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Saturday 8th October
Factual; History; Documentaries
How The World Got Mixed Up
BBC2, 9:45-11:15pm, Mixed Britannia Season
One of the very few universal laws of history is this: whenever and wherever people of different races have been brought together they have always mixed. For most of human history the power of sex managed to undermine the power of race. The incredible level of racial inter-mixing that now characterises life in 21st-century Britain is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, but a return to the traditions of the past.
This film will re-access the meaning of the great historic force that first brought the races together - imperialism. It will tell the surprising and positive story of how, throughout much of history, the races of the world's empires mixed together unquestioningly.
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Sunday 9th October
Factual; History
City Beneath The Waves: Pavlopetri
BBC2, 8:00-9:00pm
Just off the southern coast of mainland Greece lies the oldest submerged city in the world. A city that thrived for 2000 years during the time that saw the birth of Western civilisation. An international team of experts uses the latest technology to investigate the site and digitally raise it from the seabed, to reveal the secrets of Pavlopetri.
Led by underwater archaeologist Dr Jon Henderson, the team use the latest in cutting-edge science and technology to prise age-old secrets from the complex of streets and stone buildings that lie less than five metres below the surface. State-of-the-art CGI helps to raise the city from the seabed revealing, for the first time in 3,500 years, how Pavlopetri would once have looked and operated.
Jon Henderson is leading this ground-breaking project in collaboration with a team from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, and Nic Flemming, the man whose hunch led to the intriguing discovery of Pavlopetri in 1967. Also working alongside the archaeologists are a team from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, who aim to take underwater archaeology into the 21st century.
The team scour the sea floor for any artefacts that have eroded from the sands. The site is littered with thousands of fragments, each providing valuable clues to the everyday lives of the people of Pavlopetri. From the buildings to the trade goods to the everyday tableware, every artefact provides a window into a long-forgotten world.
Together these precious relics provide us with a window on a time when Pavlopetri would have been at its height, showing us what life was like in this distant age, and revealing how this city marks the start of Western civilisation.
Factual; Documentary
Road to Memphis
Yesterday, 10:30pm-12:30am
4th April, 1968: The world mourns the death of the inspirational Martin Luther King. Follow the dramatic timeline of events leading up to his murder and the hunt for his killer.
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Monday 10th October
News
Panorama - BNP: The Fraud Exposed
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm
Nick Griffin's British National Party, already under investigation for breaches of electoral law, is facing fresh allegations of corruption. Panorama uncovers new evidence of financial documents being falsified and fabricated in order to deceive the Electoral Commission. The programme also has evidence of the BNP's failure to declare major donations to the party.
As Darragh MacIntyre reports, the BNP, which is better known for its controversial views on race, is in debt and according to its own published accounts appears to be technically insolvent.
Factual; Families and Relationships; Documentaries
Twincredibles
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm
There's only a slim chance that black and white parents will have twins of different skin colour, but as one in ten children born in the UK is now mixed race, this genetic quirk is going to become increasingly common. Twincredibles follows five sets of twins, from toddlers through to adults, to create a surprising and compelling story about the journey of mixed race Britain.
The stories of all these twins throw a new and fascinating light on how brothers and sisters who are similar in so many other ways lead different lives because of their skin colour. The experiences don't always match the stereotype. For teenage boys James and Daniel, growing up in Eltham South East London, it was the whiter looking twin Daniel who suffered racial abuse, whilst darker twin James was left alone.
Travelling through the experiences of each set of twins, the film unpeels the impact this accident of their birth has on how they see themselves and how the outside world views them. Living in diverse locations across England to Scotland, the twins tell their stories in their own words, to paint an honest and sometimes hard-hitting picture of race in modern Britain.
Factual
Exposure: Heart Hospital
ITV1, 10:35-11-35pm
A one-hour documentary for ITV1’s new ‘Exposure’ strand, investigates the worsening crisis in the availability of donor hearts in Britain.
With intimate access to the heart transplant team at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital – one of the largest transplant centres in Europe – this revealing film follows three patients and their families as they find themselves on the long and uncertain road towards a life-saving operation, and provides a rare opportunity to witness complex heart transplant surgery.
The stories of these three men reveal the human impact of the critical shortage of donor hearts. As leading heart surgeon Professor Robert Bonser says: “Living under that shadow of uncertainty is a haunting experience”.
Professor Bonser has led the heart transplant service at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for 21 years, During his career, he's performed more than fifteen thousand heart operations, including 250 heart transplants. He has seen the number of transplants carried out in the UK drop by two thirds to less than 100 each year.
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Tuesday 11th October
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
Ceramics: A Fragile History
BBC4, 3:30-4:30pm, 1/3
Ceramics are where art meets function - one of our oldest and most fundamental art forms, that sits at the centre of our homes. The first film in this three-part series looks at a history of domestic pottery in Britain from Tudor times onwards, tracing the evolution of its different techniques and styles, and examining what our pots can tell us in intimate detail how preceeding generations lived and saw themselves.
