Off-air recordings for week 14-20 January 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 January

Factual; Documentaries

Timeshift: The Rules of Drinking
BBC4, 11:00-pm-12:00am, series 11

Timeshift digs into the archive to discover the unwritten rules that have governed the way we drink in Britain. In the pubs and working men's clubs of the forties and fifties there were strict customs governing who stood where. To be invited to sup at the bar was a rite of passage for many young men, and it took years for women to be accepted into these bastions of masculinity. As the country prospered and foreign travel became widely available, so new drinking habits were introduced as we discovered wine and, even more exotically, cocktails.

People began to drink at home as well as at work, where journalists typified a tradition of the liquid lunch. Advertising played its part as lager was first sold as a woman's drink and then the drink of choice for young men with a bit of disposable income. The rules changed and changed again, but they were always there - unwritten and unspoken, yet underwriting our complicated relationship with drinking.


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Monday 16th January

Factual; Documentaries

Secrets of the Shoplifters
Channel 4, 10:00-11.05pm

Britain is the shoplifting capital of Europe - the crime has increased by over 12% in the last year. This film heads to the front line of the battle between shops and robbers, revealing the cunning and clever up-to-date tactics employed by both sides.


The summer riots highlighted that Brits are prepared to break the law and steal to get what they want. Whilet store detectives are refusing to give up the fight, shoplifters are equally determined to outwit them. It's a surreal world of cat and mouse - detectives scour Facebook while lifters use a range of complex tricks to try to disable those seemingly unmovable tags.

The recession is dramatically changing the goods that are being stolen - the theft of clothing is being replaced by a huge rise in meat stealing. With shoplifters becoming smarter and more presentable in appearance, security staff have to become experts in body language to stay one step ahead.

These committed detectives are putting their necks on the line, often without handcuffs or stab vests, while they try and detain people who, when caught, can sometimes turn violent.


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Tuesday 17th January

Drama. Classic and Period

The Mystery of Edwin Drood
BBC1, 1:25-2:25am, part 1 (part 2 tomorrow)

A two-part period drama adapted from the novel by Charles Dickens.

Opium addict and choirmaster John Jasper has vivid dreams of killing his beloved nephew Edwin Drood and stealing his fiancee Rosa. When two exotic strangers arrive in town, Jasper's dark desires take shape and his life will never be the same again.

With Edwin Drood feared dead, Jasper tries desperately to remember events of the night before. He pursues Rosa with an intensity that pushes him to the edge of sanity, while a trail of evidence points ominously to the cathedral crypt.

Factual; Science and Nature; Science and Technology

Horizon: Playing God
BBC2, 9:30-10:30pm

Adam Rutherford meets a new creature created by American scientists, the spider-goat. It is part goat, part spider, and its milk can be used to create artificial spider's web.

It is part of a new field of research, synthetic biology, with a radical aim: to break down nature into spare parts so that we can rebuild it however we please.

This technology is already being used to make bio-diesel to power cars. Other researchers are looking at how we might, one day, control human emotions by sending 'biological machines' into our brains.


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Wednesday 18th January

Factual; History

Illuminations: The Private Life of Medieval Kings
BBC4, 11:00pm-12:00am, Second of three part series (part 1 already recorded)

Dr Janina Ramirez unlocks the secrets of medieval illuminated manuscripts and shows how they gave power to the king and united the kingdom in an age of plague, warfare and rebellion. She discovers that Edward III used the manuscripts he read as a boy to prepare him for his great victory at the battle of Crecy and reveals how a vigorous new national identity bloomed during the 100 Years War with France (1340-1453).


In the British Library's Royal Manuscripts collection she finds out that magnificent manuscripts like the Bedford Hours, taken as war booty from the French royal family, were adapted for the education of English princes. Dr Ramirez also explores how knowledge spread through a new form of book - the encyclopaedia.

Factual; History

The Crusades
BBC2, 9:30-10:30pm, 1/3 Holy War

The story of the Crusades is remembered as a tale of religious fanaticism and unspeakable brutality, of medieval knights and jihadi warriors; of castles and kings; of heroism, betrayal and sacrifice.


