Off-air recordings for week 29 June - 5 July 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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Sunday 30th June

Factual > Science & Nature > Nature & Environment > Documentaries

Rise of the Continents
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 4/4 - Eurasia

Two hundred million years ago the continent we know as Eurasia - "the vast swathe of land that extends from Europe in the West to Asia in the East" - didn't exist.

To reveal Eurasia's origins, Prof Iain Stewart climbs up to the "eternal flames" of Mount Chimera in Southern Turkey, blazing natural gas that seeps out of the rock. Formed on the seafloor, it shows that where the South of Eurasia is today there was once a ninety-million-square-kilometre Ocean known as the Tethys. It is the destruction of the Tethys Ocean that holds the key to Eurasia's formation.

In the backwaters of Kerala in Southern India he finds evidence of how that happened, in the most unlikely of places: the bones of the local fishermen's prize catch. The freshwater fish called Karimeen, shares anatomical features with another group of fish that live in Madagascar; evidence that India and Madagascar were joined. India was once four thousand kilometres south of its current position on the other side of the Tethys.

As it moved North, the Ocean in front of it closed. And as it collided with the rest of Eurasia the impact built the Himalayas, "the greatest mountain range on Earth". Taking an ultralight aircraft up into the peaks, Professor Iain Stewart reveals how the mountains aren't simply pieces of the land pushed upwards. In fact the rock that forms them was once the floor of the Tethys Ocean.


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Monday 1st July

News

Panorama: Kids Lost in Care
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm

Panorama investigates the standard of residential care for Britain's most vulnerable children. The results of a seven-month investigation reveal that thousands of young people are being exported to children's homes across the country, to care that is often not up to scratch, leading some to run away into risky situations. One of the young victims of the Oxford grooming case reveals her untold story of the abuse she suffered while living in residential care. The film also shines a light on the growing private market in children's homes, where there is little transparency, even though it is fully-funded by the UK taxpayer.


Factual > Health & Wellbeing > Reality

Don't Call Me Crazy
BBC3, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/3

The McGuinness Unit in Manchester is one of the largest teenage mental health inpatient units in the country - and a place of last resort for many adolescents with eating disorders or psychosis, who self-harm or are suicidal. While some of the young patients agree to stay voluntarily undergoing treatment here, others have been detained against their wishes, sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Filmed over the course of a year and with unparalleled access, this series follows teenage girls and boys at the unit as they battle to turn their lives around.

In the second episode, we meet 14-year-old Crystal, who's been admitted to the McGuinness Unit because she sees animals and people that nobody else can. Some of the characters, like a girl she calls '7', are her friends who she wants to keep, but others like 'The Man' or 'The Rat' scare her. Crystal's parents want to know if her condition can be diagnosed - could it be schizophrenia or psychosis?

We also catch up with Beth, who's been on the Unit for three months suffering from depression and an eating disorder. Since being sectioned under the Mental Health Act, Beth is slowly starting to eat a bit more - but doing so is making her feel guilty, so she has developed a way of punishing herself for eating by self-harming. Up to one in every 12 young people deliberately self-harm and around 25,000 are admitted to hospital every year due to the severity of their injuries. It's a continuing problem for staff on the McGuinness Unit - as soon as they confiscate something the patients could self-harm with, the young people find new ways of hiding them.

Beth has to stay in the unit on Christmas Day, but by February she believes she's well enough to leave and takes her case to a tribunal to challenge her section.



Factual > History > Documentaries

Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm


Cleopatra - the most famous woman in history. We know her as a great queen, a beautiful lover and a political schemer. For 2,000 years almost all evidence of her has disappeared - until now.

In one of the world's most exciting finds, archaeologists believe they have discovered the skeleton of her sister, murdered by Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

From Egypt to Turkey, Neil Oliver investigates the story of a ruthless queen who would kill her own siblings for power. This is the portrait of a killer.


