Off-air recordings for week 6-12 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 6th April

History > Documentaries

Walking Through History
Channel 4, 8:00-9:00pm, 2/4 - Frontline Dorset

Tony's walk in this episode takes him back to 1940 when Dorset became the unlikely frontline in the war against Hitler.  His five-day, 60-mile walk along the Jurassic coast reveals the county's hidden World War II story.  Starting by the defences on Chesil Beach (still standing 70 years on), Tony's journey encompasses stunning scenery and amazing acts of ingenuity and bravery as he heads east towards Swanage and Studland Bay.  He uncovers the strange part a world-famous swannery played in developing a secret weapon.

He hears of the bravery of the man who won the Victoria Cross serving in Portland Harbour when it became one of the first places in Britain to be bombed by the Germans.  He reveals the role Dorset had to play in protecting Britain from invasion, and in an emotional climax he meets one of the veterans who survived after landing on Omaha Beach on D Day.


Factual > Documentaries

Archive on 4: Riding into Town
BBC Radio 4, 8:00-9:00pm

The excitement and romance of the wild west was a powerful force on the imaginations of the British from the 1930s until the '70s. Samira Ahmed reflects on the love of the Western.

The American Film Institute defines western films as those "set in the American West that embody the spirit, the struggle and the demise of the new frontier". The term Western, used to describe a narrative film genre, appears to have originated with a July 1912 article in Motion Picture World Magazine.

In this personal exploration, Samira Ahmed will see how Westerns nourished post-war British children and how they explored the politics and fears of their day. Samira says, "I remember sitting at an uncle's house in Hillingdon, possibly celebrating Eid, with lots of Hyderabadi relatives, and we were all - kids and adults alike - gathered round the TV watching the end of the original True Grit."

The programme considers the central cast of characters in the western form. Samira explores her interest in the weird and wonderful women and their ranches full of outlaws, such as Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious: "I especially loved the strong Indian and Mexican women - Katy Jurado in High Noon, as opposed to anaemic Grace Kelly. And there were always strong women in Westerns, holding their own in a deeply macho world. Then there were those secretly gay, camp, polysexual or just plain wacko Westerns - Johnny Guitar, the French critics' favourite, and The Singer Not the Song featuring Dirk Bogarde's highly unlikely Mexican bandido in black leather jeans and gloves."


Drama > Films

Coriolanus
BBC2, 9:45-11:40pm

Ralph Fiennes's acclaimed directorial debut transposes Shakespeare's Roman tragedy to a contemporary Balkan conflict. Proud Roman General Caius Martius refuses to court public opinion, laying bare his contempt for his fellow citizens even when his equally proud mother Volumnia encourages him to run for consul.


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Sunday 7th April

Arts, Culture & the Media > Documentaries

Perspectives: Portillo on Picasso
ITV1, 10:00-11:00pm

Broadcaster, journalist and former government minister Michael Portillo shares his love for art as he travels to Spain and France to discover the genius of Picasso in this fourth programme of the Perspectives arts strand on ITV.  Michael talks of how his love of art has been influenced by his father, an exiled Spanish republican, as he explores the life and work of Pablo Picasso.  He travels to Malaga, birthplace of the celebrated artist, and where he came to love the bullfight. Michael stands in the bullring which inspired his famous paintings.  He meets Picasso’s granddaughter Diana in the Paris studio where he painted Guernica, his most iconic work, and Salvador Farelo, one of Malaga’s greatest bullfighters, who says bullfighting appears so much in Spanish art because bullfighting is itself pure art.

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Monday 8th April

Factual > Arts, Culture & the Media > Arts

What Do Artists Do All Day?
BBC4, 8:00-9:00pm, 3/3 - Jack Vettriano

Jack Vettriano is arguably Britain's most popular artist, with his nostalgic paintings of a lost age of glamour being instantly recognisable and his most famous work, The Singing Butler, the country's bestselling image, reproduced on everything from calendars to jigsaws. But despite his popularity, the self-taught miner's son from Fife has never been fully accepted by the art establishment. This film offers an intimate and revealing portrait of Vettriano, as he creates his latest painting, featuring actress Kara Tointon, and sees him talk with brutal honestly about his critics and how he deals with fame. 




Factual > History > Documentaries

Fit to Rule: How Royal Illness Changed History
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3 - Tudors to Stuarts: From Gods to Men

Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, explores how the physical and mental health of our past monarchs has shaped the history of the nation. From Henry VIII to Edward VIII's abdication in 1936, this three-part series re-introduces our past royals not just as powerful potentates, but as human beings, each with their own very personal problems of biology and psychology.

Stripping away the regal facade, Lucy examines their medical problems, doctors' reports, personal correspondence and intimate possessions to gain a unique insight into the real men and women behind the royal portraits. She uncovers how kings and queens have had to deal with infertility, religious extremism, depression, bisexuality and culture shock. But could these supposed chinks in the royal armour provide a surprising explanation for the enduring power of the British monarchy? Lucy argues that the survival of the monarchy has been determined not so much by the strengths of our past monarchs but by their weaknesses.