But now, using fresh evidence, eye-witness testimonies and contemporary accounts - from both the Christian and Islamic worlds - Dr Thomas Asbridge re-examines this epic medieval tale. Retracing the steps of the crusaders from a small town in France to the magnificent cities of the Holy Land, he brings to life the human experience of the Crusades, and sheds new light on how it was that two of the world's great religions waged war in the name of God; why hundreds of thousands of Christians and Muslims answered the call to crusade and jihad.


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Thursday 19th January

News; Documentaries

Putin, Russia and the West
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/4, Taking Control

Vladimir Putin, after eight years as President of Russia and four more as Prime Minister, is stubbornly holding onto power. He has announced his intention to return as President and declared his United Russia party the winner in parliamentary elections that have widely been seen as fraudulent, causing mass protests in Moscow and elsewhere with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets.


But just how did this consummate political operator with a background in the KGB become a valued ally of the West? And when did his policies start to provoke deep concern in Washington and London? Putin, Russia & the West tells the inside story, with contributions from Putin’s top colleagues and the Western statesmen who have clashed with him.

This is a four-part series from Norma Percy and the team at Brook Lapping behind the multi-award-winning documentaries The Death of Yugoslavia, The Second Russian Revolution and Iran & the West.

The first film, Taking Control, starts with George W Bush meeting Putin in June 2001 and declaring how he looked Putin in the eye and ‘got a sense of his soul’. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice recall their reactions to the discussions that happened behind closed doors, with Putin delivering a prophetic warning about Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Taliban. Three months later, 9/11 happened.

Following the terrorist attacks, Putin quickly aligned Russia with the West, to the surprise of many in the Kremlin. The US and Russia had opposed each other for decades, but the world had now changed. Sergei Ivanov, Russian’s Defence Minister, tells how offers from Taliban to join forces with Russia against America were rejected with strong language.

But at home Putin was becoming increasingly authoritarian. Mikhail Kasyanov, then Russia’s Prime Minister, recalls a meeting with Putin and the country’s top businessmen, where ‘all the oligarchs present almost hid under the table in fear.' The film also tells the story of how Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, challenged Putin and ended up in prison.


Documentaries

True Stories: Gypsy Blood
More4, 10:00-11:35pm

Filmed over two years by award-winning photographer Leo Maguire, Gypsy Blood examines the violent culture that some gypsy and traveller fathers hand on to their sons.


The film is an intimate portrait of two gypsy families, their fight for respect and the price they pay in cycles of revenge that can erupt into sudden and terrifying violence.

The Dohertys are Irish Traveller royalty. While Hughie Doherty, 27, becomes embroiled in a fight to defend his family's name, his seven-year-old son Francie is caught between two worlds, learning to read at primary school while learning to fight with his fists at home.

Fred Butcher is Romany but torn between the gypsy fighting tradition and his love as a father. His nine-year-old son, Freddy Cole, is terrified his father will be badly hurt in a fight. The film follows the story of how Fred nearly dies in a machete attack as a day of drinking and sparring goes terribly wrong.

Gypsy Blood is a haunting study of masculinity, violence and the uneasy relationship gypsy and traveller men have with their bare-knuckle traditions, and an insight into people living amongst a wider society but sometimes with values that are a world apart.


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Friday 20th January

Documentary; Historical

Pugin: God's Own Architect
BBC4, 1:35-2:35am

Augustus Northmore Welby Pugin is far from being a household name, yet he designed the iconic clock tower of Big Ben as well as much of the Palace of Westminster. The 19th century Gothic Revival that Pugin inspired, with its medieval influences and soaring church spires, established an image of Britain which still defines the nation. Presenter Richard Taylor charts Pugin's extraordinary life story and discovers how his work continues to influence Britain today


Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media

Fig Leaf: The Biggest Cover-up in History
BBC4, 3:35-4:35am

Writer and broadcaster Stephen Smith uncovers the secret history of the humble fig leaf, opening a window onto 2,000 years of Western art and ethics.

He tells how the work of Michelangelo, known to his contemporaries as 'the maker of pork things', fuelled the infamous 'fig leaf campaign', the greatest cover-up in art history; how Bernini turned censorship into a new form of erotica by replacing the fig leaf with the slipping gauze; and how the ingenious machinations of Rodin brought nudity back to the public eye.

In telling this story, Smith turns many of our deepest prejudices upside down, showing how the Victorians had a far more sophisticated and mature attitude to sexuality than we do today. He ends with an impassioned plea for the widespread return of the fig leaf to redeem modern art from cheap sensation and innuendo.