Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*
__________________________________________________________
Sunday 23rd October 2011
Factual; Histories; Documentaries
Britain's Park Story
BBC4, 8:00-9:00pm
The British invented them for the world, and they have been described as 'the lungs of the city - historian Dan Cruickshank reveals the history of our public parks. Cruickshank travels the country to discover the evolution of the nation's urban public parks, a story of class, civic pride, changing fashions in sport and recreation which helps re-evaluate the amazing assets they are. From their civic heyday in the 19th century to the neglect of the 1980s and their resurgence today, the documentary is a fascinating and entertaining history of an often-overlooked great British invention.
Factual; Science and Nature; Nature and Environment
Tales from the National Parks
BBC4, 11:20pm-12.20am, 1/3 The Lake District
The National Parks are Britain's most treasured landscapes, but they are increasingly becoming battlefields. They were designated 60 years ago as places for everyone, but is that still the case? In this series the award-winning filmmaker Richard Macer spent a year amid conflicts in three different parks, on a journey to discover who they are really for.
In each park (the other two are the Peak District and Loch Lomond) the stories are very different, but there is something that unites them all - fiercely divided communities who are prepared to fight in order to preserve their right to enjoy the countryside. In each film Macer has secured access to the National Park Authority - an organisation which looks after the landscapes and decides upon planning matters. In all these stories the Park Authorities have a key role to play in trying to find amicable solutions to the problems which confront them.
In the Lake District, entrepreneur Mark Weir wants to build a giant zip-wire ride from the top of a beautiful, remote mountain. But what chance does it have of getting permission when there are over 400 objectors to it? Tragically, Mark is killed in an accident during filming and never lives to see if his zip-wire becomes a reality.
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Monday 24th October 2011
News
Panorama: Cops Behaving Badly
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm
What happens when the police fail in their sworn duty to protect life, when they get it wrong or when police officers themselves break the law? Richard Bilton investigates cops who behave badly, and discovers just how many cases are dealt with by the police themselves behind closed doors. He asks why, in some cases, police officers are allowed to simply walk away.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Life Stories
I Never Tell Anybody Anything: The Life and Art of Edward Burra
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm
Edward Burra (1905-76) was one of the most elusive British artists of the 20th century. Long underrated, his reputation has been suddenly rehabilitated, with the first major retrospective of his work for 25 years taking place in 2011 and record-breaking prices being paid for his work at auction.
In this film, the first serious documentary about Edward Burra made for television, leading art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon tells the remarkable story of his life. It follows Burra from his native town of Rye to the jazz clubs of prohibition-era New York, to the war-torn landscapes of the Spanish Civil War and back to England during the Blitz. It shows how Burra's increasingly disturbing and surreal work deepened and matured as he experienced at first hand some of the most tragic events of the century. Through letters and interviews with those who knew him, it paints an entertaining portrait of a true English eccentric.
Factual; Science and Nature; Environment
The Secret Life of Waves
BBC4, 11:00pm-12:00am
Documentary-maker David Malone delves into the secrets of ocean waves. In an elegant and original film he finds that waves are not made of water, that some waves travel sideways and that the sound of the ocean comes not from water but from bubbles. Waves are not only beautiful but also profoundly important, and there is a surprising connection between the life cycle of waves and the life of human beings.
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Thursday 26th October 2011
Factual; Politics; Documentaries
The Future State of Welfare with John Humphrys
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm
In February 2011 David Cameron announced a welfare reform bill he described as the most fundamental, ambitious and radical since the benefit system began. The cost of benefit, he said, had gone up by nearly £60bn in the last decade. Critics say that the welfare state is in crisis.
And yet at the same time, there's resounding support among the British public for welfare. In an Ipsos MORI poll commissioned for this programme, 92% of adults agreed with the statement that it is important to have a benefits system to provide a safety net for anyone that needs it.
John Humphrys travels the country to talk to the people with the most to lose: people on incapacity benefit; the long-term unemployed; people on housing benefit; lone parents. Are they prepared for the harsher future ahead? He returns to the area where he was born - Splott in Cardiff - to show how attitudes to work and welfare have changed in his lifetime. When he was growing up, a man who didn't work was regarded as a pariah; today, one in four of the working-age population in Splott is on some form of benefit. John also visits America, where 15 years ago they embarked on what has been called a 'welfare revolution'. Is this more punitive model where the UK heading? He looks at specific reforms the Government has in mind or has begun already.
Humphrys concludes that the public don't like what they see as a growing sense of entitlement among some groups claiming benefits, and politicians respond to the public mood. He argues that there is strong consensus across political divides, and that reform would edge the UK back towards the original Beveridge vision of welfare.
Factual; Science and Nature; Environment
The Secret Life of Ice
BBC4, 8:00-9:00pm
Ice is one of the strangest, most beguiling and mesmerising substances in the world. Full of contradictions, it is transparent yet it can glow with colour, it is powerful enough to shatter rock but it can melt in the blink of an eye. It takes many shapes, from the fleeting beauty of a snowflake to the multi-million tonne vastness of a glacier and the eeriness of the ice fountains of far-flung moons.
Science writer Dr Gabrielle Walker has been obsessed with ice ever since she first set foot on Arctic sea ice. In this programme she searches out some of the secrets hidden deep within the ice crystal to try to discover how something so ephemeral has the power to sculpt landscapes, to preserve our past and inform our future.
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Friday 27th October 2011
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Music; Rock and Indie
Upside Down: The Creation Records Story
BBC4, 9:00-10:40pm
Millions of sales on both sides of the Atlantic, near bankruptcy, pills, thrills, spats, prats, successes, excesses, pick-me-ups and breakdowns - all spiralled together to create some of the most defining music of the 20th century. This is the definitive and fully-authorised documentary of the highs and lows of the UK's most inspired and dissolute independent record label - Creation Records. Over 25 years after Creation's first records, it follows the story from the days of the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Primal Scream and Teenage Fanclub to the Boo Radleys, the Super Furry Animals and of course Oasis, among many, many more. The label's enigmatic founder Alan McGee talks candidly of the trail which led from humble beginnings in Glasgow, via drink and drug dependency to being wined and dined at No 10 Downing Street by Tony Blair.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Music; Rock and Indie
Creation at the BBC
BBC4, 10:40-11:00pm
A trip through the BBC archives from programmes such as Whistle Test, the Oxford Road Show, Top of the Pops and Later with Jools Holland to find some rare and some familiar footage of the bands who were on one of the UK's most seminal and important record labels, Creation Records. There's footage of the Jesus and Mary Chain on Whistle Test in 1985, and from the same year comes The Loft on the Oxford Road Show. The Loft morphed into Pete Astor's next project, the Weather Prophets, who performed on the Whistle Test later that year. My Bloody Valentine nearly bankrupted Creation but produced one of the label's flagship albums, Isn't Anything, while Slowdive were front runners in the 'shoegazing' scene. The 1990s heralded the halcyon days of Creation with the release of Primal Scream's Screamadelica and Oasis signing to the label in 1993. Thus followed a string of chart successes for Creation with Ride, the Boo Radleys, Super Furry Animals, Teenage Fanclub and, of course, Oasis.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Music; Rock and Indie
Omnibus: Alan McGee, the Man who Discovered Oasis
BBC4, 11:40pm-12:30am
Millions of sales on both sides of the Atlantic, near bankruptcy, pills, thrills, spats, prats, successes, excesses, pick-me-ups and breakdowns - all spiralled together to create some of the most defining music of the 20th century. This is the definitive and fully-authorised documentary of the highs and lows of the UK's most inspired and dissolute independent record label - Creation Records. Over 25 years after Creation's first records, it follows the story from the days of the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Primal Scream and Teenage Fanclub to the Boo Radleys, the Super Furry Animals and of course Oasis, among many, many more. The label's enigmatic founder Alan McGee talks candidly of the trail which led from humble beginnings in Glasgow, via drink and drug dependency to being wined and dined at No 10 Downing Street by Tony Blair.
__________________________________________________________
Saturday 29th October 2011
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Music; Rock and Indie
Do It Yourself: The Story of Rough Trade
BBC4, 12:30-2:00am
The Rough Trade story begins more than thirty years ago on 20th February 1976. Britain was in the grip of an IRA bombing campaign; a future prime minister was beginning to make her mark on middle England, where punk was yet to run amok; and a young Cambridge graduate called Geoff Travis opened a new shop at 202 Kensington Park Road, just off Ladbroke Grove in West London. The Rough Trade shop sold obscure and challenging records by bands like American art-rockers Pere Ubu, offering an alternative to the middle-of-the-road rock music that dominated the music business.
