Off-air recordings for week 16-22 June 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.

_____________________________________________
Sunday 17th June


Factual; Science and Nature; Environmet; Documentaries

Secrets of Our Living Planet 
BBC2, 8:00-9:00pm, 1/4 - The Emerald Band


Secrets of Our Living Planet showcases the incredible ecosystems that make life on Earth possible. Using beautifully shot scenes in the wild, Chris reveals the hidden wonder of the creatures that we share the planet with, and the intricate, clever and bizarre connections between the species, without which life just could not survive.


Discover previously unknown relationships, like why a tiger needs a crab; or why a gecko needs a giraffe. Each week Chris visits one of our planet's most vital and spectacular habitats and dissects it, to reveal the secrets of how our living planet works.


In this episode, Chris weaves a spellbinding account of how the very special conditions that exist in the rainforest have allowed vast colourful communities of animals and plants to evolve. And he reveals one particularly extraordinary web of life centred on a tree, the Brazil nut tree. It is one of the mightiest trees in the Amazon but it can only survive thanks to a little rodent called agouti, an orchid and a very unusual bee.





________________________________________
Monday 18th June


Factual; Pets and Animals; Science and Nature; Documentaries

Natural World: Unnatural History of London
BBC2, 8:00-9:00pm


Seals, parakeets and even pelicans that eat pigeons have all made London their home. That's as well as badgers, foxes, scorpions, and pigeons that ride the tube. But even more wonderful are the people who love the exotic wildlife of our capital, from Billingsgate fish porters to Indian Chefs to 'Crayfish Bob', who scours London's canals for Turkish invaders. This is a warm-hearted portrait of the world's greenest capital city and the Londoners who love its secret wildlife.




Factual; Documentaries

Ukraine's Forgotten Children
BBC4, 9:00-10:30pm



Ten times as many children are in institutional care in Ukraine as in England. In this disturbing investigation, film-maker Kate Blewett finds out what a lifetime in the care of the state really means for Ukraine's forgotten children.


Shot over six months in an institute for disabled and abandoned children, the film takes us inside the lives of a handful of children who were abandoned by their parents - with a simple signature - to state care. The institute houses 126 children, of whom all but four still have living parents. The vast majority are what are called 'social orphans' in Ukraine, signed over to institutional care in a society that still clings to the Soviet-era ideal that the state knows best. But what Kate finds is that children of widely varying abilities are warehoused together, leading inevitably to institutionalisation, repetitive behaviour, self-stimulation and self-harm, even amongst those with very minor disabilities.


Lyosha is ten, and has no arms and legs. But with a fighting spirit and lively intelligence, he uses his balance and powerful neck muscles to propel himself around the room, along corridors and even up and down stairs, almost as quickly as those around him with four limbs. He is proud of the fact that he makes his own bed every morning, and will not allow carers to help him do so. Lyosha is just one of a group of boys for whom Nikolai, the institute director, has great ambitions. Nikolai has seen too many of the children he has cared for leave at 18, to be transferred to psychiatric or geriatric homes, labelled as incapacitated and effectively robbed of their human rights and their future. He has gained funding from Russia for a small group home for boys like Lyosha whom he feels have the greatest unrealised potential. Once in this home they will get the education and rehabilitation they need to avoid a future without hope or freedom...





Factual; Travel; Documentaries

A Short Journey Into Tajikistan
BBC4, 10:30-11:15pm



Tajikistan, in central Asia, was once one of the smallest and poorest republics of the USSR. In the last twenty years it has moved from communism to capitalism, from atheism to a rediscovery of Islam.


Reporter Khayrulla Fayz returns to his village to discover what life is like for people there now. He talks to cotton farmers in the fields where he picked cotton as a child, meets migrant workers forced to leave their families to find work in Russia and asks the new entrepreneurs about the challenges of doing business there.


When Khayrulla was a boy he spoke Russian and looked up to Lenin as the father of the nation. He finds out who the new heroes are for the younger generation carving out an identity for this newly-independent country.





Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries

Turner's Thames
BBC4, 11:15pm-12:15am



In this documentary, the presenter and art critic Matthew Collings explores how Turner, the artist of light, makes light the vehicle of feeling in his work, and how he found inspiration for that feeling in the waters of the River Thames.


JMW Turner is the most famous of English landscape painters. Throughout a lifetime of travel, he returned time and again to paint and draw scenes of the Thames, the lifeblood of London. This documentary reveals the Thames in all its diverse glory, from its beauty in west London, to its heartland in the City of London and its former docks, out to the vast emptiness and drama of the Thames estuary near Margate.


Turner was among the first to pioneer painting directly from nature, turning a boat into a floating studio from which he sketched the Thames. The river and his unique relationship with it had a powerful impact upon his use of materials, as he sought to find an equivalent in paint for the visual surprise and delight he found in the reality of its waters.


