Off-air recordings for week 3-9 December 2011

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

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Saturday 3rd December


Documentaries

Tony Robinson's Gods and Monsters
Channel 4, 8:00-9:00pm, 2/2 Evil Spirits

Featuring dramatic reconstructions, the opening programme examines our fascination with and terror of dead bodies.


People in the past believed that even in death a body retained some vital force, and that the dead could rise from the grave to cause havoc among the living. Why did they believe this? What powers did they believe the dead had? And what did they do about it?

Tony's journey takes him on a fascinating and sometimes humorous tour of some of the darkest recesses of the ancient mind, and brings him face to face with a plague-breathing zombie, a dead body that seems alive three weeks after it died, and the English monarchs who ate the bodies of their subjects.


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Sunday 4th December


Factual; Money; Documentaries

Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm

In just seven years, Mark Zuckerberg has gone from his Harvard college dorm to running a business with 800 million users, and a possible value of $100 billion. His idea to 'make the world more open and connected' has sparked a revolution in communication, and now looks set to have a huge impact on business too.

Emily Maitlis reports on life inside Facebook. Featuring a rare interview with Zuckerberg himself, the film tells the story of Facebook's creation, looks at the accuracy of The Social Network movie, and examines Facebook's plans to use the personal information it has collected to power a new kind of online advertising.

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Monday 5th December


Documentaries; News, Current Affairs and Politics

Dispatches: Landlords from Hell
Channel 4, 8:30-9:00pm

In this undercover investigation, Jon Snow reports on the return of the slum landlord in 21st-century Britain. At a time when more people than ever are having to rent privately, unable to get on the property ladder, Dispatches reveals the shocking conditions in which tenants are forced to live.


Dispatches sends an undercover reporter to work for a rogue property empire in the north of England. He reveals a world of forced evictions, slum properties in dangerous condition, and routine bullying of tenants. Jon confronts the man raking in millions while his tenants suffer.

Dispatches also exposes an extraordinary new phenomenon: thousands of people living in illegal sheds, transforming parts of London into slums. A second undercover reporter lives in a squalid, illegal shed in London, paying £40 a week rent to another rogue landlord.

Dispatches lifts the lid on a world where unscrupulous landlords are exploiting the most vulnerable people in society and getting away with it.

August 2011:

Since the programme has gone out, the Charity Commission has opened an inquiry into housing charity, the Meridian Foundation, exposed in a recent Channel 4 Dispatches undercover investigation.

Meridian's property empire extends across greater Manchester and the north west of England. It has a turnover of hundreds of thousands of pounds with much of that money from the taxpayer in the form of Housing Benefit.

A spokeswoman for the Charity Commission confirmed it had received 25 complaints about the charity after the programme was broadcast.



Documentaries

The Great British Property Scandal
Channel 4, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/2 (part 2 on Tuesday)

Almost two million British families are currently on the waiting lists for social housing, and thousands live in unsuitable temporary accommodation or are struggling with soaring rent payments. Cutbacks and the recession also mean that homelessness has become a very real threat to thousands across the whole social spectrum who are increasingly struggling to make ends meet.


Meanwhile, one million properties lie empty across the UK, even though many cost huge amounts to keep secure - a bill often footed by taxpayers. In some areas whole streets of houses stand deserted, damaging the local community as well as neighbourhood businesses. In others, empty stranded houses are a blight on the local landscape attracting vermin and vandals, and depressing surrounding property prices.

For The Great British Property Scandal season, Channel 4 investigates some of the issues that have contributed to the housing crisis and speak to a broad range of the people affected by it.


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Tuesday 6th December


Documentaries

My Child's Not Perfect
ITV1, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/2

Children struggling with problems which drastically affect their behaviour and profoundly impact on their families’ lives are the focus of this brand new ITV1 series.


Among the children featured are a six-year-old girl who, despite being talkative at home, becomes mute as soon as she passes through the school gates each day, a 16 year old boy with Tourette’s Syndrome, whose condition appeared suddenly following a seizure, and a ten-year-old boy whose family have spent almost his entire life desperately searching for a clear, satisfactory diagnosis to help them understand why something ‘is not right’ with him.

Produced by Maverick Television, 2x60 documentary series, My Child’s Not Perfect, focuses on each family’s efforts to understand more about their child’s behaviour and ways to cope with the challenge of raising young people with a range of behavioural, emotional or clinical problems. In each programme, the children and their families, drawn from across the country and from a range of backgrounds, are shown dealing with the emotional demands and practical difficulties of searching for and testing methods of combating and managing each condition.

And, as the series will show, for some a significant part of their struggle is finding an adequate diagnosis for their condition in the first place.