In January 1977, when a record by Manchester punk band Buzzcocks appeared in the shop, Rough Trade found itself in the right place at the right time to make an impact far beyond that of a neighbourhood music store. When Spiral Scratch was released in 1977, the idea of putting out a single without the support of an established record company was incredible. But Rough Trade was to become the headquarters of a revolt against this corporate monopoly - it was stocking records by bands inspired by the idea that they could do it themselves.
But selling a few independent records over the counter was not going to change the world. Early independent labels had to hand over their distribution to the likes of EMI or CBS. But one man at Rough Trade challenged that monopoly. Richard Scott joined Rough Trade in 1977 and became the architect of a grand scheme that was nothing short of revolutionary: independent nationwide distribution.
_________________________________________________________
*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.
Thursday, 20 October 2011
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Off-air recordings 8-14 October 2011
Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*
_________________________________________________________
Monday 17th October
Documentaries; Science; Technology
Brave New World with Stephen Hawking
Channel 4, 8:00-9:00pm, 1/5 - Machines
The team showcase breakthroughs in technology and engineering that are creating a new generation of machines. Mark Evans fuses his brain with a computer in Switzerland to test a new breed of machine.
Kathy Sykes hits the streets of San Francisco to have the ride of her life as she experiences the future of transport in a driverless car. In Italy Jim Alei-Khalili comes face to face with a remarkable, baby-like robot called iCub, which learns like a child.
Joy Reidenberg discovers the extraordinary exoskeleton that can make the paralysed walk and give one man the strength of three. In the Canary Islands Maggie Aderin-Pocock visits one of the world's biggest telescopes, where they're searching for new planets in the furthest reaches of the universe - planets that we could one day colonise.
Documentaries; Factual; Science and Nature
Origins of Us
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3, Bones
Origins of Us tells the story of our species, homo sapiens. In every one of our bodies is the evidence of how we evolved away from our ape cousins to become the adaptable, successful species we are today.
Anatomist and physical anthropologist Dr Alice Roberts reveals the key adaptations in our body that has contributed to our extra-ordinary success. Far from being inevitable, the evolution of our species is a product of pure chance. And with each anatomical advantage comes a cost, which many of us are still paying today. Bad backs, painful childbirth, impacted wisdom teeth are all a by-product of our evolutionary success.
This is a journey through your own body, 6 million years and 300 000 generations of our family, from a tree dwelling ape in the forests of Africa, to you and the six billion other humans on Earth today.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Life Stories
Colouring Light: Brian Clarke - An Artist Apart
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm
Brian Clarke is one of Britain's hidden treasures. A painter of striking large canvases and the designer of some of the most exciting stained glass in the world today, he is better known abroad - especially in Germany and Switzerland - than in his own country, and more widely recognised among critics, collectors and gallery owners than he is by the general public.
In this visually striking documentary portrait made by award-winning filmmaker Mark Kidel, Clarke returns to Lancashire where he grew up as a prodigy in a working-class family and charts his meteoric rise during the punk years and eventual success as a stained glass artist working with some of the world's great architects, including Norman Foster and Arata Isozaki - and producing spectacular work in Japan, Brazil, the USA and Europe.
__________________________________________________________
Tuesday 18th October
Documentaries; Crime and Justice; Factual; Politics
This World: Spain's Stolen Babies
Spain is reeling from an avalanche of allegations of baby theft and baby trafficking. The trade began at the end of the Spanish civil war and continued for 50 years - hundreds of thousands of babies are thought to have been traded by nuns, priests and doctors up to the 1990s. This World reveals the impact of Spain's stolen baby scandal through the eyes of the children and parents who were separated at birth, and who are now desperate to find their relatives.
Exhumations of the supposed graves of babies and positive DNA tests are proof that baby theft has happened. Across Spain, people are queuing up to take a DNA test and thousands of Spaniards are asking 'Who am I?'
Katya Adler has been meeting the heartbroken mothers who are searching for the children whom they were told died at birth, as well as the stolen and trafficked babies who are now grown up and searching for their biological relatives and their true identities.
Factual; Families and Relationships; Health and Wellbeing; Life Stories;
The Kid's Speech
BBC1, 10:35-11:25pm
Moving and uplifting documentary following the stories of three children who live with a stammer. Eleven-year-olds Reggie and William, and 14-year-old Bethan, are determined to improve their speech. Along with their parents, they embark on a unique, intensive course at the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children.
Over two emotional weeks, the kids open up about their fears and frustrations whilst learning techniques to help with their fluency. This is also a significant journey for the parents, who learn more about themselves and their children than they could have imagined.
Michael Palin's father was a severe stammerer, and Michael speaks movingly about the condition and how it affected his family.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Performances and Events
RTS Huw Wheldon Lecture 2011: TV Modern Father of History
BBC2, 11:20pm-12:00am
Bettany Hughes uses the 2011 Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture to argue that history on television is thriving and enjoying a new golden age. She explores why programme makers should look to the ancients for inspiration, how television can become an active player in the historical process itself and why people are looking to the past to help navigate a complex modern world.
__________________________________________________________
Wednesday 19th October 2011
News
Panorama Special: Britain's Child Beggars
BBC1, 9:00-10:00pm
Meet 'Alice'. She is a four-year-old child out on the streets of London begging hours on end, day in, day out. 'Alice' is just one of Britain's Gypsy child beggars, and she can earn hundreds of pounds a day.
A special Panorama investigation uncovers the truth about these children. Reporter John Sweeney tracks down the begging gangs to luxury homes in Romania, where he confronts the adults forcing the children to beg.
Factual; Documentaries; Science and Nature
Faster Than The Speed of Light?
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm
Last month an international group of scientists made an astonishing claim - they had detected particles that seemed to travel faster than the speed of light. It was a claim that contradicted more than a hundred years of scientific orthodoxy. Suddenly there was talk of all kinds of bizarre concepts, from time travel to parallel universes.
So what is going on? Has Einstein's famous theory of relativity finally met its match? Will we one day be able to travel into the past or even into another universe?
In this film, Professor Marcus du Sautoy explores one of the most dramatic scientific announcements for a generation. In clear, simple language he tells the story of the science we thought we knew, how it is being challenged, and why it matters.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Discussion and Talk
Friday Night, Saturday Morning
BBC4, 10:30-11:35pm
Talk show, hosted by Tim Rice and featuring a discussion about Monty Python's Life of Brian, which had been banned by local councils and caused protests. Guests are John Cleese, Michael Palin, Malcolm Muggeridge, the bishop of Southwark Arthur Stockwood, Norris McWhirter and Paul Jones & the Blues Band.
_________________________________________________________
Thursday 20th October 2011
Drama
Holy Flying Circus
BBC4, 11:30pm-1:00am
In 1979, Monty Python made Life of Brian and the debate about what is an acceptable subject for comedy was blown wide open. This is a fantastical re-imagining of the build-up to the release of the film and the controversy it caused.
__________________________________________________________
*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.
_________________________________________________________
Monday 17th October
Documentaries; Science; Technology
Brave New World with Stephen Hawking
Channel 4, 8:00-9:00pm, 1/5 - Machines
The team showcase breakthroughs in technology and engineering that are creating a new generation of machines. Mark Evans fuses his brain with a computer in Switzerland to test a new breed of machine.
Kathy Sykes hits the streets of San Francisco to have the ride of her life as she experiences the future of transport in a driverless car. In Italy Jim Alei-Khalili comes face to face with a remarkable, baby-like robot called iCub, which learns like a child.
Joy Reidenberg discovers the extraordinary exoskeleton that can make the paralysed walk and give one man the strength of three. In the Canary Islands Maggie Aderin-Pocock visits one of the world's biggest telescopes, where they're searching for new planets in the furthest reaches of the universe - planets that we could one day colonise.
Documentaries; Factual; Science and Nature
Origins of Us
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3, Bones
Origins of Us tells the story of our species, homo sapiens. In every one of our bodies is the evidence of how we evolved away from our ape cousins to become the adaptable, successful species we are today.
Anatomist and physical anthropologist Dr Alice Roberts reveals the key adaptations in our body that has contributed to our extra-ordinary success. Far from being inevitable, the evolution of our species is a product of pure chance. And with each anatomical advantage comes a cost, which many of us are still paying today. Bad backs, painful childbirth, impacted wisdom teeth are all a by-product of our evolutionary success.
