Off-air recordings for week 23-29 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 24th June 


Drama; Historical; Films

Julius Caesar
BBC4, 8:00-10:30pm


Film version of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2012 production of Shakespeare's fast-moving thriller. A vivid story about a struggle for democracy, Julius Caesar is also a love story between two men united by an explosive act of political violence. The setting is a modern African state in which the tyrant Caesar is about to seize power. Cassius persuades Brutus to join the conspirators plotting an assassination. Featuring a distinguished cast of black actors, the film is shot on location and in the RSC's theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon.




Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Life Stories

Omnibus: Ray Bradbury - The Illustrated Man
BBC4, 11:30pm-12:20am


Documentary about the late sci-fi and fantasy writer Ray Bradbury, filmed in Los Angeles and including dramatisations of extracts from his stories.


____________________________________________
Monday 25th June


Factual; Documentaries

London on Film
BBC4, 8:30-9:00pm, 2/3 East End


The intensity of life in London's East End has attracted film-makers since the camera was first invented. The vast changes in East End life - from the docks and the rag trade to market traders, migrants and wartime upheavals - are revealed entirely through the images they captured on film.




Factual; Documentaries

Storyville: Girl Model
BBC4, 9:00-10:15pm


Storyville: documentary which exposes the shocking supply of ever younger girl models to the Japanese modelling industry. The film follows 13-year-old Nadya from poverty in Siberia to the city of Tokyo and a life as a model. American scout Ashley promises her a lucrative career, but all is not as it seems as Nadya's optimism quickly fades when confronted with the dehumanising culture of life in Japanese casting sessions.




Factual; History; Documentaries

Atlantis: The Evidence - A Timewatch Special
BBC4, 10:15-11:15pm

In this Timewatch special, historian Bettany Hughes unravels one of the most intriguing mysteries of all time. She presents a series of geological, archaeological and historical clues to show that the legend of Atlantis was inspired by a real historical event, the greatest natural disaster of the ancient world.




____________________________________________
Tuesday 26th June

Crime; Documentaries

Killers Behind Bars: The Untold Story
Channel 5, 8:00-9:00pm, Robert Black

The case of paedophile Robert Black, currently serving life in prison for the killings of four children in the 1980s. Professor David Wilson explores Black's past, revealing a shocking history of abuse and repeat offences that had gone unchecked, and listens to recorded interviews that provide an insight into the mind of a killer. The tapes lead Wilson to believe Black is guilty of many more murders, and his investigation points to a possible link between the criminal and two of the UK's longest-running missing child cases.


Comedyl; Entertainment; Discussion and Talk

Turn Back Time - The Family
BBC1, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/5


The Edwardian era pushes the three modern families to their limits.

There is a rude awakening for the Polo-playing Meadows family, who take on the role of being an Edwardian working-class family and must cope with the impact of poverty on their lives, as they and their two daughters adapt to a new role as breadwinners.

The Taylor family live the lives of their ancestors as an upper-middle-class Edwardian household. Formality and etiquette mean the Taylor family must live very separate lives and mum Adele struggles as her familiar role as wife and working mum is stripped away.

Finally, the Golding family are desperately hanging on to their newly acquired social status as a middle-class family, but for dad Ian it is a chance to put his theories on the benefits of discipline into practice.




Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries

Ethan Hawke on Macbeth: Shakespeare Uncovered

BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/3


Shakespeare Uncovered: Ethan Hawke sets out to prepare himself for the possibility of playing the role of Macbeth by uncovering the true story behind the play, seeing some of the greatest productions and discovering the extraordinary insights into the criminal mind that Shakespeare reveals.

Ethan has played a modern-dress Hamlet, but he is fascinated by the challenge of the truly ancient story of Macbeth. Assisted by historian Justin Champion - who visits the actual Scottish sites of the story on his behalf - Ethan is introduced to Dunsinane where Macbeth supposedly lived and to the history books that distorted the true story and led Shakespeare himself to distort the truth.

Ethan is also helped by actors and performers in his home town of New York as he investigates the 'bloody heart' of this extraordinary character. He also wants to know how important Macbeth's wife is to the whole story and we observe Shakespeare's Globe actors rehearsing and performing scenes from the play. He talks at length to Anthony Sher and his director Greg Doran (recently appointed to take over as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company) about their legendary stage and film production of the play.

Finally, Ethan goes to look at a copy of the First Folio - The Complete Works of Shakespeare, as published in 1623. This priceless book contains the first ever printed version of the play - if Shakespeare's friends had not clubbed together after the writer's death to create this book, then Macbeth and 16 other Shakespeare plays would have been lost forever.

At the end of the film Ethan believes that this extraordinarily brutal and bloody play does have a message of comfort and explains why the mayor of New York chose to quote from it on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the atrocity of 9/11.


