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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Sunday 29th July
Factual; Science and Nature; Nature and Environment; Documentaries
The Dark: Nature's Nighttime World
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3 - Central American Jungle
This illuminating natural history series reveals a totally new perspective on wildlife at night. Over six months, a team of biologists and specialist camera crew explore the length of South and Central America to find out how animals have adapted to life in the dark.
The expedition starts in the jungles of Costa Rica where the team are after some of the most frightening nocturnal predators. Alone in the dark, nighttime camera specialist Justine Evans has an exceptionally close encounter with a large male jaguar. Biologist Dr George McGavin is on the trail of the most ingenious predator of the jungle - the net casting spider. And cameraman Gordon Buchanan finds ruined temples deep in the jungle as he searches for the bizarre creatures that rule the jungle canopy at night.
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Monday 30th July
News
Panorama: Disabled or Faking It?
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm
Panorama investigates the government's plans to end the so-called 'sick note culture' and their attempts to get millions of people off disability benefits and into work. In Britain's modern welfare state, millions are being paid to private companies to assess sick and disabled claimants but is the system working? Or are new tests wrongly victimising those who deserve support the most?
Crime
Real Crime with Mark Austin
ITV1, 10:35-11:35pm, Murder of a Father
Garry Newlove's widow Helen and the couple's daughters Zoe, Danielle and Amy talk about the murder of the 47-year-old, who was beaten to death after confronting youths vandalising his wife's car outside the family home in Warrington, Cheshire, in August 2007. The case sparked a national debate about alcohol-related anti-social behaviour, and Helen now campaigns to bring an end to gangs such as the one that claimed her husband's life.
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Tuesday 31st July
Documentaries
Lost Children
Channel 4, 10:00-11:05pm, 1/2 - Courteney
Twelve-year-old Courtney from Liverpool has been diagnosed with ADHD, and was excluded from her primary school for disruptive behaviour.
She's now starting her second year as a boarder at High Close School in Berkshire, which is run by Barnardo's and is home to some of Britain's most troubled children.
According to Nikita, Courtney's key worker, she has tremendous potential. But as Courtney approaches her teenage years her behaviour is deteriorating fast.
Struggling to find words for how she feels, Courtney says it's like there's 'a little cell in inside my head that says "don't care". It's like my head's changed.'
Behind Courtney's anger there's an extraordinary family story that stretches back more than four generations, from her mother Sara to her great-grandmother, Edna.
Loving and close, these four generations are a remarkable testimony to the strength of their family ties but they're also players in a story of troubled and sometimes violent relationships.
Through the years, the women in the family have turned to each other for support. But despite their love for each other, events in their lives seem to keep on repeating themselves.
As Courtney's mother Sara inches closer to breaking point, Jonathan Newport, the dedicated deputy head teacher of High Close, is running out of ideas.
Courtney's on the brink of exclusion at an extremely understanding school, and keyworker Nikita is worried if she leaves there she will 'fall through the net.'
With the help of her family and teachers, can Courtney turn her life around?
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Wednesday 1st August
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
A History of Art in Three Colours
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/3 - Blue
Dr James Fox explores how, in the hands of artists, the colours gold, blue and white have stirred our emotions, changed the way we behave and even altered the course of history.
When, in the Middle Ages, the precious blue stone lapis lazuli arrived in Europe from the East, blue became the most exotic and mysterious of colours. And it was artists who used it to offer us tantalizing glimpses of other worlds beyond our own.
Factual; History
City Beneath the Waves: Pavlopetri
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm
Just off the southern coast of mainland Greece lies the oldest submerged city in the world. It thrived for 2,000 years during the time that saw the birth of western civilisation.
An international team of experts is using cutting-edge technology to prise age-old secrets from the complex of streets and stone buildings that lie less than five metres below the surface of the ocean. State-of-the-art CGI helps to raise the city from the seabed, revealing for the first time in 3,500 years how Pavlopetri would once have looked and operated.
Underwater archaeologist Dr Jon Henderson is leading the project in collaboration with Nic Flemming, the man whose hunch led to the discovery of Pavlopetri in 1967, and a team from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. Working alongside the archaeologists are a team from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics.
The teams scour the ocean floor, looking for artefacts. The site is littered with thousands of fragments, each providing valuable clues about the everyday lives of the people of Pavlopetri. From the buildings to the trade goods to the everyday tableware, each artefact provides a window into a forgotten world.
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Thursday 2nd August
Law; Documentaries
The Briefs
ITV1, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/2
The information contained herein is strictly embargoed from all press use, non-commercial publication, or syndication until Tuesday July 24, 2012.
“Everybody on the face of it is against our client. The police are against him. He feels the court is against him. The prosecutor is against him. He thinks the judge is against him. So we're his only friend.” – Franklin Sinclair, Tuckers Solicitors
ITV1’s new two-part documentary, The Briefs, takes us into the cut-throat world of criminal law, following the lawyers from a Manchester firm as they represent clients on cases ranging from drug dealing to blackmail to murder.
With unprecedented access to Britain’s busiest legal aid-funded law practice, these programmes show privileged conversations between lawyer and client, and follow the cases from police station to court, and even to prison.
In the first programme, the lawyers represent a drug dealing mum and a man on trial for blackmailing a footballer’s family. In the second episode, we experience the unique marketing techniques lawyers’ use, the case of a performance poet accused of benefit fraud, a particularly emotive murder, and a gay couple whose fights always seem to end up in a police station.
Programme-makers Chameleon Television spent a year filming with Tuckers Solicitors, who handle more than 10,000 clients a year. More than half their cases are legally aided - the lawyers paid by the taxpayer. The firm deals with more of these cases than any other law business in the UK. Unusually, cameras have been allowed into police stations, so we see lawyers giving advice to clients following their arrest.