This is a journey through your own body, 6 million years and 300 000 generations of our family, from a tree dwelling ape in the forests of Africa, to you and the six billion other humans on Earth today.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Life Stories
Colouring Light: Brian Clarke - An Artist Apart
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm
Brian Clarke is one of Britain's hidden treasures. A painter of striking large canvases and the designer of some of the most exciting stained glass in the world today, he is better known abroad - especially in Germany and Switzerland - than in his own country, and more widely recognised among critics, collectors and gallery owners than he is by the general public.
In this visually striking documentary portrait made by award-winning filmmaker Mark Kidel, Clarke returns to Lancashire where he grew up as a prodigy in a working-class family and charts his meteoric rise during the punk years and eventual success as a stained glass artist working with some of the world's great architects, including Norman Foster and Arata Isozaki - and producing spectacular work in Japan, Brazil, the USA and Europe.
__________________________________________________________
Tuesday 18th October
Documentaries; Crime and Justice; Factual; Politics
This World: Spain's Stolen Babies
Spain is reeling from an avalanche of allegations of baby theft and baby trafficking. The trade began at the end of the Spanish civil war and continued for 50 years - hundreds of thousands of babies are thought to have been traded by nuns, priests and doctors up to the 1990s. This World reveals the impact of Spain's stolen baby scandal through the eyes of the children and parents who were separated at birth, and who are now desperate to find their relatives.
Exhumations of the supposed graves of babies and positive DNA tests are proof that baby theft has happened. Across Spain, people are queuing up to take a DNA test and thousands of Spaniards are asking 'Who am I?'
Katya Adler has been meeting the heartbroken mothers who are searching for the children whom they were told died at birth, as well as the stolen and trafficked babies who are now grown up and searching for their biological relatives and their true identities.
Factual; Families and Relationships; Health and Wellbeing; Life Stories;
The Kid's Speech
BBC1, 10:35-11:25pm
Moving and uplifting documentary following the stories of three children who live with a stammer. Eleven-year-olds Reggie and William, and 14-year-old Bethan, are determined to improve their speech. Along with their parents, they embark on a unique, intensive course at the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children.
Over two emotional weeks, the kids open up about their fears and frustrations whilst learning techniques to help with their fluency. This is also a significant journey for the parents, who learn more about themselves and their children than they could have imagined.
Michael Palin's father was a severe stammerer, and Michael speaks movingly about the condition and how it affected his family.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Performances and Events
RTS Huw Wheldon Lecture 2011: TV Modern Father of History
BBC2, 11:20pm-12:00am
Bettany Hughes uses the 2011 Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture to argue that history on television is thriving and enjoying a new golden age. She explores why programme makers should look to the ancients for inspiration, how television can become an active player in the historical process itself and why people are looking to the past to help navigate a complex modern world.
__________________________________________________________
Wednesday 19th October 2011
News
Panorama Special: Britain's Child Beggars
BBC1, 9:00-10:00pm
Meet 'Alice'. She is a four-year-old child out on the streets of London begging hours on end, day in, day out. 'Alice' is just one of Britain's Gypsy child beggars, and she can earn hundreds of pounds a day.
A special Panorama investigation uncovers the truth about these children. Reporter John Sweeney tracks down the begging gangs to luxury homes in Romania, where he confronts the adults forcing the children to beg.
Factual; Documentaries; Science and Nature
Faster Than The Speed of Light?
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm
Last month an international group of scientists made an astonishing claim - they had detected particles that seemed to travel faster than the speed of light. It was a claim that contradicted more than a hundred years of scientific orthodoxy. Suddenly there was talk of all kinds of bizarre concepts, from time travel to parallel universes.
So what is going on? Has Einstein's famous theory of relativity finally met its match? Will we one day be able to travel into the past or even into another universe?
In this film, Professor Marcus du Sautoy explores one of the most dramatic scientific announcements for a generation. In clear, simple language he tells the story of the science we thought we knew, how it is being challenged, and why it matters.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Discussion and Talk
Friday Night, Saturday Morning
BBC4, 10:30-11:35pm
Talk show, hosted by Tim Rice and featuring a discussion about Monty Python's Life of Brian, which had been banned by local councils and caused protests. Guests are John Cleese, Michael Palin, Malcolm Muggeridge, the bishop of Southwark Arthur Stockwood, Norris McWhirter and Paul Jones & the Blues Band.
_________________________________________________________
Thursday 20th October 2011
Drama
Holy Flying Circus
BBC4, 11:30pm-1:00am
In 1979, Monty Python made Life of Brian and the debate about what is an acceptable subject for comedy was blown wide open. This is a fantastical re-imagining of the build-up to the release of the film and the controversy it caused.
__________________________________________________________
*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.
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
Off-air recordings for week 8-14 October 2011
Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*
_________________________________________________________
Saturday 8th October
Factual; History; Documentaries
How The World Got Mixed Up
BBC2, 9:45-11:15pm, Mixed Britannia Season
One of the very few universal laws of history is this: whenever and wherever people of different races have been brought together they have always mixed. For most of human history the power of sex managed to undermine the power of race. The incredible level of racial inter-mixing that now characterises life in 21st-century Britain is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, but a return to the traditions of the past.
This film will re-access the meaning of the great historic force that first brought the races together - imperialism. It will tell the surprising and positive story of how, throughout much of history, the races of the world's empires mixed together unquestioningly.
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Sunday 9th October
Factual; History
City Beneath The Waves: Pavlopetri
BBC2, 8:00-9:00pm
Just off the southern coast of mainland Greece lies the oldest submerged city in the world. A city that thrived for 2000 years during the time that saw the birth of Western civilisation. An international team of experts uses the latest technology to investigate the site and digitally raise it from the seabed, to reveal the secrets of Pavlopetri.
Led by underwater archaeologist Dr Jon Henderson, the team use the latest in cutting-edge science and technology to prise age-old secrets from the complex of streets and stone buildings that lie less than five metres below the surface. 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.
Jon Henderson is leading this ground-breaking project in collaboration with a team from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, and Nic Flemming, the man whose hunch led to the intriguing discovery of Pavlopetri in 1967. Also working alongside the archaeologists are a team from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, who aim to take underwater archaeology into the 21st century.
The team scour the sea floor for any artefacts that have eroded from the sands. The site is littered with thousands of fragments, each providing valuable clues to the everyday lives of the people of Pavlopetri. From the buildings to the trade goods to the everyday tableware, every artefact provides a window into a long-forgotten world.
Together these precious relics provide us with a window on a time when Pavlopetri would have been at its height, showing us what life was like in this distant age, and revealing how this city marks the start of Western civilisation.
Factual; Documentary
Road to Memphis
Yesterday, 10:30pm-12:30am
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Monday 10th October
News
Panorama - BNP: The Fraud Exposed
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm
Nick Griffin's British National Party, already under investigation for breaches of electoral law, is facing fresh allegations of corruption. Panorama uncovers new evidence of financial documents being falsified and fabricated in order to deceive the Electoral Commission. The programme also has evidence of the BNP's failure to declare major donations to the party.
As Darragh MacIntyre reports, the BNP, which is better known for its controversial views on race, is in debt and according to its own published accounts appears to be technically insolvent.
Factual; Families and Relationships; Documentaries
Twincredibles
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm
There's only a slim chance that black and white parents will have twins of different skin colour, but as one in ten children born in the UK is now mixed race, this genetic quirk is going to become increasingly common. Twincredibles follows five sets of twins, from toddlers through to adults, to create a surprising and compelling story about the journey of mixed race Britain.
The stories of all these twins throw a new and fascinating light on how brothers and sisters who are similar in so many other ways lead different lives because of their skin colour. The experiences don't always match the stereotype. For teenage boys James and Daniel, growing up in Eltham South East London, it was the whiter looking twin Daniel who suffered racial abuse, whilst darker twin James was left alone.
Travelling through the experiences of each set of twins, the film unpeels the impact this accident of their birth has on how they see themselves and how the outside world views them. Living in diverse locations across England to Scotland, the twins tell their stories in their own words, to paint an honest and sometimes hard-hitting picture of race in modern Britain.
Factual
Exposure: Heart Hospital
ITV1, 10:35-11-35pm
A one-hour documentary for ITV1’s new ‘Exposure’ strand, investigates the worsening crisis in the availability of donor hearts in Britain.
With intimate access to the heart transplant team at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital – one of the largest transplant centres in Europe – this revealing film follows three patients and their families as they find themselves on the long and uncertain road towards a life-saving operation, and provides a rare opportunity to witness complex heart transplant surgery.
