Saturday 25th
Yesterday - The Last Tommy - "Tales of heroism from Britain's last surviving World War I veterans. The Battle of the Somme in 1916 is the biggest disaster of the war, with 20,000 killed in only eight hours."
BBC 4 - Harold Pinter Night - Arena: Harold Pinter - Part 1 - The Room and part 2- A Celebration; Krapp's Last Tape; Arena: One for the Road; The Birthday Party
BBC Radio 4 - Saturday Play: Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde - "When a London lawyer studies the last will of his old friend Dr Jekyll, his suspicions are aroused. Why has respectable Dr Jekyll left everything to sinister Edward Hyde?
BBC Radio 4 - Archive On 4: On Northern Men - "Kay Mellor explores the way that northern English masculinities have been portrayed in British film and television, reconciling issues of blatant sentimentality with the real-life social parallels that inform the canon of the past 50 years.
She examines fictional portrayals that have changed and diversified, yet stayed much the same in many ways. From the crucial age of the Angry Young Man, marked out in This Sporting Life, she considers the contrasts and similarities between the trapped northern masculine identities portrayed in Kes and Billy Elliot.
Kay discovers that the disintegration of traditional northern male stereotypes in fiction leads us also to more diverse explorations, for example, the weak men in Coronation Street, Last of the Summer Wine and Keeping Up Appearances, British-Asian northern masculinities in East is East, the dysfunctional and proud Frank Gallagher in Shameless, and interpretations of homosexual masculinities in Queer as Folk and Jimmy McGovern's The Street.
The programme traces the relationship between changing variables of social class, heroism, 'northernness' and fictional portrayals of masculinity in film and television, using supporting material from the radio archive, and remembers some of the humour and creativity that emerges from struggle and the portrayal of difficult lives."
Sunday 26th
Channel 4 - Revelations: Muslim and Looking for Love - "If you're young, single and Muslim, finding love is getting increasingly difficult.Qualifications, height, job prospects and even complexion are high on the list of demands. Then there's the question of nationality. Will your husband or wife come from Britain or from abroad?For professional women, educated Muslim men are in short supply. Muslim men tend to marry at a younger age, not good news when you're pushing 30.At the Birmingham Central Mosque, they think they have the answer. As well as ministering to its congregation, it also offers the services of one of the largest Muslim marriage bureaus.The Bureau has over a thousand people on its books and Mr Haq and Mr Razzaq are the voluntary matchmakers. Unlikely as it may seem, these two middle-aged men are at the vanguard of a Muslim marriage revolution. For them, the Bureau offers a third way, a space between the traditional arranged marriage and the Western dating scene."
BBC 1 - Rivers with Griff Rhys Jones - 1/5 - Scotland - "Actor and comedian Griff Rhys Jones sets out on an adventure to explore how rivers have influenced, nurtured and powered our lives throughout history. From the raging torrents of Scotland to the reflective flatlands of East Anglia, Griff barges, canoes, swims and sails his way along a hidden network which has been the lifeblood of Britain.
Griff starts his journey with the wild rivers of Scotland. He travels east, upstream from Kinlochleven, into one of the most remote areas of the country, then follows the fast and furious course of the water downstream to Perth. He milks fish for their eggs, goes canyoning, and canoes a fast-flowing river that fallen pine trees have turned into an obstacle course."
BBC 2 - Gonzo: The Life and Works of Dr Hunter S. Thompson - "The definitive film biography of a mythic American figure, a man that Tom Wolfe called 'our greatest comic writer', whose suicide led the Rolling Stone Magazine, where Thompson began his career, to devote an entire issue to the man that launched a brash, irreverent, fearless style of journalism - named 'gonzo' after an anarchic blues riff by James Booker.
Borrowing from Kris Kristofferson, Thompson was a 'walking contradiction, partly truth, mostly fiction'. While his pen dripped with venom for dishonest politicians, he surprised nervous visitors with the courtly manners and soft-spoken delivery of a Southern gentleman. By many, he is considered an iconic crusader for truth, justice and a fiercely idealistic American way. Like Jack Kerouac's On the Road, his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has been a wanderlust myth for generation after generation of American youth. And for America's esteemed journalists - from Tom Wolfe, and Walter Isaacson to the NY Times' Frank Rich - he remains an iconic freelance who believed that writing could make a difference. The film focuses on Thompson's work, particularly his most provocative and productive period from 1965 to 1975.
Gonzo is directed by Alex Gibney, the Academy Award nominated director of Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room and the director of the Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. While Gibney shaped the screen story, every narrated word in the film springs from the typewriters of Thompson himself, given life by Johnny Depp.
The film is distinguished by its unprecedented cooperation of Thompson's friends, family and estate. The filmmakers had access to hundreds of photographs and over 200 hours of audiotapes, home movies and documentary footage."
Monday 27th
Channel 4 - The Scandalous Adventures of Lord Byron - part 1 of 2 - "Byron's first adventure through Spain, Greece, Albania and Turkey was about escape. Disillusioned with London's decadence, he was restless for new sensations in foreign lands; these included indiscriminate and copious sex and immersion in Eastern cultures.
