Off-air recordings for week 18-24th February 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 18th February 2012

Factual; Arts; Culture and the Media; Documentaries

Lucian Freud: Painted Life
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm

Painted Life explores the life and work of Lucian Freud, undoubtedly one of Britain's greatest artists. Freud gave his full backing to the documentary shortly before his death. Uniquely, he was filmed painting his last work, a portrait of his assistant David Dawson.

Lucian Freud: Painted Life also includes frank testimony from those who knew and loved this extraordinary personality. Members of his large family (he had at least fourteen children by a number of different women), close friends including David Hockney and Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, his dealers, his sitters and his former lovers recall for the first time a complex man who dedicated his life to his art and who always sought to transmute paint into a vibrant living representation of humanity.

The film shows how Freud never swam with the flow and only achieved celebrity in older age. He rejected the artistic fashions of his time, sticking to figurative art and exploring portraiture, especially with regards to nude portraiture, which he explored with a depth of scrutiny that produced some of the greatest works of our time.

This documentary is both a definitive biography and a revelatory exploration of the creative process.




Factual; Arts; Culture and the Media; Magazines and Reviews


The Culture Show
BBC2, 6:00-7:00pm, 22/31

Andrew Graham-Dixon presents the latest edition of The Culture Show from Glasgow, featuring the National Theatre of Scotland's new adaptation of The Wicker Man. As a major new Picasso exhibition opens at Tate Britain, Alastair Sooke looks back at his relationship with the English surrealist artist Roland Penrose. Also, forget the Oscars and the Baftas - Mark Kermode presents his very own movie awards of the year.



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Monday 20th February 2012

News

Panorama: Britain's Hidden Alcoholics
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm

Alistair Campbell meets some of the increasing number of Britain's middle-class professionals for whom one glass of wine after work is never enough, and asks if we all need to reassess our relationship with drink.

Alistair, Tony Blair's former closest advisor, knows from bitter experience the true cost of excessive boozing: his alcoholism contributed to his nervous breakdown.
With nearly 9,000 people dying from alcohol-related diseases every year and leading medical experts describing it as a health crisis, Campbell ventures into the world of Britain's hidden alcoholics and asks how much is too much.



Documentaries

True Stories: My Social Network Stalker
Channel 4, 10:00-11:05pm

Ruth Jeffery and her boyfriend Shane Webber seemed a perfectly normal happy couple who talked about a future with marriage and children.  They had known each other for ten years, but after they rekindled their relationship from school days in early adulthood, the man Ruth loved began to secretly rip her life apart.  With exclusive access to Ruth and her family, who tell their full story on camera for the first time, this True Stories film unravels Ruth's prolonged ordeal, which came to a shocking conclusion. For three and a half years Ruth was subjected to emotional and mental abuse at the hands of an unknown stalker. It appeared she was constantly watched and Ruth was pushed to the brink of suicide after suffering the indignity of seeing naked images of her posted on adult websites and distributed to family and friends, including her parents.
After more than three years, the stalker was finally caught, but the revelation of the man's identity proved as traumatic as what she had already endured. Her tormenter was the person Ruth had confided in the most: her boyfriend.
My Social Network Stalker documents the story from Ruth's perspective, from the first abusive messages she received in 2008 - which she believed were from former school friends, isolating her from almost everyone she had ever known - to the sexually explicit photos and videos Webber circulated on the internet, some of which she is still trying to get taken off, to the extreme distress that caused her depression, symptoms of OCD and eating problems; and to how Webber was finally tracked down as the stalker.
The documentary also examines the possible motivations for Webber's shocking campaign of abuse on his loving girlfriend.   Webber has shown no remorse since his arrest, despite terrorising and humiliating the woman he claimed to love, and in October 2011 he was sentenced to four months in prison: the documentary makers are with Ruth as she and her family prepare for and react to the sentencing.
Ruth is in her final year of her degree and slowly rebuilding her life and her relationships. Webber served two months and has been released with a restraining order in place until 2016.