The stories of these three men reveal the human impact of the critical shortage of donor hearts. As leading heart surgeon Professor Robert Bonser says: “Living under that shadow of uncertainty is a haunting experience”.
Professor Bonser has led the heart transplant service at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for 21 years, During his career, he's performed more than fifteen thousand heart operations, including 250 heart transplants. He has seen the number of transplants carried out in the UK drop by two thirds to less than 100 each year.
_________________________________________________________
Tuesday 11th October
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
Ceramics: A Fragile History
BBC4, 3:30-4:30pm, 1/3
Ceramics are where art meets function - one of our oldest and most fundamental art forms, that sits at the centre of our homes. The first film in this three-part series looks at a history of domestic pottery in Britain from Tudor times onwards, tracing the evolution of its different techniques and styles, and examining what our pots can tell us in intimate detail how preceeding generations lived and saw themselves.
Whether it's for celebrating birth, marriage and death (our own or royal), eating and drinking or showing the world our social status, ceramics contain more than just our tea or coffee - they contain something of our lives, our social DNA, and reveal a lot about our taste and habits as a nation. They become, in effect, snapshots in clay.
Factual; Health and Wellbeing; Documentaries
Me, My Sex and I
BBC1, 10:35-11:25pm
What is the truth about the sexes? It is a deeply-held assumption that every person is either male or female; but many people are now questioning whether this belief is correct.
This compelling and sensitive documentary unlocks the stories of people born neither entirely male nor female. Conditions like these have been known as 'intersex' and shrouded in unnecessary shame and secrecy for decades. It's estimated that DSDs (Disorders of Sexual Development) are, in fact, as common as twins or red hair - nearly one in 50 of us.
The programme features powerful insights from people living with these conditions, and the medical teams at the forefront of the field, including clinical psychologist Tiger Devore, whose own sex when born was ambiguous.
_________________________________________________________
Wednesday 12th October
Learning; Secondary
Witness: Immigration UK
BBC2, 4:00-5:00pm
The programme uses first person testimony and clips from the BBC archive to examine immigration into the UK since 1948.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
Treasures of Chinese Porcelain
BBC4, 1:00-2:00am
In November 2010, a Chinese vase unearthed in a suburban semi in Pinner sold at auction for £43 million - a new record for a Chinese work of art. Why are Chinese vases so famous and so expensive? The answer lies in the European obsession with Chinese porcelain that began in the 16th century and by the 18th century was a full-blown craze that swept up kings, princes and the emerging middle classes alike.
In this documentary Lars Tharp, the Antiques Roadshow expert and Chinese ceramics specialist, sets out to explore why Chinese porcelain was so valuable then - and still is now. He goes on a journey to parts of China closed to Western eyes until relatively recently. Lars travels to the mountainside from which virtually every single Chinese export vase, plate and cup began life in the 18th century - a mountain known as Mount Gaolin, from whose name we get the word kaolin, or china clay. He sees how the china clay was fused with another substance, mica, that would turn it into porcelain - a secret process concealed from envious Western eyes. For a time porcelain became more valuable than gold - it was a substance so fine, so resonant and so strong that it drove Europeans mad trying to copy it.
Carrying his own newly-acquired vase, Lars uncovers the secrets of China's porcelain capital, Jingdezhen, before embarking on the arduous 400-mile journey to the coast that every piece of export porcelain would once have travelled. He sees how the trade between China and Europe not only changed our idea of what was beautiful - by introducing us to the idea of works of art we could eat off - but also began to affect the whole tradition of Chinese aesthetics too, as the ceramicists of Jingdezhen sought to meet the European demand for porcelain decorated with family coats of arms, battle scenes or even erotica.
The porcelain fever that gripped Britain drove conspicuous consumption and fuelled the Georgian craze for tea parties. Today the new emperors - China's rising millionaire class - are buying back the export wares once shipped to Europe. The vase sold in Pinner shows that the lure of Chinese porcelain is as compelling as ever.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
Britain's Most Fragile Treasure
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm
Historian Dr Janina Ramirez unlocks the secrets of a centuries-old masterpiece in glass. At 78 feet in height, the famous East Window at York Minster is the largest medieval stained-glass window in the country, and it was the creative vision of a single artist - a mysterious master craftsman called John Thornton, one of the earliest named English artists.
The East Window has been called England's Sistine Chapel. Within its 311 stained-glass panels is the entire history of the world, from the first day to the Last Judgment, and yet it was made 100 years before Michelangelo's own masterpiece. The scale of Thornton's achievement is revealed as Dr Ramirez follows the work of a highly-skilled conservation team at York Glaziers Trust. They have dismantled the entire window as part of a five-year project to repair centuries of damage and restore it to its original glory.
It's a unique opportunity for Dr Ramirez to examine Thornton's greatest work at close quarters, to discover details that would normally be impossible to see and to reveal exactly how medieval artists made images of such delicacy and complexity using the simplest of tools.
The East Window of York Minster is far more than a work of artistic genius, it's a window onto the medieval world and the medieval mind - telling us who were once were and who we still are, all preserved in the most fragile medium of all.
________________________________________________________
Friday 14th October
News; Documentaries
Dispatches: Britain's Rubbish
Channel 4, 3:00-4:00pm
Dispatches lifts the lid on Britain's bins and asks what the plan is to tackle the country's growing rubbish problem. Reporter Morland Sanders travels the UK in the wake of the government's Waste Policy Review to find out about bin collections, litter, excessive packaging and Britons' secret bin habits.
He finds householders angry about their bins not being collected every week and fly-tipping setting resident against resident. He asks whether we can do more to help reduce the rubbish problem ourselves and sets a family the challenge of living without a bin for a fortnight. Can they really recycle everything? On the high street, he questions whether we are simply sold too much packaging with the things we buy, making us throw far too much away, and sifts through litter to see who should be doing more to keep Britain tidy.
He also talks to the people who collect, sort and recycle our waste and discovers what happens to our paper and plastics once they are collected. Does profit win out over green considerations? And he investigates whether the waste companies are really solving our rubbish problem.
_________________________________________________________
*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.
_________________________________________________________
Saturday 8th October
Factual; History; Documentaries
How The World Got Mixed Up
BBC2, 9:45-11:15pm, Mixed Britannia Season
One of the very few universal laws of history is this: whenever and wherever people of different races have been brought together they have always mixed. For most of human history the power of sex managed to undermine the power of race. The incredible level of racial inter-mixing that now characterises life in 21st-century Britain is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, but a return to the traditions of the past.
This film will re-access the meaning of the great historic force that first brought the races together - imperialism. It will tell the surprising and positive story of how, throughout much of history, the races of the world's empires mixed together unquestioningly.
_________________________________________________________
Sunday 9th October
Factual; History
City Beneath The Waves: Pavlopetri
BBC2, 8:00-9:00pm
Just off the southern coast of mainland Greece lies the oldest submerged city in the world. A city that thrived for 2000 years during the time that saw the birth of Western civilisation. An international team of experts uses the latest technology to investigate the site and digitally raise it from the seabed, to reveal the secrets of Pavlopetri.
Led by underwater archaeologist Dr Jon Henderson, the team use the latest in cutting-edge science and technology to prise age-old secrets from the complex of streets and stone buildings that lie less than five metres below the surface. 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.
Jon Henderson is leading this ground-breaking project in collaboration with a team from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, and Nic Flemming, the man whose hunch led to the intriguing discovery of Pavlopetri in 1967. Also working alongside the archaeologists are a team from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, who aim to take underwater archaeology into the 21st century.
The team scour the sea floor for any artefacts that have eroded from the sands. The site is littered with thousands of fragments, each providing valuable clues to the everyday lives of the people of Pavlopetri. From the buildings to the trade goods to the everyday tableware, every artefact provides a window into a long-forgotten world.
Together these precious relics provide us with a window on a time when Pavlopetri would have been at its height, showing us what life was like in this distant age, and revealing how this city marks the start of Western civilisation.
Factual; Documentary
Road to Memphis
Yesterday, 10:30pm-12:30am
4th April, 1968: The world mourns the death of the inspirational Martin Luther King. Follow the dramatic timeline of events leading up to his murder and the hunt for his killer.
__________________________________________________________
Monday 10th October
News
Panorama - BNP: The Fraud Exposed
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm
Nick Griffin's British National Party, already under investigation for breaches of electoral law, is facing fresh allegations of corruption. Panorama uncovers new evidence of financial documents being falsified and fabricated in order to deceive the Electoral Commission. The programme also has evidence of the BNP's failure to declare major donations to the party.