By pursuing this ever-changing tale of light, Turner also documented and reflected upon key moments in British history in the early 19th century; the Napoleonic wars, social unrest and the onset of the industrial revolution. His paintings of the river Thames communicate the fears and exultations of the time. 


Turner's greatness as a painter is often attributed to his modern use of colour. Many of his paintings are loved by the British public and regularly celebrated as the nation's greatest art. This film reveals for the first time on television a key inspiration for that modernity and celebrity; a stretch of water of immense importance to the nation in the early 19th century but which today is often taken for granted - the River Thames.



________________________________________
Tuesday 19th June


Factual; Science and Nature; Nature and Environment; Documentaries

Ocean Giants
BBC2, 1/3 Giant Lives



Ground-breaking documentary granting a unique and privileged access into the magical world of whales and dolphins, uncovering the secrets of their intimate lives as never before.


This episode explores the intimate details of the largest animals that have ever lived on our planet- the great whales. From the balmy waters of the Indian Ocean to the freezing seas of the Arctic, two daring underwater cameramen - Doug Allan, Planet Earth's polar specialist, and Didier Noirot, Cousteau's front-line cameraman - come face-to-face with fighting humpback whales and two-hundred-ton feeding blue whales.


Teaming up with top whale scientists, Giant Lives discovers why southern right whales possess a pair of one-ton testicles, why the arctic bowhead can live to over two hundred years old, and why size truly matters in the world of whales. 





Crime; Criminology; Documentaries

Killers Behind Bars: The Untold Story
Channel Five, 8:00-9:00pm, 2/3 Peter Tobin


The case of Peter Tobin, currently serving life imprisonment for the murder of two young women and a teenage girl in attacks going back to 1991. Professor David Wilson tries to understand how Tobin operated by visiting the scenes of his crimes in Glasgow and Margate - including the very room that 23-year-old student Angelina Kluk was raped and murdered in 2006. Armed with this information, the criminologist goes in search of unsolved murders bearing his hallmarks.




Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries

Joely Richardson on Shakespeare's Women: Shakespeare Uncovered
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm



Shakespeare Uncovered: In Twelfth Night and As You Like It, Joely Richardson investigates (with a major contribution from her mother Vanessa Redgrave) the legacy of the two great comedies and the great comic heroines created by Shakespeare in those hugely popular plays.


Shakespeare's comic heroines are well known to be some of his greatest creations and in this film Joely looks at Viola in Twelfth Night, washed up on a foreign shore, having (for her own safety) to disguise herself as a man and then falling in love with the man she is working for. Then there is the legendary Rosalind in As You Like It, who also spends much of the play disguised as a man but in the process torments and teases the man she loves in an effort to uncover how sincere he is.


Joely investigates the reason why these heroines spend much of their time dressed as men - it was because they were originally created for young men to play. But at the same time we find that Shakespeare revealed an acute understanding and sympathy for women when he wrote these characters.


A variety of film versions are studied alongside the most recent productions at Shakespeare's Globe, and with contributions from the world's greatest Shakespearean scholars like Jonathan Bate and Germaine Greer and from actors like Vanessa Redgrave and Helen Mirren, this film reveals the legacy of strong, sassy, witty women that we inherit from William Shakespeare's great comedies.



________________________________________
Wednesday 20th June


Factual; History; Documentaries

The Secret History of Our Streets
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 3/6 - Caledonian Road



In 1886 Charles Booth embarked on an ambitious plan to visit every one of London's streets to record the social conditions of residents. His project took him 17 years.


Once he had finished he had constructed a groundbreaking series of maps which recorded the social class and standing of inhabitants. These maps transformed the way Victorians felt about their capital city.


This series takes six archetypal London streets as they are now, discovering how they have fared since Booth's day.


Booth colour coded each street, from yellow for the 'servant keeping classes', down to black for the 'vicious and semi-criminal'. With the aid of maps the series explores why certain streets have been transformed from desperate slums to become some of the most desirable and valuable property in the UK, whilst others have barely changed.


This landmark series features residents past and present, exploring how what happened on the street in the last 125 years continues to shape the lives of those who live there now.


This episode features Caledonian Road, which starts next to King's Cross station and heads north for over a mile. From its beginning, the street has been resolutely working class and when Charles Booth visited he found it a depressing district.


But the people of 'the Cally', as it is affectionately known to residents, have held their community together despite being challenged by powerful outside forces as well as a reputation for being a bit rough around the edges.


Featuring fascinating and often passionate accounts from residents both past and present, the film tells the story of the changing faces of this remarkable street.




Law; Crime and Justice; Documentaries


The Strange Case of the Law

BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3



In his first television series, barrister Harry Potter tells the remarkable story of English justice for BBC Four. As an ordained priest in the Church of England, Harry spent eight years as a prison chaplain. He then trained as a barrister, was called to the Bar in 1993, and works exclusively in criminal defence.


