Off-air recordings for week 24-30 August 2013

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 24th August

Factual > Politics > Documentaries

Thatcher - The Downing Street Years
BBC2, 8:10-9:10pm, 2/4 - Best of Enemies

In her second term in office after victory in 1983, Mrs Thatcher's position seemed impregnable. Her conduct of the Falkland's war was popular, she had trounced Arthur Scargill and the striking miners, and had survived the bombing by the IRA of the Grand Hotel in Brighton. But all was not well: Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong and ex Chancellor Nigel Lawson are amongst those who recall the emnity between the Prime Minister and her Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine. Thatcher thought of him as 'over-poweringly ambitious and self-centred', and his handling of the Westland affair in 1986 only served to increase ill-feeling between the two, which reached its height with his challenge to her leadership in 1990. 


Factual > News > Documentaries

This World: America's Stoned Kids
BBC2, 9:10-10:10pm

In November last year the American state of Colorado voted to legalise the recreational use of cannabis. It is the most radical experiment in drugs policy for generations and the world will be looking to see what happens, particularly to drug use amongst teenagers. In this hour long documentary for This World, clinical psychologist and addiction expert Professor John Marsden heads to Denver, the state capital, to assess the likely impact of legalisation on a country already suffering an epidemic of teenage marijuana use.
At a local high school, John hears from A grade students who explain that getting stoned is now more socially acceptable than getting drunk. At an addiction clinic that treats children as young as 12, John hears how marijuana is already the number one reason for kids to enter residential programmes more than alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy and other drugs combined. With rates of teenage cannabis use in the USA the highest that they have been in years, it is widely acknowledged the war on drugs has failed. However the question is, will full legalisation manage to take the selling of the drug out of the hands of the street dealers and into the hands of the legitimate business people and be the answer to stopping America's kids from getting stoned?


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Monday 26th August


Factual > Science & Nature > Nature & Environment

Ultimate Swarms
BBC1, 9:00-10:00pm

Zoologist and explorer George McGavin goes in search of some of the world's most impressive swarms. By getting right to the heart of these natural spectacles, he finds out why swarms are the ultimate solution to surviving against all odds and discovers how unlocking the secrets to how animals swarm could be crucial to understanding our own increasingly crowded lives. 

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Tuesday 27th August

Factual > Crime > Documentaries

Born to Kill? The Killer Prophet
Channel 5, 8:00-9:00pm, 3/6

In October 1970, the bodies of Dr Victor Ohta, his wife Virginia, their two sons and the medic's secretary were found dumped in the swimming pool of their California home. Many believed that a murderous hippie cult was on the rampage, but the killer turned out to be reclusive 24-year-old John Linley Frazier, who believed that he was on a mission from God. In this programme, eyewitnesses and criminal experts analyse Frazier's motives and personality.


Factual > Arts, Culture & the Media > Arts > Documentaries > Factual > History

Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show On Earth
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3 - Democrats

Classicist Dr Michael Scott journeys to Athens to explore how drama first began. He discovers that from the very start it was about more than just entertainment - it was a reaction to real events, it was a driving force in history and it was deeply connected to Athenian democracy. In fact, the story of theatre is the story of Athens. 

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Wednesday 28th August

Factual > History > Documentaries

Martin Luther King and the March on Washington
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm

Documentary commemorating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington, a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. This programme tells the story of the how the march for jobs and freedom began, speaking to the people who organised and participated in it. Using rarely seen archive footage the film reveals the background stories surrounding the build up to the march as well as the fierce opposition it faced from the JFK administration, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and widespread claims that it would incite racial violence, chaos and disturbance. The film follows the unfolding drama as the march reaches its ultimate triumphs, gaining acceptance from the state, successfully raising funds and in the end, organised and executed peacefully - and creating a landmark moment in the struggle for civil rights and racial equality in the united states.

Including interviews with some of the key actors: members of the inner circles of the core organizational groups such as Jack O'Dell, Clarence B. Jones, Julian Bond and Andrew Young; Hollywood supporters and civil rights campaigners including Harry Belafonte, Diahann Carroll and Sidney Poitier; Performing artists at the March such as Joan Baez and Peter Yarrow; as well as JFK administration official, Harris Wofford; the CBS Broadcaster who reported from the March, Roger Mudd; Clayborne Carson, the founding director of Stanford's Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute and a participant in the March; as well as those who witnessed the march on TV and were influenced by it, such as Oprah Winfrey, and most of all, the remembrances of the ordinary citizens who joined some 250,000 Americans at the capital on that momentous.