In this first episode, Lucy explores the medical histories of the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, beginning with the ascension of Henry VIII and tracing the changing fortunes of these two very different royal families up to the execution of Charles I. Five hundred years ago our monarchs derived their authority from God alone, but despite their semi-divine status, they were subject to exactly the same harsh physical realities as the rest of us. Lucy discovers how the Tudors and Stuarts coped with royal bodies that were often too young or too old, too infirm or too infertile and sometimes simply the wrong sex at a time when male heirs were all important.

Lucy investigates the most critical medical problems and family psychodramas faced by a fascinating cast of royal characters, including the trouble Henry VIII had in producing a male heir and the cause of his daughter Mary I's phantom pregnancy. She sheds new light on the biological and psychological make-up of some of our greatest rulers by examining their personal correspondence and private possessions, including intimate love letters exchanged between James I and his lover the Duke of Buckingham, and the special orthopaedic boots worn by Charles I. 


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Tuesday 9th April

Documentaries

The Prozac Economy
BBC Radio 4, 8:00-8:40pm

Prozac is 25 years old. One of the first blockbuster drugs, it has been taken by over 40 million people around the world and made billions of dollars for Eli Lilly, the company that created it.

In this programme, Will Self examines the legacy of the so-called ‘wonder drug’. As he sets off on a personal exploration of the conflicting and sensational stories that surround Prozac, he talks to those who make the drug, those who take it and those who prescribe it.

Anti-depressant use in the UK is rising sharply, but as Will discovers when he talks to Eli Lilly's Dr Robert Baker, the medical world still doesn't really know exactly how Prozac works. Dr David Wong, one of the fathers of the drug, reveals to Will that he believes too many people are taking it. Psychotherapist Susie Orbach diagnoses a generation of 'Prozac children' raised on the promise of on-demand happiness.

Dr David Healy, one of Prozac's most outspoken critics, tells Will why he thinks that the drug and its siblings are responsible for hundreds of unnecessary deaths in this country each year, and Linda Hurcombe explains to Will why she believes Prozac is linked to the death of her teenage daughter, Caitlin. On the flip side, Will meets Dorothy Neilson who explains how the drug saved her from a horrifying pit of depression


Factual > Health & Wellbeing

Keeping Britain Alive: The NHS in a Day
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 3/8

The groundbreaking eight-part series that tells the story of a single day in the NHS. One hundred camera crews were dispatched across the country to capture how this giant institution collides with every aspect of life in Britain. Through the experience of patients and staff, each film reveals the grief, frustration, heroism and joy evident in the NHS every single day.

In the third episode: a GP struggling with an unusual medical emergency on a Scottish Island and a top surgeon performing a high risk brain operation while the patient Daryl is still awake. In London, Pat waits anxiously for his wife Laura to come round from an induced coma. This film shows the vastly different contexts in which the NHS operates; urban and rural; both the cutting edge treatment for those who are critically ill with the more everyday procedures that make up the ailments and dilemmas of modern Britain.


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Wednesday 10th April

History > Documentaries

The Century that Wrote Itself
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3 - The Written Self

In a new three-part series for BBC Four, author Adam Nicolson takes an intimate look at the diarists and letter writers of the 17th century who produced the first great age of self-depiction.

The Century That Wrote Itself explores how, at a time of great upheaval in England, writing was both a means of escape and of fighting for what you believed. It was a time when account books became confessionals, and letters became weapons against the authorities.

In the first episode, The Written Self, Adam traces our modern sense of self back to the time when ordinary people first took up the quill. From a Quaker woman who used the written word as an instrument of revolution (imprisoned after sparking debates with her pamphlets and leaflets fighting for free speech, a free press and for the rights of women as preachers), to an ambitious shepherd who traded one of his sheep in return for lessons in reading and writing, the programme explores how rising literacy allowed people to re-write the country’s future - and their own.

Of the series, presenter Adam Nicolson says: “The 17th century was the most revolutionary moment in our history. The whole geometry of the country, the way people dealt with each other, the way they were thinking about religion and science, their relationships with the rest of the world - all of that was in flux.

“You could think of it as 'the English Spring' - the moment when all kinds of inherited authority, medieval hierarchies, the crown and the church, started to melt and bubble. But this wasn't an easy slide into modernity – it was an agonising process, with many steps forward and many back. And all of it was dependent on the liberalising effects of written communication. If you could read and write you didn't have to depend on what others told you. You could know it for yourself. You could challenge what they had to say.”


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Thursday 11th April

Factual > History > Religion & Ethics > Documentaries

Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain's Holiest Places
BBC4, 8:30-9:00pm, 6/6 - Caves

In this final episode, Ifor ap Glyn sets out to discover why subterranean sites have some of the richest religious histories in Britain. Why do people seem to feel closer to the divine by going underground?