Whether it's for celebrating birth, marriage and death (our own or royal), eating and drinking or showing the world our social status, ceramics contain more than just our tea or coffee - they contain something of our lives, our social DNA, and reveal a lot about our taste and habits as a nation. They become, in effect, snapshots in clay.
Factual; Health and Wellbeing; Documentaries
Me, My Sex and I
BBC1, 10:35-11:25pm
What is the truth about the sexes? It is a deeply-held assumption that every person is either male or female; but many people are now questioning whether this belief is correct.
This compelling and sensitive documentary unlocks the stories of people born neither entirely male nor female. Conditions like these have been known as 'intersex' and shrouded in unnecessary shame and secrecy for decades. It's estimated that DSDs (Disorders of Sexual Development) are, in fact, as common as twins or red hair - nearly one in 50 of us.
The programme features powerful insights from people living with these conditions, and the medical teams at the forefront of the field, including clinical psychologist Tiger Devore, whose own sex when born was ambiguous.
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Wednesday 12th October
Learning; Secondary
Witness: Immigration UK
BBC2, 4:00-5:00pm
The programme uses first person testimony and clips from the BBC archive to examine immigration into the UK since 1948.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
Treasures of Chinese Porcelain
BBC4, 1:00-2:00am
In November 2010, a Chinese vase unearthed in a suburban semi in Pinner sold at auction for £43 million - a new record for a Chinese work of art. Why are Chinese vases so famous and so expensive? The answer lies in the European obsession with Chinese porcelain that began in the 16th century and by the 18th century was a full-blown craze that swept up kings, princes and the emerging middle classes alike.
In this documentary Lars Tharp, the Antiques Roadshow expert and Chinese ceramics specialist, sets out to explore why Chinese porcelain was so valuable then - and still is now. He goes on a journey to parts of China closed to Western eyes until relatively recently. Lars travels to the mountainside from which virtually every single Chinese export vase, plate and cup began life in the 18th century - a mountain known as Mount Gaolin, from whose name we get the word kaolin, or china clay. He sees how the china clay was fused with another substance, mica, that would turn it into porcelain - a secret process concealed from envious Western eyes. For a time porcelain became more valuable than gold - it was a substance so fine, so resonant and so strong that it drove Europeans mad trying to copy it.
Carrying his own newly-acquired vase, Lars uncovers the secrets of China's porcelain capital, Jingdezhen, before embarking on the arduous 400-mile journey to the coast that every piece of export porcelain would once have travelled. He sees how the trade between China and Europe not only changed our idea of what was beautiful - by introducing us to the idea of works of art we could eat off - but also began to affect the whole tradition of Chinese aesthetics too, as the ceramicists of Jingdezhen sought to meet the European demand for porcelain decorated with family coats of arms, battle scenes or even erotica.
The porcelain fever that gripped Britain drove conspicuous consumption and fuelled the Georgian craze for tea parties. Today the new emperors - China's rising millionaire class - are buying back the export wares once shipped to Europe. The vase sold in Pinner shows that the lure of Chinese porcelain is as compelling as ever.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
Britain's Most Fragile Treasure
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm
Historian Dr Janina Ramirez unlocks the secrets of a centuries-old masterpiece in glass. At 78 feet in height, the famous East Window at York Minster is the largest medieval stained-glass window in the country, and it was the creative vision of a single artist - a mysterious master craftsman called John Thornton, one of the earliest named English artists.
The East Window has been called England's Sistine Chapel. Within its 311 stained-glass panels is the entire history of the world, from the first day to the Last Judgment, and yet it was made 100 years before Michelangelo's own masterpiece. The scale of Thornton's achievement is revealed as Dr Ramirez follows the work of a highly-skilled conservation team at York Glaziers Trust. They have dismantled the entire window as part of a five-year project to repair centuries of damage and restore it to its original glory.
It's a unique opportunity for Dr Ramirez to examine Thornton's greatest work at close quarters, to discover details that would normally be impossible to see and to reveal exactly how medieval artists made images of such delicacy and complexity using the simplest of tools.
The East Window of York Minster is far more than a work of artistic genius, it's a window onto the medieval world and the medieval mind - telling us who were once were and who we still are, all preserved in the most fragile medium of all.
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Friday 14th October
News; Documentaries
Dispatches: Britain's Rubbish
Channel 4, 3:00-4:00pm
Dispatches lifts the lid on Britain's bins and asks what the plan is to tackle the country's growing rubbish problem. Reporter Morland Sanders travels the UK in the wake of the government's Waste Policy Review to find out about bin collections, litter, excessive packaging and Britons' secret bin habits.
He finds householders angry about their bins not being collected every week and fly-tipping setting resident against resident. He asks whether we can do more to help reduce the rubbish problem ourselves and sets a family the challenge of living without a bin for a fortnight. Can they really recycle everything? On the high street, he questions whether we are simply sold too much packaging with the things we buy, making us throw far too much away, and sifts through litter to see who should be doing more to keep Britain tidy.
He also talks to the people who collect, sort and recycle our waste and discovers what happens to our paper and plastics once they are collected. Does profit win out over green considerations? And he investigates whether the waste companies are really solving our rubbish problem.
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*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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