As Darragh MacIntyre reports, the BNP, which is better known for its controversial views on race, is in debt and according to its own published accounts appears to be technically insolvent.
Factual; Families and Relationships; Documentaries
Twincredibles
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm
There's only a slim chance that black and white parents will have twins of different skin colour, but as one in ten children born in the UK is now mixed race, this genetic quirk is going to become increasingly common. Twincredibles follows five sets of twins, from toddlers through to adults, to create a surprising and compelling story about the journey of mixed race Britain.
The stories of all these twins throw a new and fascinating light on how brothers and sisters who are similar in so many other ways lead different lives because of their skin colour. The experiences don't always match the stereotype. For teenage boys James and Daniel, growing up in Eltham South East London, it was the whiter looking twin Daniel who suffered racial abuse, whilst darker twin James was left alone.
Travelling through the experiences of each set of twins, the film unpeels the impact this accident of their birth has on how they see themselves and how the outside world views them. Living in diverse locations across England to Scotland, the twins tell their stories in their own words, to paint an honest and sometimes hard-hitting picture of race in modern Britain.
Factual
Exposure: Heart Hospital
ITV1, 10:35-11-35pm
A one-hour documentary for ITV1’s new ‘Exposure’ strand, investigates the worsening crisis in the availability of donor hearts in Britain.
With intimate access to the heart transplant team at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital – one of the largest transplant centres in Europe – this revealing film follows three patients and their families as they find themselves on the long and uncertain road towards a life-saving operation, and provides a rare opportunity to witness complex heart transplant surgery.
The stories of these three men reveal the human impact of the critical shortage of donor hearts. As leading heart surgeon Professor Robert Bonser says: “Living under that shadow of uncertainty is a haunting experience”.
Professor Bonser has led the heart transplant service at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for 21 years, During his career, he's performed more than fifteen thousand heart operations, including 250 heart transplants. He has seen the number of transplants carried out in the UK drop by two thirds to less than 100 each year.
_________________________________________________________
Tuesday 11th October
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
Ceramics: A Fragile History
BBC4, 3:30-4:30pm, 1/3
Ceramics are where art meets function - one of our oldest and most fundamental art forms, that sits at the centre of our homes. The first film in this three-part series looks at a history of domestic pottery in Britain from Tudor times onwards, tracing the evolution of its different techniques and styles, and examining what our pots can tell us in intimate detail how preceeding generations lived and saw themselves.
Whether it's for celebrating birth, marriage and death (our own or royal), eating and drinking or showing the world our social status, ceramics contain more than just our tea or coffee - they contain something of our lives, our social DNA, and reveal a lot about our taste and habits as a nation. They become, in effect, snapshots in clay.
Factual; Health and Wellbeing; Documentaries
Me, My Sex and I
BBC1, 10:35-11:25pm
What is the truth about the sexes? It is a deeply-held assumption that every person is either male or female; but many people are now questioning whether this belief is correct.
This compelling and sensitive documentary unlocks the stories of people born neither entirely male nor female. Conditions like these have been known as 'intersex' and shrouded in unnecessary shame and secrecy for decades. It's estimated that DSDs (Disorders of Sexual Development) are, in fact, as common as twins or red hair - nearly one in 50 of us.
The programme features powerful insights from people living with these conditions, and the medical teams at the forefront of the field, including clinical psychologist Tiger Devore, whose own sex when born was ambiguous.
_________________________________________________________
Wednesday 12th October
Learning; Secondary
Witness: Immigration UK
BBC2, 4:00-5:00pm
The programme uses first person testimony and clips from the BBC archive to examine immigration into the UK since 1948.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
Treasures of Chinese Porcelain
BBC4, 1:00-2:00am
In November 2010, a Chinese vase unearthed in a suburban semi in Pinner sold at auction for £43 million - a new record for a Chinese work of art. Why are Chinese vases so famous and so expensive? The answer lies in the European obsession with Chinese porcelain that began in the 16th century and by the 18th century was a full-blown craze that swept up kings, princes and the emerging middle classes alike.
In this documentary Lars Tharp, the Antiques Roadshow expert and Chinese ceramics specialist, sets out to explore why Chinese porcelain was so valuable then - and still is now. He goes on a journey to parts of China closed to Western eyes until relatively recently. Lars travels to the mountainside from which virtually every single Chinese export vase, plate and cup began life in the 18th century - a mountain known as Mount Gaolin, from whose name we get the word kaolin, or china clay. He sees how the china clay was fused with another substance, mica, that would turn it into porcelain - a secret process concealed from envious Western eyes. For a time porcelain became more valuable than gold - it was a substance so fine, so resonant and so strong that it drove Europeans mad trying to copy it.
Carrying his own newly-acquired vase, Lars uncovers the secrets of China's porcelain capital, Jingdezhen, before embarking on the arduous 400-mile journey to the coast that every piece of export porcelain would once have travelled. He sees how the trade between China and Europe not only changed our idea of what was beautiful - by introducing us to the idea of works of art we could eat off - but also began to affect the whole tradition of Chinese aesthetics too, as the ceramicists of Jingdezhen sought to meet the European demand for porcelain decorated with family coats of arms, battle scenes or even erotica.
The porcelain fever that gripped Britain drove conspicuous consumption and fuelled the Georgian craze for tea parties. Today the new emperors - China's rising millionaire class - are buying back the export wares once shipped to Europe. The vase sold in Pinner shows that the lure of Chinese porcelain is as compelling as ever.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
Britain's Most Fragile Treasure
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm
Historian Dr Janina Ramirez unlocks the secrets of a centuries-old masterpiece in glass. At 78 feet in height, the famous East Window at York Minster is the largest medieval stained-glass window in the country, and it was the creative vision of a single artist - a mysterious master craftsman called John Thornton, one of the earliest named English artists.
The East Window has been called England's Sistine Chapel. Within its 311 stained-glass panels is the entire history of the world, from the first day to the Last Judgment, and yet it was made 100 years before Michelangelo's own masterpiece. The scale of Thornton's achievement is revealed as Dr Ramirez follows the work of a highly-skilled conservation team at York Glaziers Trust. They have dismantled the entire window as part of a five-year project to repair centuries of damage and restore it to its original glory.
It's a unique opportunity for Dr Ramirez to examine Thornton's greatest work at close quarters, to discover details that would normally be impossible to see and to reveal exactly how medieval artists made images of such delicacy and complexity using the simplest of tools.
The East Window of York Minster is far more than a work of artistic genius, it's a window onto the medieval world and the medieval mind - telling us who were once were and who we still are, all preserved in the most fragile medium of all.
________________________________________________________
Friday 14th October
News; Documentaries
Dispatches: Britain's Rubbish
Channel 4, 3:00-4:00pm
Dispatches lifts the lid on Britain's bins and asks what the plan is to tackle the country's growing rubbish problem. Reporter Morland Sanders travels the UK in the wake of the government's Waste Policy Review to find out about bin collections, litter, excessive packaging and Britons' secret bin habits.
He finds householders angry about their bins not being collected every week and fly-tipping setting resident against resident. He asks whether we can do more to help reduce the rubbish problem ourselves and sets a family the challenge of living without a bin for a fortnight. Can they really recycle everything? On the high street, he questions whether we are simply sold too much packaging with the things we buy, making us throw far too much away, and sifts through litter to see who should be doing more to keep Britain tidy.
He also talks to the people who collect, sort and recycle our waste and discovers what happens to our paper and plastics once they are collected. Does profit win out over green considerations? And he investigates whether the waste companies are really solving our rubbish problem.
_________________________________________________________
*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.
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Off-air recordings for week 1-7 October 2011
Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*
__________________________________________________________
Saturday 1st October
Factual; History; Politics
Frost on Nixon
BBC2, 7:00-9:00pm
Joan Bakewell talks to Sir David Frost about his landmark interviews with former United States president Richard Nixon. The Nixon Interviews, first broadcast in 1977, gained record audiences and the high drama which surrounded them later became the subject of both a West End play and an Oscar-nominated film, Frost Nixon.
Sir David tells Joan Bakewell about the fight to secure the interview and the struggle to raise the money to make it. He also recalls the negotiations with Hollywood super-agent Swifty Lazar, who Nixon had retained to represent him, the intense discussions with Nixon's own team of advisers, and trying to come to terms with the hugely complicated personality of Richard Nixon himself.
At times the contest between the two men verged on gladiatorial, at others Frost almost seemed to be Nixon's confessor. It ended with Nixon's momentous apology to the American people.