Harry is a published author, with articles on prisons and criminal justice; a book on the history of capital punishment and two books on Scottish History. Harry was born and brought up in Glasgow.


Harry says: “As a Scot I may be said to have a dispassionate view of English Law, although it gratifies me to note that England’s greatest judge - Lord Mansfield - and her greatest barrister - Thomas Erskine, were Scottish too. The story of English Law is one about which we can all be proud. It is an important aspect of our national history, a boon we have given the world, and has been largely one which has ensured liberty and justice in equal measure, the two greatest attributes of civilisation.


“The English Common Law is anything but common. It is unique and peculiar to this country, growing out of the specifics of her history, and enshrining all that is best in our culture.”


English Common Law, with its emphasis on the role of the jury, set a standard of fairness that has influenced legal systems across the world. Many of the features that characterise today's courts were in place by as early as the 14th century and in this three-part series, Harry looks at how England came to have such a distinctive and enduring justice system.


In this first episode, Harry explores the rise of ‘trial by ordeal’ where painful and dangerous physical tests were used to determine guilt or innocence. He shows how systems of religious ‘proof’ came to be replaced by jury trial, explains why Henry II's attempt to unify law in England led to murder in Canterbury Cathedral, and takes a revealing look at the most famous legal document in history, the Magna Carta.




Factual; Science and Nature; Nature and Environment; Documentaries


Ocean Giants
BBC2, 8:00-9:00pm, 2/3 - Deep Thinkers



Humans have long wondered if the universe may harbour other intelligent life forms. But perhaps we need look no further than our oceans?


Whales and dolphins, like humans, have large brains, are quick to learn new behaviours and use a wide range of sounds to communicate with others in their society. But how close are their minds to ours? In the Bahamas, Professor Denise Herzing believes she is very close to an answer, theorising that she will be able to hold a conversation with wild dolphins in their own language within five years.


In Western Australia, dolphins rely on their versatile and inventive brains to survive in a marine desert. In Alaska, humpback whales gather into alliances in which individuals pool their specialised talents to increase their hunting success. We discover how young spotted dolphins learn their individual names and the social etiquette of their pod, and how being curious about new objects leads Caribbean bottlenose dolphins to self-awareness and even to self-obsession. Finally, the film shows a remarkable group of Mexican grey whales, who seem able to empathize with humans and may even have a concept of forgiveness. 






________________________________________
Thursday 21st June




Factual; Science and Nature; Nature and Environment; Documentaries

Ocean Giants
BBC2, 8:00-9:00pm, 3/3 - Voices of the Sea



Whales and dolphins are nature's supreme vocalists, with a repertoire to put an opera singer to shame. The mighty sperm whale produces deafening clicks in its blowhole which it uses to locate giant squid two miles down in the ocean abyss, while migrating narwhals use similar sounds to pinpoint vital breathing holes in Arctic ice-floes.


The pink boto dolphin creates bat-like ultrasonic clicks to 'see with sound' and to catch fish in the murky waters of the Amazon River, and also uses whistles and chirps for social conversations.


Killer whales in the North Sea use wolf-like howls to round up the herring shoals which they feed on, and they and other dolphins also use percussive tail slaps and splashing leaps to signal to each other. One group of bottlenose dolphins in Brazil has even learned to communicate with fishermen in a unique partnership.


But the most famous and mysterious voice of all the Ocean Giants surely belongs to male humpback whales, whose haunting operatic performances may last several hours and seem to be about singing purely for the sheer pleasure of making music.




Factual; Documentaries


London On Film

BBC4, 11:30-12:00am, 1/3 - The West End


From bright lights, showbusiness and shops to riots, sleaze and traffic jams, film-makers have long been drawn to London's West End. Using a rich mix of archive material, this film paints a colourful and surprising portrait of the city's beating heart.


________________________________________
Friday 22nd June


Documentaries

Dispatches: Let Our Dad Die
Channel 4, 2:20-2:50am


In 2005 Tony Nicklinson had a catastrophic stroke, which has left him utterly paralysed. He has what is known as 'locked in syndrome' and cannot move, talk, feed himself or perform even the most basic function without help. He can only communicate via a computer controlled by his eyes.


Tony Nicklinson wants to die, but he cannot kill himself without help, and anyone who helped him would be committing murder.


On the eve of a historic and controversial legal bid to demand the right to be killed, he tells his story, comes face to face with his critics, and hears from the Greek doctor who saved his life seven years earlier, who says he wouldn't wish this condition on his worst enemy.I




Factual

Simon Schama's Shakespeare
BBC2, 9:00-100:00pm, 1/2 - This England


Schama explores how Shakespeare created a vision of England that still rings true today.




________________________________________