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Tuesday 21st February 2012

Factual; Documentaries

Storyville: The Love of Books - A Sarajevo Story
BBC4, 2:20-3:20am

Documentary which tells the story of a group of men and women who risked their lives to rescue a library - and preserve a nation's history - in the midst of the Bosnian war. Amid bullets and bombs and under fire from shells and snipers, this handful of passionate book-lovers safeguarded more than 10,000 unique, hand-written Islamic books and manuscripts - the most important texts held by Sarajevo's last surviving library.




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Thursday 23rd February 2012

Documentary; Science; Environment

This World:  Inside The Meltdown
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm

An insight into the Fukushima nuclear plant accident told by those who fought to avoid a disaster which, according to the Japanese government, could have left a vast area of the country - even Tokyo - uninhabitable. Featuring interviews with employees, fire fighters, army officers, prime minister at the time Naoto Kan, and survivors of the tsunami, the film provides a detailed account of how close the nation came to a catastrophe that could have dwarfed the incident at Chernobyl in 1986.




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Friday 24th February

Catholics
BBC4, 3:15-4:15am, 1/3

A new, three-part documentary series about Catholicism in Britain will give an insight into some of its most intriguing, important and normally private institutions.  Catholics, by acclaimed film-maker Richard Alwyn for Wingspan Productions, goes behind the headlines that have come to define the Catholic Church to explore what it is actually like to be Catholic in Britain today.
Each of the three films – one about men, one about women, one about children – will be an intimate portrait of a different Catholic world, revealing Catholicism to be a rich but complex identity and observing how this identity shapes people’s lives. The first film, Priests, filmed over six months with extraordinary access, is an intimate behind-the-scenes portrait of Allen Hall in London, one of only three remaining Roman Catholic seminaries in Britain.
The second film, Children, focuses on a small primary school in rural Lancashire as some of the pupils head towards their first Holy Communion.
The third film, Women, uses its remarkable behind-the-scenes access to Westminster Cathedral, Britain’s biggest Roman Catholic Church, to meet the female staff, volunteers and congregation of the Cathedral to explore what it is like to be a Catholic woman in Britain today.
The series was commissioned by Richard Klein, Controller BBC Four, and Charlotte Moore, Commissioning Editor Documentaries. The series is executive produced by Wingspan’s Archie Baron and is a Wingspan Production in association with Jerusalem Productions for the BBC. The BBC executive producer is Clare Paterson.
Richard Alwyn’s previous films have been nominated for RTS and Bafta awards and include the Prix Italia-winning Beslan Siege. Richard Klein, Controller BBC Four, says: “Catholic Christianity is at the very centre of many of the western world's cultural and institutional sensibilities and yet Catholics today can feel at times like they are set apart from mainstream society. So this is a series which seeks to ask a simple question of people who are Catholics: What is it like, being a Catholic?”  Richard Alwyn says: "It’s inevitably been a very troubled time for the Catholic Church in recent years. So we are particularly proud of the access that we have gained to make films which reveal the complex reality of being Catholic away from the tabloid headlines." Archie Baron says: "I hope viewers will find this series moving, thought-provoking and closely textured."


Factual; Arts; Culture and the Media; Documentaries


Jeremy Deller: Middle Class Hero - A Culture Show Special
BBC2, 7:00-8:00pm

As Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller prepares for an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, he discusses the creative processes behind some of his major works, which include a collaborative project with rock band Manic Street Preachers and a re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave that took place during the 1984-5 UK miners' strike. The programme also follows him in Texas, where he films bats for his latest work.



Documentaries
Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3

Pete Townshend, Ken Loach and Faye Weldon join Melvyn Bragg as he explores how it was his generation of writers, artists and filmmakers who swept aside the culture of an earlier and more powerful class-bound era.  The grim but settled austerity years after World War Two were followed by an astonishing surge of energy that transformed perceptions of both culture and class.
Following in the footsteps of the angry young men of the 1950s, writers were expressing their frustration at the snobbery and exclusivity of the system in which they had grown up. They were saying it in books, on the stage and, by the early 60s they were saying it on television, the dominant medium of the time.  Melvyn explains: “Art goes where energy is and in the working class and lower middle class there was tremendous energy, and it came out and it took over.”


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