Drama; Political
Frost/Nixon
BBC2, 9:45-11:40pm
The story behind one of the most unforgettable moments in TV history. When disgraced President Richard Nixon agreed to an interview with jet-setting television personality David Frost, he thought he had found the key to saving his tarnished legacy. But, with a name to make and a reputation to overcome, Frost became one of Nixon's most formidable adversaries and engaged the leader in a charged battle of wits that changed the face of politics.
_______________________________________________________
Sunday 2nd October
Documentary; Languages
Fry's Planet Word
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/5 Identity
What is it that defines us? Stephen argues that above all, it is the way we speak. Be it a national language, a regional dialect or even class variation - we interpret and define ourselves through our language.
From markets in Kenya to call centres in Newcastle, Stephen charts the shifting patterns of lingua franca and the inexorable spread of Globish (Global English). As many of the world's more than 6000 languages are threatened with linguicide, Stephen seeks out examples of this rise and fall. In Ireland he learns how TV soaps are keeping Irish alive, whilst in Southern France, Provencal and other Oc languages are struggling to survive after 200 years of suppression by Parisian orthodoxy and the heavy hand of the Academie Francaise.
But even amidst the imminent death of some, other languages like Basque survive, whilst Hebrew in Israel is reborn. Variety is the spice and in Bradford poet Ian McMillan teaches Stephen the subtle variations of dialect, whilst in Norwich Stephen finds his ultimate sense of identity in the chants of his beloved Canaries, Norwich City F.C.
Documentary
Stonewall Uprising
Yesterday, 10:00pm-12:00am
Relive the New York homosexual community's spontaneous stand against the police in 1969, a defining event in the gay rights moment that helped put an end to shocking persecution.
__________________________________________________________
Monday 3rd October
Documentary
Dispatches: Can You Trust Your Doctor?
Channel 4, 8:00-9:00pm
GPs are among the most trusted and respected of all professions. They are our first port of call for most NHS treatment with 800,000 people visiting surgeries every day. But Dispatches reveals that failing doctors routinely slip through the system.
We've been filming secretly in GP practices and have uncovered concerning evidence of misdiagnosis by doctors who have failed in the past, but are still practising.
Reporter Jon Snow reveals that, six years after The Shipman Inquiry called for increased scrutiny of doctors, GPs who've been sanctioned by the authorities in the past are not regularly checked to make sure they are safe to practice. Even GPs who've been punished by the authorities in the past are not regularly checked to make sure they are safe to practice.
Jon Snow also speaks to a whistleblowing doctor and nurse who reveal that even when the authorities have serious concerns about a doctor's fitness to practice they don't always act promptly to alert all patients. They allege they have been barred from telling patients the truth about serious malpractice at a surgery they worked at.
As the government prepares to hand over more control and responsibility to Britain's GPs Dispatches asks how much we are really told about the medical competence of our own doctors.
__________________________________________________________
Tuesday 4th October
Factual; Arts; Culture and the Media; Documentaries
Hidden Paintings of the South East
BBC4, 7:30-8:00pm
Interior designer Kathryn Rayward uncovers the hidden art of the Bloomsbury Set in Sussex, where a long-hidden painting of a lady in a red dress sheds light on the tangled love lives of novelist Virginia Woolf, painter Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. She follows the trail of Bloomsbury's artistic legacy to the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery to unearth more hidden art, and visits the stunning murals at Berwick church and goes behind-the-scenes at Towner in Eastbourne.
Factual; Health and Wellbeing; Science and Technology; Science and Nature; Life Stories; Documentaries
Transplant
BBC1, 10:35-11:35pm
For the first time on UK television, Transplant shows the extraordinary reality of multiple organ donation, following the organs from a single donor to the different recipients. The film shows the surgeries and the human stories on both sides, as both donor and recipients have agreed to waive the normal anonymity that exists between them.
Transplant follows the complex process of donation coordinated by the organ donor organisation, NHS Blood and Transplant, from the very beginning when a potential donor is declared brain dead and their organs are retrieved through to the transplant surgeries and recovery of the patients who've benefited from the donor's organs.
Factual; Life Stories; Documentaries
Alex: A Life Fast Forward
11:35pm-12:35am
Alex Lewis knows he does not have much longer to live. Aged 21 he finds himself falling hopelessly in love and can't quite believe what's happening.
Alex was first diagnosed with bone cancer shortly before his 18th birthday. After over three years of intensive treatment, he realises he is running out of options. He decides to cram as much life as possible into the time he has left. His remarkable zest for life is contagious.
On the first day of filming in June, 2010 his only sadness is not being able to commit to a long-term relationship. That evening he goes to a party in Swansea, kisses a girl, falls in love and within weeks they are inseparable. In September Alex and Ali become engaged to be married. This is a story of the power of love, as a young man confronts his mortality in the most emotionally charged circumstances imaginable.
__________________________________________________________
Wednesday 5th October
Drama; Classic and Period
Wide Sargasso Sea
BBC4, 9:00-10:25pm
Dramatisation of Jean Rhys's novel set in 19th-century Jamaica. The tragic story of the first Mrs Rochester from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre centres on an arranged marriage between a white Creole heiress and a brooding Englishman, who fall in love only to be torn apart by rumours, paranoia and a cultural divide.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
The Real Jane Austen
BBC4, 10:25-11:20pm
Drama-documentary exploring the life of Jane Austen. Actor Anna Chancellor, a distant relative of Jane Austen, discovers the woman behind the acclaimed novels through readings and reconstructions. Location shots of her homes in Steventon and Chawton and extracts from adaptations of her work are also featured.
__________________________________________________________
Thursday 6th October
Factual; Science and Technology; Science and Nature
Horizon: Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?
BBC4, 8:00-9:00pm
There's something very odd going on in space - something that shouldn't be possible. It is as though vast swathes of the universe are being hoovered up by a vast and unseen celestial vacuum cleaner.
Sasha Kaslinsky, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon, is understandably nervous: 'It left us quite unsettled and jittery' he says, 'because this is not something we planned to find'. The accidental discovery of what is ominously being called 'dark flow' not only has implications for the destinies of large numbers of galaxies - it also means that large numbers of scientists might have to find a new way of understanding the universe.
Dark flow is the latest in a long line of phenomena that have threatened to re-write the textbooks. Does it herald a new era of understanding, or does it simply mean that everything we know about the universe is wrong?
News; Factual and Arts
Mixed Race Britannia
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3, 1910-1939
In this three-part series George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain's mixed-race community and examines through the decades how mixed race has become one of the country's fastest growing ethnic groups. Most of all, the films tell a tale of love, of couples coming together to fight prejudice and create a new society.
The first film (1910-1939) discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers and witnesses the riots in British port cities as returning white soldiers find local girls in relationships with other men. George hears about the eugenics research examining mixed-race children and learns how Britain avoided the race laws and race hatred of fascism that scarred other countries in Europe.
The second film (1940-1965) sees the Second World War creating a miniature baby boom of “brown babies” born to local British women and African American GIs, and tells the tragic story of the British-Chinese children in Liverpool who lost their Chinese seamen fathers. With the post-war mass immigration, mixed couples, once rare and exotic, were becoming more common and society finally witnessed the first interracial kiss on British television.
In the Seventies a new wave of immigration was settling in Britain, the National Front was on the march and mixed-race families faced violence on the street (film three, 1965-2011). George learns about the debates surrounding mixed race adoption and hears about a 21st story love-story as the couple struggle to overcome the cultural prejudice from the community.
_________________________________________________________
Friday 7th October
Documentary; News; Current Affairs
Unreported World
Channel 4, 7:30-7:55pm, 1/10, Trouble in the Townships
New Unreported World reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy visits South Africa. Seventeen years after it was freed from apartheid, he finds a country in which violent protests against corruption and the lack of basic services mean its ambition to lead the continent as a prosperous democracy hangs in the balance.
Simmering with anger, South Africa's people tell Krishnan they feel a sense of betrayal they will tolerate no longer.
Johannesburg is the centre of Africa's biggest economy but is also the heart of a country where the poorest people are often robbed by corrupt officials, while the most powerful stand accused of creaming off astonishing wealth.
There are 182 squatter camps in Johannesburg. Guru-Murthy and producer Alex Nott visit one of the biggest and most dangerous - Diepsloot, which is home to 200,000 people.
Journalist Golden shows them shocking reports of the mob justice that rules here. He says that the residents of Diepsloot fear for their lives every night they go to sleep, as the police seem powerless, or unwilling, to address the horrendous levels of crime.