Factual > History > Politics > Documentaries

MLK: The Assassination Tapes
BBC4, 10:00-10:50pm

April 4, 1968, and Martin Luther King is gunned down on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. The catalyst that would lead to his assassination began three months before his death, when the city's sanitation workers went on strike. Realising that this might be a seminal moment in the civil rights movement, scholars at the University of Memphis started to collect every piece of media they could find - television, radio and print.
Unbelievably, most of this remarkable footage hasn't been seen since 1968. Now, for the first time, it has been chronologically reassembled, bringing to life as never before the tumultuous events surrounding one of the most shocking assassinations in America. 



Factual > Arts, Culture & the Media

Dreaming the Impossible: Unbuilt Britain
BBC4, 10:50-11:50pm, 3/3 - A Revolution in the City

Using her skills to uncover long-forgotten and abandoned plans, architectural investigator Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner explores the fascinating and dramatic stories behind some of the grandest designs that were never built.
Destruction, whether intentional or circumstantial, often creates a clean slate and demands a fresh outlook in which we come to think the unthinkable. This programme looks at bold, and in some cases shocking, plans to make revolutionary changes to Britain's biggest cities.
In the mid 17th century, the capital was reeling from the devastation caused by the Great Fire of London. But amid the destruction, a huge opportunity arose to completely remodel and modernise London and make it into a very different city than the one we know today.
London was effectively a blank sheet of paper and within a week of the city being razed to the ground, architect Sir Christopher Wren presented King Charles II with a vision to create a completely new city. Wren wanted the winding streets and old courtyards that had existed almost unchanged since medieval times to be replaced by monumental Parisian-style avenues in a formal grid pattern with large piazzas. This was a unique opportunity to improve on the past, but while Wren's design for St Paul's Cathedral did become a reality London was reconstructed on essentially the same street plan as before the fire.
Three centuries later, Glasgow was the second city of the empire and the industrial powerhouse of the nation, but was struggling to cope with overcrowding and slum housing. Many believed the only solution was to start again. The city's leading planner, Robert Bruce, proposed demolishing the entire city centre - the celebrated buildings of Mackintosh and Greek Thompson would all have been bulldozed - to create a 1940s vision of the future. The new Glasgow would have been built as a system of regular tower blocks, ringed by a motorway, built in districts according to function. Bruce's justification for these drastic proposals was the creation of a new 'healthy and beautiful city'. Although his plan was not realised in its entirety, many of his ideas were carried out, and the M8 motorway which cuts right through the city centre is probably the most visible legacy of the 'Bruce Report'.
In both plans, destruction was the driving force behind creating a new city on a fresh slate. Separated in time by 300 years, these two radical thinkers, Christopher Wren and Robert Bruce, devised colossal, transformative schemes for their respective cities in a bid to create their very personal vision of the 'perfect city'. 



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Thursday 29th August

Factual > Science & Nature > Nature & Environment

Poaching Wars with Tom Hardy
ITV1, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/2

All over Sub-Saharan Africa, the poaching crisis is spreading like a plague. Cameroon, Chad, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have all seen large-scale elephant slaughter and throughout the rest of Africa, both rhino and elephant are being killed in alarming numbers. The everyday effect of the poaching business on African wildlife is one of horror and cruelty that brutalises both the animals and the humans involved.
In programme two, Tom heads to Botswana, Mozambique and Tanzania, looking for answers.

In the 1930s there were believed to be nearly five million elephant ranging free in Africa. Today their total number is thought to be less than half a million. Rhino populations have also been decimated due to the simple greed for horn and ivory.

Botswana’s second biggest industry, tourism, is wildlife-related, so it has a lot to protect and more incentive than most.  Tom goes to meet Tshekedi Khama, the Minister of Environment Wildlife and Tourism and a big player in the world of poaching. Tom is directed to a very secretive warehouse on the outskirts of Gaborone, Botswana’s capital city. Inside he is stunned to see thousands of elephant tusks being stored.
The ivory trade was banned worldwide in 1989 but today the black market is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year...



Factual > Science & Nature > Science & Technology > Documentaries

Horizon: Dinosaurs - The Hunt for Life
BBC2, 11:20pm-12:20am

The hunt for life within the long-dead bones of dinosaurs may sound like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy - but one woman has found traces of life within the fossilised bones of a T Rex.
Dr Mary Schweitzer has seen the remains of red blood cells and touched the soft tissue of an animal that died 68 million years ago. Most excitingly of all, she believes she may just have found signs of DNA. Her work is revolutionising our understanding of these iconic beasts.


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Friday 30th August

Factual > Science & Nature > Nature & Environment

The Burrowers: Animals Underground
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm

Chris Packham sheds light on the magical underground world of three iconic British animals - badgers, water voles and rabbits - investigating wild burrows and creating full scale replicas too.



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