Working with mental health professionals from established institutions including The Maudsley Hospital, The Anna Freud Centre and The Priory Hospital, My Child’s Not Perfect sets out to provide an insight into issues faced by many families today.

Episode 1

In episode one we meet Katherine, a lively little six year old who is the life and soul of the family at home. However, as soon as she passes through the school gates each day, she becomes mute. Unable to speak a word for eight hours a day, her family embarks on a course of intensive speech therapy to get to the cause of her resistance to talk.

For 16 year old Henry, the problem isn’t talking, it’s what he says: Henry has Tourette’s Syndrome. Diagnosed just over a year ago, following a sudden seizure, Henry and his family’s lives were turned upside down in an instant. Unable to control either physical movement or vocal expression, he’s coming to terms with the impact of this incurable condition and seeking alternative therapies to manage it, while studying for his GCSEs.

The programme also features Charlotte, who has been searching for a diagnosis to explain her ten year old son Adam’s behaviour. Convinced that something just ‘wasn’t right’ since he was a baby, she has come to the mental health unit of the Priory in Cheadle, near Stockport, to meet Dr Faeza Khan. She assesses Adam and diagnoses him with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, which comes as a relief to his mother, who has spent his life searching for a diagnosis which will hopefully enable the family to access services and support to formulate a long-term care package for him.


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Wednesday 7th December


Factual; Science and Nature; Documentaries

After Life: The Strange Science of Decay
BBC4, 4:00-5:30am

Ever wondered what would happen in your own home if you were taken away, and everything inside was left to rot? The answer is revealed in this fascinating programme, which explores the strange and surprising science of decay.

For two months in summer 2011, a glass box containing a typical kitchen and garden was left to rot in full public view within Edinburgh Zoo. In this resulting documentary, presenter Dr George McGavin and his team use time-lapse cameras and specialist photography to capture the extraordinary way in which moulds, microbes and insects are able to break down our everyday things and allow new life to emerge from old.

Decay is something that many of us are repulsed by. But as the programme shows, it's a process that's vital in nature. And seen in close up, it has an unexpected and sometimes mesmerising beauty.

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Thursday 8th December


Documentaries

Jerusalem: The Making of a Holy City
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3

Author and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore presents a three-part series that illuminates the history of the sacred, and peerlessly beautiful city - Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is one of the oldest cities in the world. For the Jewish faith, it is the site of the Western Wall, the last remnant of the second Jewish Temple. For Christians, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the site of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Muslims, the Al-Aqsa Mosque is the third holiest Sanctuary of Islam.

In episode one Simon Sebag Montefiore will delve into the past to explore how this unique city came into being, explaining how it became of such major importance to the three Abrahamic faiths; and how these faiths emerged from the Biblical tradition of the Israelites.

Starting with the Canaanites, Simon goes on a chronological journey to trace the rise of the city as a holy place and discusses the evidence for it becoming a Jewish city under King David. The programme explores the construction of the First Temple by Solomon through to the life and death of Jesus Christ and the eventual expulsion of the Jews by the Romans, concluding in the 7th Century AD, on the eve of the capture of Jerusalem by the Muslim Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab.


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Friday 9th December


News, Current Affairs and Politics

Unreported World
Channel 4, 7:30-8:00, 10/10, Australia's Hidden Valley

Unreported World investigates the effect of controversial emergency legislation on Australia's Aboriginal population. The government has used this legislation to take control of many Aboriginal settlements. It said this was help to end violence and child abuse, and combat the alcohol abuse that ravages many Aboriginal communities.


Reporter Oliver Steeds and director Ed Braman begin their journey in Alice Springs - visited by tens of thousands of Britons every year for its aboriginal art galleries and tourist sites - where alcohol addiction is still ravaging the lives of the country's original inhabitants, many of whom live in desolate squatter camps on the outskirts of town.

The team joins a regular night patrol, staffed by volunteers who search the streets for Aboriginal people incapacitated by alcohol. Many of them live in townships or settlements outside the town: a legacy from 1928 when they weren't allowed to live in the town itself.

Steeds and Braman visit a settlement called Hidden Valley. At the entrance is a sign warning that, under emergency legislation, alcohol is illegal. Despite this, the ground is littered with bottles and cans.

They give one resident, Beverley, a lift to the largest supermarket in the centre of Alice Springs. Since the emergency legislation, which required the suspension of Australia's race discrimination act, her welfare payments are ring-fenced to help prevent the purchase of alcohol.

Aboriginal people are five times more likely to die of alcohol-related causes than other Australians. However, the legislation, and the knowledge of the harm alcohol is doing, does little to stop her - or her friends - from buying it.


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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.