Franklin Sinclair, the charismatic senior partner who runs the Manchester branch of the firm, says sometimes his lawyers are the only people taking the side of the accused in a criminal case and it is their job to gain the trust of those they represent.
“We're there to support them; we have to explain things to them, as best we can. We have to make them feel like we're on their side.”
He is also unapologetic about the firm’s need to make money.
“It's been suggested that we profit from our clients' bad behaviour. Obviously in very simple terms we do, but firstly let me point out that we are a business, and if we don't make any profit, we won't survive, and there won't be any criminal law firms defending anybody. And as a senior judge recently said, nobody else protects the vulnerable as well as criminal lawyers do.”
At a time when the legal system is under increasing scrutiny, this is a unique insight into how justice really works.
News; Documentaries
Undercover at the News Of The World
Channel 4, 11:05pm-12:05am
For two decades, 'Fake Sheikh' Mazher Mahmood was responsible for a series of sensational undercover stings - some acclaimed, others much criticised.
His typical modus operandi was to pose as a wealthy Arab, prompting indiscretions from his celebrity victims by offering them highly paid jobs or other inducements.
This programme reveals the unauthorised inside story of how the famous undercover team at the News of the World used greed, alcohol, sex, money and fame to tempt their targets into indiscretions that made front-page news.
Targets included The Countess of Wessex, the then England manager Sven Goran Eriksson, and jockey Kieren Fallon.
The film centres on the revelations of the Fake Sheikh's loyal right-hand-man, who worked with him from 2001 to 2009.
In his appearance before the Leveson Inquiry, Mahmood insisted his investigations were all prompted by reliable tips and were in the public interest, exposing either criminality, moral wrong-doing or hypocrisy. He firmly denies charges of entrapment.
The programme reveals details of some of the most notorious News of the World stings and includes interviews with some of those who were stung, including Kieron Fallon and George Galloway MP.
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Friday 3rd August
Factual; Science and Nature; Nature and Environment; Documentaries
Nature's Microworlds
BBC4, 12:00-12:30am, 3/4 - The Amazon
Steve Backshall lifts the lid on an incredible world of intricate relationships and unexpected hardship in the Amazon rainforest, explores the way that the jungle's inhabitants interact, and reveals a hidden secret that might just be what keeps the whole place alive.
Factual; Science and Nature; Nature and Environment; Documentaries
New Forest: A Year in the Wild
BBC2, 7:00-8:00pm, 2/3
The opulent beauty of the New Forest is explored in another lyrical sound-and-pictures portrait of the British countryside. With a breathy commentary from Hermione Norris, it’s a glorious montage of the seasons.
Among those who make their living from the forest we meet a “storyteller”, a lady with a hair bun and a poncho who haunts the woods telling folk tales to children; and Dave, a practitioner of coppicing, the ancient art of harvesting wood from trees. Best of all we hear the autumn soundtrack of bellowing fallow deer and the snuffling of pigs as they are let into the forest to eat acorns.
Exploring 12 months in the lives of people and wildlife inhabiting the New Forest National Park in Hampshire. Although only created in 2005, its woodlands are among the oldest in the country and have supported lifestyles dating back to medieval times. Residents including coppicer Dave Dibden show how their traditions have continued into the present day, and the film also features footage of some of Britain's rarest creatures, including sand lizards, Dartford warblers and fellow birds hobbies.
Factual; History; Documentaries
The Great British Story
BBC1, 9:00-10:00pm, 7/8 - Industry and Empire
Have you ever seen a beetling mill? Although one stars only briefly in Michael Wood’s account of the Industrial Revolution, it’s a great sequence that will leave you wanting more. Beetling was the process of pounding linen with mallets to flatten it, and when mechanised it resembles a giant, rippling barrel organ, driven by water – rather beautiful.
Somehow Wood takes in this and dozens of other elements in the making of the first industrial nation and whips through two centuries’ worth in an hour: the Lunar Society, Cornish miners, Welsh smelters, Midlands canals and the first Luddites with their imaginary leader, the wonderfully named Captain Swing.
Michael Wood explores the many ways in which the Industrial Revolution transformed society during the 19th century, as towns and cities grew while the rural population shrank and Britain became the world's first industrial power. He discovers how this economic shift affected workers, visiting communities in Dorset and Wiltshire, as well as the site of a former slum in Manchester, and investigates the roles of slavery and colonialism in driving British expansion. He also travels to mines and factories that thrived during the period, and learns how the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers revolutionised the way people viewed the world.
Crime
Soham: A Parents' Tale
ITV1, 9:00-10:00pm
Two little girls wearing Manchester United replica kits. Best friends. Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. Both aged ten. Frozen in time at 5.04pm on Sunday, 2 August, 2002, when this last picture (inset above) was taken on the day they were murdered.
Holly and Jessica left a barbecue in the village of Soham in Cambridgeshire at 6.15pm and were never seen alive by their loved ones again. They were killed by school caretaker Ian Huntley. He burnt those shirts and dumped the girls’ bodies in a ditch where they were found nearly two weeks later.
In A Parent’s Tale, Holly Wells’s parents, Kevin and Nicola, lead us through the decade since their daughter died. There is sorrow, and tears. But mother and father insist that they refused to let their daughter’s murderer destroy their lives. “I would not let Huntley take any more from me,” says Kevin Wells.
A decade after the murders of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in the Cambridgeshire town of Soham, Holly's parents, Kevin and Nicola, talk about their loss, how they have coped since school caretaker Ian Huntley committed the crimes, and the positive steps they have taken to honour the memory of their daughter.
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