Off-air Recordings for week 19-25 May 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 19th May 2012

Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media

Off By Heart Shakespeare
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm

William Shakespeare is hardly a name that you would expect to thrill Britain's teenagers, but over the last year thousands have taken part in a nationwide competition to learn some of his greatest speeches off by heart.

Now, nine finalists, aged between 13 and 15, and from all over the United Kingdom, are off to Stratford-upon-Avon to take part in a life changing series of workshops with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Over a single week, they learn how to perform some of Shakespeare's greatest soliloquies from Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Hamlet, before taking part in a dramatically different and closely fought grand final, hosted by Jeremy Paxman, to find the BBC Shakespeare Schools Champion.


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Sunday 20th May 2012

Factual; Life Stories; Documentaries

Man On Wire
BBC2, 10:00-11:30pm

Documentary based on Philippe Petit's autobiographical book To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers.

In August 1974, French wire-walker Philippe Petit spent nearly an hour walking, dancing, kneeling and lying on a wire which he and his friends had strung in secret between the rooftops of New York's Twin Towers. Six years of intense planning, dreaming and physical training fell into place that morning.

Already an accomplished wire-walker, Petit had caught sight of an article about the planned construction of the Twin Towers while in a dentist's waiting room in 1968, and at that moment an obsession was born. He spent every waking moment since that day plotting the details of his walk (which he called 'le coup') and gathered a team of people around him to assist in the planning.

Petit's preparation was expert, thorough and top secret: he took precise measurements and even aerial photographs to help him construct models of the rigging; learned about the physical effects of the wind on the swaying of the buildings; even created fake ID cards and spied on office workers to plan how best to gain access to the towers without arousing suspicion. On that August morning, his dream was realised.

Using contemporary interviews, archival footage and dramatic reconstructions, the film tells the story of this extraordinary feat, and also of Petit's previous walks between the towers of Notre Dame in Paris, and of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.



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Tuesday 22nd May 2012

Factual; Health and Wellbeing

Great Ormond Street
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 3/6, Buying Time

This episode focuses on Great Ormond Street's heart transplant team. Every year, the number of donor hearts decreases: safer roads, better intensive care and a society reluctant to donate means fewer hearts and longer waits for children for whom transplant is the last resort. The Berlin Heart is a revolutionary machine that keeps these children alive. However, it's a precarious existence as the machine can only buy them time until the rare gift of a heart is made.


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Wednesday 23rd May 2012

Factual; History; Documentaries

The Fall of Singapore: The Great Betrayal
BBC2, 11:20pm-12:20am

Pearl Harbor and the Fall of Singapore: 70 years ago these huge military disasters shook both Britain and America, but they conceal a secret so shocking it has remained hidden ever since. This landmark film by Paul Elston tells the incredible story of how it was the British who gave the Japanese the knowhow to take out Pearl Harbor and capture Singapore. For 19 years before the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, British officers were spying for Japan. Worse still, the Japanese had infiltrated the very heart of the British establishment - through a mole who was a peer of the realm known to Churchill himself.



History; Documentaries

Hitler's Children
BBC 2, 9:00-10:00pm

Adolf Hitler did not have children, but what about the families of Goering, Himmler and Frank, to name a few? What is it like for the descendants of these top Nazi officials to deal with the terrifying legacy of their notorious families? Hitler's Children introduces us to sons, daughters, grandchildren, nieces and nephews of these infamous men. Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank and godson of Hitler, despises his father so much that he has spent his entire adult life researching, writing and lecturing vehemently against him and the Nazi regime. Bettina Goering, the grandniece of Hitler's second in command, Hermann Goering, lives in voluntary exile in Santa Fe, and together with her brother decided to get sterilized so as to end the Goering name and bloodline. These, and many others, discuss how they have coped with the fact that their last name alone immediately raises images of murder and genocide; each baring, for the first time, the scars that their legacy has left them.


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Thursday 24th May 2012


Documentaries; History

Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History For Girls
BBC4, 11:00pm-12:00am, 1/3 - Act One: At Court

In this new three-part series historian and Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces Dr Lucy Worsley immerses herself in the world of Restoration England, exploring the captivating lives of the women of the period. The years after the Civil War and the Restoration of Charles II marked the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the modern age.

These were exciting times for women, some of whom displayed remarkably modern attitudes and ambitions, achieving wealth, celebrity and power in ways that still look outstanding by 21st century standards. But these women also faced a world that was predominantly male, misogynistic and medieval in its outlook. In the first episode Lucy investigates the lives of women at the top: the King’s mistresses at the Royal Court. When Charles and his entourage returned from exile they came back with a host of continental ideas, and as a result some of the women at court rose to prominence as never before, gaining unprecedented political influence and independence.

Amongst a fascinating cast of female characters, the most astonishing were Charles II’s own mistresses: the Royalist, Barbara Villiers, the French spy Louise de Keroualle and the infamous Cockney actress, Nell Gwynn. Lucy examines the lives of these women, discovering how their fortunes were shaped by the Restoration and how their stories reflect the atmosphere of these extraordinary years. As she discovers, these women were key Restoration players, but as mistresses were truly in charge of their own destinies - or simply part of the world’s oldest profession?

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Friday 25th May 2012

News

Unreported World: Cameroon
Channel 4, 7:30-7:55pm, 6/8

Reporter Evan Williams and director James Brabazon travel to the Central African country of Cameroon to investigate the practice of eating ‘bushmeat' - wild meat hunted in the rainforest. They talk to the medical experts warning that butchering and eating primates including critically endangered gorillas and chimpanzees could trigger a new global pandemic - a new HIV or SARS - by unleashing as-yet unknown viruses. And they meet the British woman battling the trade and looking after the animals orphaned by the slaughter.

Eighty percent of all meat eaten in Cameroon is bushmeat. To understand how the trade works, the Unreported World team travels to the Dja Reserve in the south east of the country. The team passes a constant stream of logging trucks and discovers that the tracks and clearings created by logging companies have opened up the once-impenetrable jungle to bushmeat poachers.

Williams meets some of the wardens trying to combat the poachers. There are only 60 wardens to cover the 2000 square miles of the Dja Reserve. Until 2009 they were funded by the EU. Now they're on their own and it's dangerous work. One warden has already been killed by poachers this year and many have been injured.

Williams and Brabazon walk into the forest with the wardens and meet a group of indigenous Baka people, the so-called pygmies. They tell Williams that people come four or five times a week looking for all sorts of bushmeat and hire locals to go and hunt for them. One warden tells Williams that the local hunters get around 25 to 30 Euros for a chimpanzee.

But the Baka have something even more shocking to reveal. Eating gorilla meat has wiped out one of their neighbouring villages: 25 men, women and children died. There was only one person who survived, and that person didn't eat the meat...

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