outnumbered coppers on the frontline tell how they took the brunt of the rioters' aggression, while officers in the control room explain why things happened as they did. Many criticised the police after the riots, now they explain their side of the story.


Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media

BBC4, 10:30-11:30pm

Johannes Vermeer is one of our favourite painters, with his Girl with a Pearl Earring now deemed the 'Mona Lisa of the North'. But little is known about his life and for almost two centuries he was lost to obscurity.


Andrew Graham-Dixon, travelling to Vermeer's hometown of Delft and a dramatic Dutch landscape of huge skies and windmills, embarks on a detective trail to uncover the life of a genius in hiding.


Renowned for painting calm and beautiful interiors, the real life of Vermeer was marred by crime and violence. His life was a bid to escape the privations of his family and yet even a glamorous marriage and artistic success failed to save him from the fate he dreaded more than any other.




Crime and Justice


More4, 11:05-11:35pm

Documentary telling the story of Winnie Johnson, whose 12-year-old son Keith Bennett was killed by Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in 1964. Recently diagnosed with cancer and nearing 80, Winnie is desperate to find Keith's body before she dies and makes one last plea to Brady to reveal where he buried his victim.


Religion and Ethics; Documentaries

BBC1, 11:15-11:45pm

As Ramadan approaches, this documentary tells the little-known story of three English gentlemen who embraced Islam at a time when to be a Muslim was to be seen to be a traitor to your country. Through personal journeys of still surviving relatives, the programme looks at their achievements and how their legacy lives on today.


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Thursday 19th July

Science and Nature; Documentaries

BBC2, 8:00-9:00pm

Biologist Mat Pines has been observing baboons in Ethiopia’s Awash National Park for five years and they’re comfortable with each other. In a touching sequence one young baboon with long, dexterous fingers, even starts to groom the back of Pines’s shirt.


They are scintillating animals with enormously expressive faces. For example, when they raise their eyebrows it’s a very big clue that they are not at all pleased. But they’re ruthless and scrappy, too. It’s a violent patriarchal society where the males abduct the mates of others in cacophonous fights over territory and females. These riots can be hugely destructive and age is no bar to injury; one youngster is horribly wounded after an affray involving many hundreds of baboons brawling over ownership of a favourite clifftop. 


But they’re under threat from their human neighbours, cocky, gun-toting young men of the Afar tribe, and before Pines leaves, he wants to try to persuade the Afars that coexistence is possible.


Mat Pines's five-year study of the lives of hamadryas baboons in Ethiopia, in which he lived alongside the primates in the Awash National Park, observing their behaviour and gaining acceptance in their society. As his study draws to a close, his favourite baboon, who he has called Critical, is trying to find a family and fend off male rivals - while Mat attempts to foster a greater understanding of the creatures among the local Afar tribe, who have traditionally regarded them as enemies. Narrated by David Attenborough.




Factual; History; Documentaries


Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town

BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm

Pompeii: one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in history. We know how its victims died, but this film sets out to answer another question - how did they live? Gleaning evidence from an extraordinary find, Cambridge professor and Pompeii expert Mary Beard provides new insight into the lives of the people who lived in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius before its cataclysmic eruption.


In a dark cellar in Oplontis, just three miles from the centre of Pompeii, 54 skeletons who didn't succumb to the torrent of volcanic ash are about to be put under the microscope. The remains will be submitted to a barrage of tests that will unlock one of the most comprehensive scientific snapshots of Pompeian life ever produced - and there are some big surprises in store.


Using the latest forensic techniques it is now possible to determine what those who perished in the disaster ate and drank, where they came from, what diseases they suffered, how rich they were, and perhaps, even more astonishingly, the details of their sex lives.


The way the remains were found in the cellar already provides an invaluable clue about the lives of the people they belonged to. On one side of the room were individuals buried with one of the most stunning hauls of gold, jewellery and coins ever found in Pompeii. On the other, were people buried with nothing. It looked the stark dividing line of a polarised ancient society: a room partitioned between super rich and abject poor. But on closer examination the skeletons reveal some surprises about life in Pompeii.


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Friday 10th July

Factual; Science and Nature; Nature and Environment; Documentaries

BBC4, 12:30-1:00am

A visit to arguably the most famous archipelago on Earth, the Galapagos. It's home to a myriad of bizarre and unique creatures, endemic to these islands - but how did they get here and what is the key to these extraordinary islands that allows them to thrive? The programme reveals that this key holds not just the secret to life here, but also to how Darwin was able to leave with the ideas that would revolutionise biology.


Factual; Science and Nature; Documentaries

BBC4, 1:00-2:00am

Is there any way to slow or even prevent the ravages of time? Veteran presenter Johnny Ball looks back over the 45 years that Horizon - and he - have been on air to find out what science has learned about how and why we grow old. Charting developments from macabre early claims of rejuvenation to the latest cutting-edge breakthroughs, Johnny discovers the sense of a personal mission that drives many scientists and asks whether we are really any closer to achieving the dream of immortality.


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