Guru-Murthy talks to Philippine, who lives in a shack but says she should by now be living in a state-subsidised house. She says she has the papers and the keys but when she went to move in five years ago, she found another family there.
She suspects that a local official has corruptly sold the home that had already been assigned to her, but she has got nowhere with the authorities since then.
The team hears about one local official helping people jump the housing queue for bribes. Posing as a desperate father looking for help getting his family out of a squatter camp, Golden rings Albert Setwyewye, a former ANC councillor now working for local government. He is told to meet Albert at a nearby shopping mall, and bring some money.
__________________________________________________________
*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.
__________________________________________________________
Saturday 1st October
Factual; History; Politics
Frost on Nixon
BBC2, 7:00-9:00pm
Joan Bakewell talks to Sir David Frost about his landmark interviews with former United States president Richard Nixon. The Nixon Interviews, first broadcast in 1977, gained record audiences and the high drama which surrounded them later became the subject of both a West End play and an Oscar-nominated film, Frost Nixon.
Sir David tells Joan Bakewell about the fight to secure the interview and the struggle to raise the money to make it. He also recalls the negotiations with Hollywood super-agent Swifty Lazar, who Nixon had retained to represent him, the intense discussions with Nixon's own team of advisers, and trying to come to terms with the hugely complicated personality of Richard Nixon himself.
At times the contest between the two men verged on gladiatorial, at others Frost almost seemed to be Nixon's confessor. It ended with Nixon's momentous apology to the American people.
Drama; Political
Frost/Nixon
BBC2, 9:45-11:40pm
The story behind one of the most unforgettable moments in TV history. When disgraced President Richard Nixon agreed to an interview with jet-setting television personality David Frost, he thought he had found the key to saving his tarnished legacy. But, with a name to make and a reputation to overcome, Frost became one of Nixon's most formidable adversaries and engaged the leader in a charged battle of wits that changed the face of politics.
_______________________________________________________
Sunday 2nd October
Documentary; Languages
Fry's Planet Word
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/5 Identity
What is it that defines us? Stephen argues that above all, it is the way we speak. Be it a national language, a regional dialect or even class variation - we interpret and define ourselves through our language.
From markets in Kenya to call centres in Newcastle, Stephen charts the shifting patterns of lingua franca and the inexorable spread of Globish (Global English). As many of the world's more than 6000 languages are threatened with linguicide, Stephen seeks out examples of this rise and fall. In Ireland he learns how TV soaps are keeping Irish alive, whilst in Southern France, Provencal and other Oc languages are struggling to survive after 200 years of suppression by Parisian orthodoxy and the heavy hand of the Academie Francaise.
But even amidst the imminent death of some, other languages like Basque survive, whilst Hebrew in Israel is reborn. Variety is the spice and in Bradford poet Ian McMillan teaches Stephen the subtle variations of dialect, whilst in Norwich Stephen finds his ultimate sense of identity in the chants of his beloved Canaries, Norwich City F.C.
Documentary
Stonewall Uprising
Yesterday, 10:00pm-12:00am
Relive the New York homosexual community's spontaneous stand against the police in 1969, a defining event in the gay rights moment that helped put an end to shocking persecution.
__________________________________________________________
Monday 3rd October
Documentary
Dispatches: Can You Trust Your Doctor?
Channel 4, 8:00-9:00pm
GPs are among the most trusted and respected of all professions. They are our first port of call for most NHS treatment with 800,000 people visiting surgeries every day. But Dispatches reveals that failing doctors routinely slip through the system.
We've been filming secretly in GP practices and have uncovered concerning evidence of misdiagnosis by doctors who have failed in the past, but are still practising.
Reporter Jon Snow reveals that, six years after The Shipman Inquiry called for increased scrutiny of doctors, GPs who've been sanctioned by the authorities in the past are not regularly checked to make sure they are safe to practice. Even GPs who've been punished by the authorities in the past are not regularly checked to make sure they are safe to practice.
Jon Snow also speaks to a whistleblowing doctor and nurse who reveal that even when the authorities have serious concerns about a doctor's fitness to practice they don't always act promptly to alert all patients. They allege they have been barred from telling patients the truth about serious malpractice at a surgery they worked at.
As the government prepares to hand over more control and responsibility to Britain's GPs Dispatches asks how much we are really told about the medical competence of our own doctors.
__________________________________________________________
Tuesday 4th October
Factual; Arts; Culture and the Media; Documentaries
Hidden Paintings of the South East
BBC4, 7:30-8:00pm
Interior designer Kathryn Rayward uncovers the hidden art of the Bloomsbury Set in Sussex, where a long-hidden painting of a lady in a red dress sheds light on the tangled love lives of novelist Virginia Woolf, painter Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. She follows the trail of Bloomsbury's artistic legacy to the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery to unearth more hidden art, and visits the stunning murals at Berwick church and goes behind-the-scenes at Towner in Eastbourne.
Factual; Health and Wellbeing; Science and Technology; Science and Nature; Life Stories; Documentaries
Transplant
BBC1, 10:35-11:35pm
For the first time on UK television, Transplant shows the extraordinary reality of multiple organ donation, following the organs from a single donor to the different recipients. The film shows the surgeries and the human stories on both sides, as both donor and recipients have agreed to waive the normal anonymity that exists between them.
Transplant follows the complex process of donation coordinated by the organ donor organisation, NHS Blood and Transplant, from the very beginning when a potential donor is declared brain dead and their organs are retrieved through to the transplant surgeries and recovery of the patients who've benefited from the donor's organs.
Factual; Life Stories; Documentaries
Alex: A Life Fast Forward
11:35pm-12:35am
Alex Lewis knows he does not have much longer to live. Aged 21 he finds himself falling hopelessly in love and can't quite believe what's happening.
Alex was first diagnosed with bone cancer shortly before his 18th birthday. After over three years of intensive treatment, he realises he is running out of options. He decides to cram as much life as possible into the time he has left. His remarkable zest for life is contagious.
On the first day of filming in June, 2010 his only sadness is not being able to commit to a long-term relationship. That evening he goes to a party in Swansea, kisses a girl, falls in love and within weeks they are inseparable. In September Alex and Ali become engaged to be married. This is a story of the power of love, as a young man confronts his mortality in the most emotionally charged circumstances imaginable.
__________________________________________________________
Wednesday 5th October
Drama; Classic and Period
Wide Sargasso Sea
BBC4, 9:00-10:25pm
Dramatisation of Jean Rhys's novel set in 19th-century Jamaica. The tragic story of the first Mrs Rochester from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre centres on an arranged marriage between a white Creole heiress and a brooding Englishman, who fall in love only to be torn apart by rumours, paranoia and a cultural divide.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
The Real Jane Austen
BBC4, 10:25-11:20pm
Drama-documentary exploring the life of Jane Austen. Actor Anna Chancellor, a distant relative of Jane Austen, discovers the woman behind the acclaimed novels through readings and reconstructions. Location shots of her homes in Steventon and Chawton and extracts from adaptations of her work are also featured.
__________________________________________________________
Thursday 6th October
Factual; Science and Technology; Science and Nature
Horizon: Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?
BBC4, 8:00-9:00pm
There's something very odd going on in space - something that shouldn't be possible. It is as though vast swathes of the universe are being hoovered up by a vast and unseen celestial vacuum cleaner.
Sasha Kaslinsky, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon, is understandably nervous: 'It left us quite unsettled and jittery' he says, 'because this is not something we planned to find'. The accidental discovery of what is ominously being called 'dark flow' not only has implications for the destinies of large numbers of galaxies - it also means that large numbers of scientists might have to find a new way of understanding the universe.
Dark flow is the latest in a long line of phenomena that have threatened to re-write the textbooks. Does it herald a new era of understanding, or does it simply mean that everything we know about the universe is wrong?
News; Factual and Arts
Mixed Race Britannia
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/3, 1910-1939
In this three-part series George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain's mixed-race community and examines through the decades how mixed race has become one of the country's fastest growing ethnic groups. Most of all, the films tell a tale of love, of couples coming together to fight prejudice and create a new society.
The first film (1910-1939) discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers and witnesses the riots in British port cities as returning white soldiers find local girls in relationships with other men. George hears about the eugenics research examining mixed-race children and learns how Britain avoided the race laws and race hatred of fascism that scarred other countries in Europe.
The second film (1940-1965) sees the Second World War creating a miniature baby boom of “brown babies” born to local British women and African American GIs, and tells the tragic story of the British-Chinese children in Liverpool who lost their Chinese seamen fathers. With the post-war mass immigration, mixed couples, once rare and exotic, were becoming more common and society finally witnessed the first interracial kiss on British television.