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Tuesday 2nd July

Art, Culture & the Media > Photography > Documentaries

Imagine... McCullin
BBC1, 10:35pm-12:05am

Imagine...McCullin, presents a powerful documentary portrait of legendary British war photographer and photojournalist Don McCullin, made by Jacqui and David Morris.

The film is told through a series of searingly honest and often graphic interviews, through which McCullin recounts a life lived in the theatre of war; from his first assignment with the violent teenage gangs on his home turf of Finsbury Park to capturing international conflicts throughout the turbulent 1960s to the 1980s.

Working for The Sunday Times newspaper, McCullin’s photography brought home the horrors of modern warfare from Cyprus to the Congo and Biafra and, most famously, Vietnam.

The documentary lays bare McCullin’s disgust for the destruction of human life juxtaposed with the adrenalin rush of a life spent under enemy fire.


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Wednesday 3rd July

Documentaries > Factual

Me and My Guide Dog
ITV1, 8:00-9:00pm

An exploration of the unique relationship between man and his best friend; from the birth of a litter of puppies, through guide dog training, to placement with those who need them most.

With exclusive access to The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, this heart-warming film, narrated by dog-lover, Paul O’Grady, highlights the difference guide dogs make to people’s lives.

For the past 80 years, the Association has been matching the visually impaired with their canine guides in life-changing partnerships.

From Steve Cunningham, the world’s fastest blind man, who drives racing cars at high speed, to newly-engaged Mark and Claire who were brought together by their guide dogs’ own romance and Liverpool-based 24-year-old Lynette Proctor who’s undergoing guide-dog training with her first guide dog Pippa.

We hear the heartfelt stories of the difference dogs can make to the lives of those who cannot see for themselves.  Every hour, another person in the UK goes blind. When someone loses their sight, guide dogs ensure they don’t have to lose their freedom as well.


Documentaries > Science & Nature > Factual

Horizon: What Makes Us Human?
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm

n what ways do humans differ from our ape cousins? Professor Alice Roberts sees a touching experiment in the course of finding out. It involves toddlers and marbles and their impulse to share the fruits of co-operation in a way that chimpanzees don’t. It’s far from conclusive, but hints that the roots of human culture may lie in an instinct for collaboration and fairness – almost too heartening to be true.

It’s not the only wow-scene. Wait till you see the scientist trying to map the entire human brain (there are 100 trillion connections, so it may take a while). He shows us a multicoloured, 3D model of one part of it that looks amazingly complex: it maps one five-millionth of a cubic millimetre.

Humans share 99 per cent of their DNA with chimpanzees and yet from the moment of birth, their lives are completely different. Anthropologist Alice Roberts investigates the factors that separate mankind from its closest living relatives, exploring differences in physiology, genetic make-up and in the brain.


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Thursday 4th July


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

Who Were The Greeks?
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/2

The ancient Olympic Games were a vicious affair, Dr Michael Scott reminds us. It really wasn’t the taking part that counted. Because the Games were a religious festival, winners were acclaimed as superior beings touched by the gods. Runners-up slunk away in shame.

Scott says that to imagine what they were like we need to combine the jingoism of a big international football match, the religious significance of Easter and the diplomatic pomp of a UN summit. With no proper sanitation.

This is typical of the way Scott paints vivid pictures of the ancient world without reconstructions or gimmicks, highlighting where the Greek world was nothing like we imagine it. For instance, if we picture Greek buildings and statues, we picture pristine marble, clean and white. Wrong: they would have been painted in bright colours and patterns, using pigments sourced from across Europe and Asia. A computer re-creation of the Parthenon as it could have looked is, like the whole programme, an eye-opener.

Michael Scott examines the influence of ancient Greece on the modern world, looking at its impact on democracy, art, architecture, philosophy, science, sport and theatre. He uses the latest archaeological, literary and scientific analysis to uncover the story of how the ideas of the period have spread, been misinterpreted and absorbed into the consciousness of human society.


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