Ifor’s first stop is Lud’s Church in Derbyshire, a natural canyon of labyrinthine corridors which is one of the most dramatic and atmospheric holy places in the country. He then ventures into the depths of a cave in North Wales where evidence of ritual use dating back 14,000 years make this perhaps the oldest holy place in Britain.

Ifor then follows in the footsteps of St Cuthbert’s body, which was shifted between caves in the north of England to escape the attention of Viking raiders, and he visits a coastal cave in St Govan, South Wales, where a hermit is said to have been miraculously enveloped in rock, allowing him to evade a gang of local wreckers.

Back in Derbyshire, Ifor visits the Anchor Church at Ingleby, arguably the finest example of a cave church in Britain, before heading to Norwich, where he meets a nun who tells him all about a young woman who, in the 1370s, chose to be bricked up alive for over 40 years in an act of almost unbelievable devotion. Finally, Ifor visits the dramatic crypt at Ripon Cathedral in North Yorkshire, a recreation of the most holy site in Christendom - Jesus’ tomb in Jerusalem.


Factual > Art, Culture & the Media > History > Documentaries

The High Art of the Low Countries
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/3 - Boom and Bust

This second episode of the series is the very exemplar of art-history documentaries. Andrew Graham-Dixon looks at the Dutch Golden Age, exploring the period lasting just over a century from the 1560s to the 1670s. It saw this small country become the most powerful on Earth, exchanging regal tyranny for a market-led republicanism, built, like the country itself, by its citizens. But it was a boom-and-bust economy — witness the mania for tulips of the early 1600s — that was reflected in the wavering fortunes of its finest artists: Franz Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer. 

The paintings are stupendous, but so is the analysis. Graham-Dixon is in his element here, quoting Descartes and Montaigne one minute, and asking, “Have you ever seen a more vividly rendered cowpat?” (about a painting of a majestic bull) the next. Andrew Graham-Dixon explores the countries of Holland and Belgium, famous for their tulips and windmills, but which were actually forged through conflict and division. He examines how a period of economic prosperity, driven by the secular middle class, led to the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century, during which time the concept of oil painting was conceived, and the master painters such as Rembrandt and Vermeer found success.


Documentaries

One Mile Away
Channel 4, 11:10pm-1:00am

Penny Woolcock's award-winning documentary charts the attempts by two warring gangs, the Burger Bar Boys (B21) and the Johnson Crew (B6), to bring peace to their neighbourhoods in inner city Birmingham.  It follows Penny Woolcock's hip hop musical 1 Day, which was partly informed by these postcode wars.

One Mile Away was initiated by Shabba, a young man affiliated to the Johnson side, who met Penny during her research for 1 Day. He saw her as neutral and as someone who had built trust on both sides.  Penny agreed to get involved and introduced Shabba to Dylan Duffus, the lead actor in 1 Day and affiliated to the Burger side.

The film follows their painstaking journey over two years to recruit supporters from both sides. Along the way, they get advice from Jonathan Powell, who oversaw the Good Friday Agreement, and the riots erupt in Birmingham in summer 2011, with surprising consequences. This compelling documentary demonstrates how film and the determination of ordinary people can transform entrenched social problems. One Mile Away is now also a developing social enterprise, working with schools to reduce gang culture in the UK.


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Friday 12th April

History > Science & Nature > Science & Technology > Documentaries

Isaac Newton: The Last Magician
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm

Recluse. Obsessive. Heretic. Isaac Newton is now considered to be the greatest genius of all-time, a great rationalist who laid the foundations for many of the scientific and mathematical breakthroughs that shape the modern world.

But this 60-minute biography, part of the BBC’s Genius Of Invention season, reveals a much more complex figure by interviewing experts and delving into his own writings and those of his contemporaries. Newton emerges as an often divisive figure, one who lived a largely solitary life. In the secrecy of his study and laboratory, we find that he also delved into heretical religion, alchemy and the occult.

Sir Isaac Newton transformed how we understand the universe. By the age of 21, he had rejected 2,000 years of scientific orthodoxy to develop his own insights through a relentless - and often dangerous – series of experiments. From his obsessions with light and gravity, to alchemy and biblical texts, Newton held no truth – or text – so sacred that it could not be questioned. His work put him at odds with fellow scientists and led to dark periods of isolation throughout his life.

But his genius could not be denied: he rose through the scientific ranks to become the President of the Royal Society and one of the most influential scientists in the world. His heretical religious views and his obsession with alchemy remained a closely guarded secret in his lifetime. After his death, his unpublished alchemical research and documents relating to his heretical views were buried to protect his reputation. They remained largely hidden until 1936 when they were purchased by the economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes revealed that Newtown was a much more complex man than history had allowed. The programme concludes that Newton’s secret obsession with alchemy helped him to achieve some of his greatest scientific insights.

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