Drama; Historical; Films

Macbeth
BBC4, 11:00pm-1:30am


Film version of director Rupert Goold's highly-acclaimed production with Sir Patrick Stewart as Macbeth and Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth, originally staged by Chichester Festival Theatre and later a sell-out hit in the West End and on Broadway.

Shot on location in the mysterious underground world of Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, the film is set in an undefined and threatening central European world. Immediate and visceral, this is a contemporary presentation of Shakespeare's intense, claustrophobic and bloody drama.

Patrick Stewart won Best Actor and Rupert Goold Best Director in the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for the stage production and both Stewart and Fleetwood were nominated for Tony Awards for their performances.

Director of the play ENRON and the Royal Shakespeare Company's current Romeo and Juliet, Rupert Goold has been described by critic Benedict Nightingale as 'the hottest, most exciting director around', and Macbeth is his debut as a film director.


Documentaries

talhotblond
Channel 4, 11:10pm-12:25am


Talhotblond is the true story (and screen name) of a beautiful teenage vixen who uses internet game rooms to lure men into her cyberspace web.

When she discovers she's been double crossed and lied to by one of her victims, she wants revenge, and unleashes a fantasy online that escalates into real-life murder.

All because of a girl no one ever met in person.

Drawing from exclusive access to internet messages, secret notes and letters, as well as police evidence files and exclusive prison interviews, talhotblond details the horrific results of what can happen when people lie online.


___________________________________________
Wednesday 27th June

Documentaries

The Secret History of Our Streets
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm 4/6 - Portland Road


Charles Booth’s vast 1886 Survey of London ranked each of London's streets according to the class of its residents - including Portland Road in Notting Hill. This week the series reveals how its fortunes have ebbed and flowed over in the last 125 years, leaving it one of the most financially divided streets in Britain.

Today it's the archetypal London banker street, lined with six million pound homes for hedge fund managers. But when Booth visited in 1899 it was the worse slum in London - and still today the top one percent in Britain by income and the bottom five percent live on the same street.

Told through the personal stories of Portland Road’s remarkably diverse range of residents, past and present - including Lords, bankers and slum dwellers - the film tells the story of one of the most divided streets in Britain.


Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries

Perspectives: Andrew Lloyd-Webber - A Passion for the Pre-Raphaelites

ITV1, 11:35pm-12:30am

The composer discusses his love for the 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and invites the cameras into his Hampshire home to show off his collection. He talks about how the artists wanted to shake up Victorian England with their dramatic depictions of themes such as love and death, and is moved to tears by the Pre-Raphaelite art he views on a visit to Wightwick Manor in Wolverhampton.


Crime and Punishment; Law; History; Documentaries

The Strange Case of the Law
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/3 - The Pursuit of Liberty

Barrister and historian Harry Potter charts the formation of legal rights and freedoms in the 17th and 18th centuries, many of which still exist today. He explores the case of a lawyer who risked assassination to put the king of England on trial for his crimes against the people, a civil rights activist Oliver Cromwell banished to an offshore prison, and a pillar of the establishment who made a judgement that dealt a blow to the slave trade.

___________________________________________
Thursday 28th June

Documentaries

The Men Who Made Us Fat
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 3/3

With one adult in four now classified as obese, Jacques Peretti sets out to discover why Britain is getting fatter. He examines assumptions about what is and is not healthy and discovers how product marketing can seduce consumers into buying supposedly healthy foods such as muesli and juice - both of which can be high in sugar. He also explores the impact of successive government initiatives and health campaigns, questioning whether things have really changed when high-profile events such as the Olympic Games are sponsored by drink and fast-food companies.


___________________________________________
Friday 29th June

Factual

Simon Schama's Shakespeare
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/2

A season exploring how one man captured so much about what it means to be human

Factual; Lifestyle; Documentaries

The Circus
ITV1, 9:00-10:00pm


Running away to join the circus used to be almost every child’s dream, but the reality of having to make new friends in a different school every week, being despised for your traveller lifestyle and having to dangle from a trapeze twice nightly despite the rows of the empty seats doesn’t make it so appealing.

This honest documentary follows the Darnells, descendants of a circus family since the 1800s. Paulo’s Circus is all they know and they obviously love the business. However, times are changing — audiences are dwindling and only one of Kenny Darnell’s three sons is certain he wants to continue the family tradition. One son, if he can get up the courage to tell his dad, is even thinking of leaving the Big Top to live in the outside world.

There’s not a hint of Big Fat Gypsy Wedding finger-pointing or sniggering about this film. Instead it offers a glimpse into a form of entertainment and a lifestyle that may not be around much longer.

___________________________________________