During the trip, Byron began to write Childe Harold, an autobiographical work based on his travels. On its publication, Byron became the toast of London Society and his rise to fame was complete.
However, influenced by the sexual tolerance he had experienced abroad, his outrageous behaviour didn't keep him in favour for long."
Tuesday 28th
BBC Radio 3 - Homer's Landscapes: The Poet and His World - 1 of 3 - "Adam Nicolson travels along the eastern Mediterranean, from the Ionian Sea to the western coast of Turkey to trace the origins of the poems at the root of modern European thought.
Visiting the island of Chios, where Homer might have come from, and then travelling on to Troy and Ithaca and sailing the Aegean, Adam reads The Iliad and The Odyssey, to explore their landscapes and world from which these important epic poems emerged."
BBC Radio 4 - The Long View - "Jonathan Freedland presents the series that looks for the past behind the present.
Jonathan examines the policing of demonstrations and asks what lessons can be learned in our own time from the 1855 Hyde Park disturbances. The newly established police force was criticised in Parliament and the press for using excessive force to control the crowd, goading the public and coralling the protestors into a confined space.
Jonathan and guests compare that controversy with the criticisms being levelled at the police force today in light of the G20 protests."
Wednesday 29th July
BBC 3 - Tony: Ive Lost My Family - "Most teenagers row with their parents. But what happens if you leave home while you're still at school? What's it like living alone while you're still a child?
At the tender age of sixteen, Tony left home and was forced to fend for himself.
He's managed to survive alone for the last two years... but only just!
Tony's now 18 and still very much a boy, but he's had it with being unemployed, useless, skint, lonely and too ashamed of his life to go and face his mum.
This film follows his journey as he becomes a grown-up, and tries to reconcile with his family.
As he begins to sort his life out, Tony makes some extraordinary discoveries that lead him in an entirely new direction. Maybe the family he's been looking for can be found somewhere else - and maybe there's a different way to go home?"
Thursday 30th
BBC1 - Double Jeopardy - "A ground-breaking investigation into a crime where an attacker left an elderly woman for dead, and where the suspect was acquitted at the Old Bailey, despite DNA evidence. Reporter Richard Bilton looks into the new double jeopardy rule and the evidence needed to bring the case back to trial.
In 2005 the 800-year-old double jeopardy rule was swept away in England. Until then anyone found not guilty, stayed not guilty. They could never be tried again for the same crime. This is no longer the case. If there's new evidence of guilt in a crime that's so serious it involves a life sentence, there can now be a retrial."
BBC 2 - Arena: The Hunt for Moby Dick - "Acclaimed writer and authority on whales Philip Hoare tackles man's complex relationship with the whale and brings it into startling new focus through one man and one book: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Hoare draws an eerie parallel between Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of the great white whale on the high seas and today's war on terror.
In precariously tiny boats, a hundred years ago, whaling men braved the biggest animals on earth with no more than hand-held harpoons. Their furious battles were grim and without mercy. The prize catch was the mighty sperm whale, the greatest predator the world has ever seen. Today, the whale is still witnessed with awe, no longer as a monster but as a magnificent, gentle giant.
In an epic journey which takes him from the bleak northern coast of England to the whaling ports of New Bedford and Nantucket, and finally to the islands of the Azores - where whales were still hunted with traditional harpoons up to the 1980s - Hoare enters a world haunted by a bloody and violent past.
He stands at the desk where Melville wrote his masterpiece and discovers the original skeleton of a Victorian whale in Yorkshire, which inspired Moby-Dick. He visits the last remaining whaleship, the Charles W. Morgan, to see what conditions on board were really like. And out in the mile-deep waters of the Atlantic, he has his own extraordinary encounter with the legendary sperm whale itself.
In Arena: The Hunt for Moby-Dick, Hoare takes us closer than ever before to the truth behind the story of The Whale and the fear and awe it inspires. What does Moby-Dick have to tell us about our modern world?"
BBC Radio 3 - Homer's Landscapes: The Iliad - 2/3 - "Adam Nicolson travels along the eastern Mediterranean, from the Ionian Sea to the western coast of Turkey to trace the origins of the poems at the root of modern European thought.
Adam travels to Homer's Troy, walking the plains and visiting the ruins of its citadel, finding that although Homer is thought to have been blind, it is possible to directly map Homer's great poem of war onto the coastline of the Aegean, the beach of the Greek camp, the Scamander River and the hewn stone walls of Troy."
Friday 31st
BBC Radio 3 - Homer's Landscapes: The Odyssey - 3/3 - "The Odyssey: Adam Nicolson traces the origins of the poems at the root of modern European thought, visiting the locations of Homer's Odyssey.
BBC Radio 3 - The Essay: Doctoring Philosophy - 4/4 - Utility - "Professor Jonathan Wolff looks back at the philosopher Bentham's utilitarian principles and asks how an over-stretched health service should prioritise when all needs cannot be met."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* This applies to staff members 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment