Off-air recordings for week 13-19 April 2013

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 13th April

History > Documentaries

Walking Through History
Channel 4, 8:30-9:00pm, 3/4 - The Tudor Way

Tony Robinson sets off on a 45-mile hike through the countryside of the Weald in Kent and the Downs of East Sussex to discover the area's rich and surprising Tudor heritage. At Penshurst Place, author Philippa Gregory helps him relish the fate of the Grand Duke of Buckingham at the hands of the young Henry VIII. From there, he travels up what used to be secret paths to Hever Castle and finds out how the monarch's reign brought not just fame and disaster to the women who caught his eye, but also wrought huge social, political and industrial change. He ends this leg of his journey in Lewes, where he relives one of the more brutal monastic dissolutions.

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Monday 14th April

Factual > Crime and Justice > Documentaries

The Prisoners
BBC1, 9:00-10:00pm, Pentonville


This second episode follows a group of repeat offenders from Pentonville prison, which holds over a thousand male prisoners.  Mick is in his 40s and has spent years going in and out of jail; unless he gets housing once he's released, he will commit crime to get back behind bars.  Senol is trying to put a violent past behind him and build a better future with his fiancée, but on the outside he struggles with alcohol and his temper. While each journey is different, nearly all share a shocking truth that many offenders feel more at home in prison than out.


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Tuesday 15th April

Factual > Health and Wellbeing  > Documentaries

Keeping Britain Alive: The NHS in a Day
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 4/8


The story of a tetraplegic coming to terms with the changed relationship with his daughter; the former pilot and burns victim undergoing the latest of many bouts of reconstructive surgery and a couple in a bedside vigil over their daughter in a Birmingham Critical Care Unit.  In Sussex, military plastic surgeon Tania operates on a young patient who lost her legs to bacterial meningitis at the age of 17.  The film shows the range of different ways in which the NHS helps people live as normal a life as possible, from rehab to nutrition appointments, gender reassignment to nipple tattooing.


Factual > Crime > Documentaries

Secrets of the Shoplifters
4Seven, 11:00pm-12:00am, series 2 episode 2


Britain is the shoplifting capital of Europe, with over two billion pounds worth of goods being stolen every year. Secrets of the Shoplifters hits the High Street with a look at the run up to Christmas, when more 'lifting' goes on than at any other time of year. From the girl gangs, to the pros who steal presents to order, it's a festive crime wave.

The programme features exclusive access to the undercover retail police of South Yorkshire: a hard-pressed unit with its own mission to fulfil. They're aiming to lock up their top ten most wanted shoplifters in time for Christmas, but will they catch them all in time?  The 'lifters' come from all walks of life and include a former store detective turned thief and a professional woman shoplifter who claims to earn to £300 a day shoplifting for her middle class clients. For certain people, it seems that Christmas is a time to eat, drink and go thieving...


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Wednesday 17th April

Current Affairs > World News > Documentaries

Israel: Facing the Future
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm

John Ware travels around Israel to examine how it has responded to the changes sweeping the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring. He meets Israelis from all walks of life to analyse what is next for the country as religious and secular factions battle over its future.


Current Affairs > World News > Documentaries

Syria: Across the Lines
Channel 4, 9:00-10:00pm


Award-winning documentary maker Olly Lambert spends weeks living deep inside Syrian territory - with both government and opposition supporters - to explore how the two-year-old conflict is tearing communities apart. This unprecedented film witnesses first hand how the country is collapsing into a sectarian conflict and faces a bleak, Balkan-style future.

Lambert is the only western journalist to spend such an extended period filming on both sides of Syria’s sectarian and political divide. For five weeks he lived in the Orontes River Valley in rural Idlib, an almost entirely unreported frontline that is fast becoming a microcosm of what Syria will become if (or when) the regime of Bashar Al-Assad finally falls. His film is a graphic and unflinching portrait of a society cleaving apart in the face of dwindling international support, escalating violence and a growing mutual desire for revenge.

The fertile plains of the Orontes River used to be place of peaceful coexistence for Syria’s many sects and religions. But today, the river marks a sectarian frontline: on one side, the rebel Free Syrian Army holds ground in Sunni villages whose residents are calling for the fall of President Assad and his regime. But less than a mile away, Alawite villagers remain fiercely loyal to the government, and gladly host army checkpoints that almost daily fire shells and mortars into the Sunni villages across the valley.

Nearly all communication between the two sides has now broken down. Some villages just 800 metres apart are now sealed off from each other. Farmers are shot at while tending their crops and IEDs are planted on country roads. Sniper and mortar fire between villages has become a daily reality, while government artillery and air strikes only add to the mounting civilian death toll, further fuelling the anger and hatred, and forcing each community to become increasingly entrenched along sectarian lines.

Lambert films on both sides of the valley, with unprecedented access to the villages and communities on either side. With the Alawite supporters of Assad, he lives in the frontline village of Aziziya, filming inside checkpoints which are used to shell rebel villagers, even interviewing a military commander who is manning the gun position that had fired on Lambert only weeks earlier He talks to the Syrian Army commanders, Ba’ath party officials and loyalist villagers about why their support for the regime is unwavering, how they feel about the recent rupture in the social fabric of their valley, and what fate may await them if the regime falls....


Factual > History > Documentaries

The Century that Wrote Itself
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/3 - The Rewritten Universe


Author Adam Nicolson feeds an ostrich, dabbles in beekeeping and pretends to drink sulphuric acid. It’s not like BBC4 to resort to play-acting and there’s no need. The musings of 17th-century diarists may sound dry, but Nicolson’s enthusiasm is infectious.

First up is an Essex puritan who painstakingly logged his many trials and tribulations; followed by a nature-loving Norfolk doctor who coined more than a hundred words including “computer” and “literary”; and a neighbour of Samuel Pepys who strived to set up a universal information service – a sort of 17th-century Google. Last but certainly not least, Nicolson pores over the journals of Isaac Newton.

Adam Nicolson examines how the writing revolution of the 17th century helped redefine society's vision of the world, as individuals began to question attitudes toward God, the nature of reality and the structure of the universe. The advancement of literacy allowed creative thought and significant scientific advances not only to be recorded, but shared.


Factual > History &> Photography > Documentaries

Images of Conflict
Yesterday, 11:00pm -12:00am

Examining the work of seven war photographers, looking at the images they have captured over the past 50 years from the conflict in Vietnam to the military operations in Iraq


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Thursday 18th April

Factual > Documentaries

Maureen Lipman: If Memory Serves Me Right
BBC1, 9:00-10:00pm


During the last 15 years of his life, Maureen Lipman’s father had no short-term memory. “He lost his essence,” says Lipman, “I lost the father I knew.” During this funny, surprising and informative documentary, a spirited Lipman seeks out ways to keep her memory sharp.

She attends a reunion at her old school in Hull where a psychologist analyses her memories and those of her former classmates. We have, he says, a “reminiscence bump” between the ages of 15 and 25, when, effectively, most of our most enduring memories are gathered.

Lipman also talks to a sparky and determined Terry Pratchett, who was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007, and with her pal, actor Larry Lamb, takes part in a fiendish experiment conducted by scientist Michael Mosley. The pair have to memorise the names and birthdays of 25 strangers using a fascinating cognitive technique.

Maureen Lipman embarks on a personal journey to find out how memory works, and whether there is anything people can do to improve it. Deeply affected by how the loss of her father's short-term memory changed him, Maureen constantly worries about losing her own power of recall - without which she could not work as an actress. Here she explores through her own recollections how the process works, from cradle to grave, with the help of family, friends and scientists.


Science and Nature > Documentaries

Could We Survive a Mega-Tsunami?
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm


The short answer is no. This is one of those gleefully alarmist, CGI-stuffed documentaries designed to make us sleep less peacefully in our beds.

You see, regular tsunamis (or tidal waves, as we used to know them) are caused by ocean-floor earthquakes. They can, of course, cause colossal damage and loss of life. But a so-called mega-tsumani is different – caused by the kind of landslide you get when part of a volcanic island (such as La Palma in the Canaries, potentially) collapses into the sea. The resulting waves could be the height of two Empire State Buildings and travel at the speed of a jet aircraft. Run for the hills!

The destructive effects of tsunamis has been all too evident in recent years, with the one on Boxing Day 2004 killing around 250,000 people in southern Asia and another striking Japan in March 2011 - bringing one of the world's most advanced countries close to a nuclear catastrophe. This documentary uses the latest scientific modelling to present a minute-by-minute account of what might happen if there was a mega-tsunami in the Atlantic, and what would it do to cities including Casablanca, Lisbon, London and New York.


Factual > Arts, Culture and the Media > Documentaries

A Night at the Rijksmuseum
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm

Andrew Graham-Dixon gets a behind-the-scenes look at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam as the staff prepare to open the doors following a 10-year renovation project - one of the most significant revamps ever undertaken by a museum. It now has more than 8,000 works of art telling the story of eight centuries worth of Dutch history and is home to masterpieces by Vermeer to Rembrandt.


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Friday 19th April

Factual >  Art, and Culture > History > Documentaries

The Genius of Josiah Wedgwood
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm

You may be surprised to see that this hagiography on the great Georgian potter is presented by novelist-historian AN Wilson, but in fact he’s the perfect presenter. Wilson grew up in Stoke; his father was production director at Wedgwood in the 1950s, a potter like all the family for ten generations.

Steeped in the myth as he is, you can forgive Wilson Jr for worshipping at Josiah Wedgwood’s non-clay feet. His account of how a young artist-industrialist applied science to the craft of pottery and created “a Georgian superbrand” is fascinating. We see drawers full of ceramic fragments – some of the thousands of glaze tests Josiah ran in his search for the perfect finish. We hear of the passion for social justice that drove him to campaign against slavery. And we see plenty of superb pots and vases.

Historian and author AN Wilson explores the life of 18th-century potter Josiah Wedgwood, who was one of the founding fathers of the Industrial Revolution. He was an innovative scientist and a man with a passion for human rights at a time when Britain still had a slave trade, and wanted to craft objects that made the world a more beautiful place. Wilson navigates his way through Wedgwood's story through a selection of pots, plates and other wares that were turning points in his life.

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