In the Seventies a new wave of immigration was settling in Britain, the National Front was on the march and mixed-race families faced violence on the street (film three, 1965-2011). George learns about the debates surrounding mixed race adoption and hears about a 21st story love-story as the couple struggle to overcome the cultural prejudice from the community.
_________________________________________________________
Friday 7th October
Documentary; News; Current Affairs
Unreported World
Channel 4, 7:30-7:55pm, 1/10, Trouble in the Townships
New Unreported World reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy visits South Africa. Seventeen years after it was freed from apartheid, he finds a country in which violent protests against corruption and the lack of basic services mean its ambition to lead the continent as a prosperous democracy hangs in the balance.
Simmering with anger, South Africa's people tell Krishnan they feel a sense of betrayal they will tolerate no longer.
Johannesburg is the centre of Africa's biggest economy but is also the heart of a country where the poorest people are often robbed by corrupt officials, while the most powerful stand accused of creaming off astonishing wealth.
There are 182 squatter camps in Johannesburg. Guru-Murthy and producer Alex Nott visit one of the biggest and most dangerous - Diepsloot, which is home to 200,000 people.
Journalist Golden shows them shocking reports of the mob justice that rules here. He says that the residents of Diepsloot fear for their lives every night they go to sleep, as the police seem powerless, or unwilling, to address the horrendous levels of crime.
Guru-Murthy talks to Philippine, who lives in a shack but says she should by now be living in a state-subsidised house. She says she has the papers and the keys but when she went to move in five years ago, she found another family there.
She suspects that a local official has corruptly sold the home that had already been assigned to her, but she has got nowhere with the authorities since then.
The team hears about one local official helping people jump the housing queue for bribes. Posing as a desperate father looking for help getting his family out of a squatter camp, Golden rings Albert Setwyewye, a former ANC councillor now working for local government. He is told to meet Albert at a nearby shopping mall, and bring some money.
__________________________________________________________
*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.
Wednesday, 21 September 2011
Off-air recordings for week 24-30 September 2011
Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*
_________________________________________________________
Sunday 25th September
Factual
Fry's Planet Word
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/5, Babel
Stephen Fry explores linguistic achievements and how our skills for the spoken word have developed in a new five-part series for BBC Two.
In Planet Word, Stephen dissects language in all its guises with his inimitable mixture of learning, love of lexicon and humour. He analyses how we use and abuse language and asks whether we are near to beginning to understand the complexities of its DNA.
From the time when man first mastered speech to the cyber world of modern times with its html codes and texting, Planet Word takes viewers on a journey across the globe to discover just how far humans have come when it comes to the written and spoken word.
Factual
Brighton Bomb
More 4, 10:00-11:00pm
On 12 October 1984, the IRA carried out the most audacious terrorist attack in its history. At 2:53am, a huge explosion ripped through the front of Brighton's Grand Hotel, in an effort to kill Margaret Thatcher and decapitate her administration. It was the first attempt to wipe out an entire government in Britain since the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. The programme features interviews with the victims of the bomb, those charged with the rescue effort, the aides who were with Mrs Thatcher on that fateful night, and a former member of the IRA. What emerges is the terrifying real tale of a historic event, including a dramatic assessment of just how close the IRA came to achieving their primary aim: the assassination of the Prime Minister.
__________________________________________________________
Monday 26th September
News
Panorama - Syria: Inside The Secret Revolution
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm
After Libya, will Syria be the next Arab dictatorship to fall to people power? For months, a popular uprising has been fighting an unseen and bloody battle against the Syrian regime. Panorama has been filming inside Syria, and can now tell the full story of those struggling against President Assad and the truth about his brutal crackdown against his own people.
Factual
Exposure: Gadaffi and the IRA
ITV1, 10:35-11:35pm
Colonel Gadaffi gave the IRA enough weapons to turn a militia into an army. Exposure’s first film examines his support for the Republican terrorists and investigates the continuing danger of his legacy.
________________________________________________________
Tuesday 27th September
Religion and Ethics; Documentaries
What's the Point of Religion?
BBC1, 11:15-11:45pm
For his New Year Rosh Hashanah message the Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, puts the case for religion as a vital antidote to what he sees as a crisis in British society.
He focuses on three key parts of British life - family, community and communication between generations - examining the breakdown of each and offering an alternative way forward through religious values and concrete examples within the Jewish community of how society is working and can work.
To debate his case he is joined by two eminent intellectuals: Harvard sociologist, Professor Robert Putnam who, over a period of 25 years, has compiled statistics from over half a million interviews in the US about the state of modern society; and Labour life peer, Maurice Glasman, who is at the forefront of the current political thinking on the Big Society idea.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
Hidden Paintings of the East
BBC4, 7:30-8:00pm
Meera Syal searches for the hidden paintings which reveal the extraordinary story of a Norfolk Prince. At the heart of the film is the story of Frederick Duleep Singh, son of the Last Maharaja of the Punjab. Despite being disinherited by the British Establishment, he spent his life trying to become one of them. The story unfolds through an extraordinary collection of paintings that he bought - bargain hunt style - from the landed gentry, and then donated to the nation.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
Teenage Kicks: The Search for Sophistication
BBC4, 11:30pm-12:30am
The teenage search for sophistication is recalled in this bittersweet film about the people we were and the luxury items we thought would give us the keys to the kingdom.
_________________________________________________________
Wednesday 28th September
Factual; Documentaries
Village SOS
BBC1, 1:30-2:30am, 1/6, Talgarth
Sarah Beeny follows a passionate group of locals as they spend a year trying to rescue their community. When the residents of Talgarth near Brecon applied for a grant from the BIG Lottery fund to renovate a derelict mill, they had no idea what was in store. The mill last ground corn in 1946, but can a bunch of volunteers really turn its fortunes around?
Factual; Science and Nature
Planet Dinosaur
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm, 3/6, Last Killers
By the end of the cretaceous period - 75 millions years ago - these gigantic and specialised hunter-killers had spread throughout the globe. In the southern continents it was the powerful and muscular abelisaurids that reigned supreme but it was the famous tyrannosaurids (or tyrant dinosaurs) that dominated in the north.
Whilst the Northern Daspletosaurus hunted in gangs, using its highly developed smell and hearing to take down opponents like the horned rhino-sized beast, Chasmosaurus, in the Southern hemisphere the small skulled Majungasaurus reigned. And though the sharp toothed Majungasaurus was an efficient killer of the much smaller feathered Rahonavis, that did not stop it from occasionally turning cannibal and hunting its own.
Documentaries
True Stories: Up In Smoke
More4, 10:00-11:00pm
Slash-and-burn farming generates more carbon emissions than all air and road travel combined. It's one of the biggest contributors to deforestation and global warming.
British scientist Mike Hands thinks he has a sustainable alternative for farming in equatorial rainforests. It's taken him 25 years to develop. But can impoverished farmers afford to risk adopting a new farming method, and can Mike convince governments and agencies to back his plans?
Filmed over four years, with Mike and Honduran farmers Faustino and Aladino, Up in Smoke addresses one of the most urgent issues facing humanity.
__________________________________________________________
Thursday 29th September
Factual; Documentaries
Village SOS
BBC1, 3:00-4:00am, 2/6, Honeystreet
Sarah Beeny follows a passionate group of locals as they spend a year trying to rescue their community. When the residents of Honeystreet in Wiltshire applied for a grant from the Big Lottery Fund to renovate their local pub, they had no idea what was in store. With pubs in Britain closing every week, the volunteers must first transform the pub's reputation. But will they really succeed where countless others have failed?
Documentary
Timeshift: Dealer Censor
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm
Documentary lifting the lid on the world of cinema censorship, examining the work of the British Board of Film Classification. With unique access to the files of the BBFC, the programme features explicit and detailed exchanges between the censor and film-makers, and casts a wry eye over some of the most infamous cases in the history of the board. From the now-seemingly innocuous Rebel Without a Cause, through the first 'naturist' films and the infamous works of Ken Russell, up to Rambo III, the programme details how a body created by the industry to safeguard standards and reflect shifts in public opinion has also worked unexpectedly closely with the film-makers themselves to ensure their work reaches an audience.
__________________________________________________________
Friday 30th September
News; Current Affairs and Politics
Dispatches: The Wonderful World of Tony Blair
Channel 4, 2:50-3:45am
Since resigning in June 2007 Tony Blair has financially enriched himself more than any ex-Prime Minister ever. Reporter Peter Oborne reveals some of the sources of his new-found wealth, much of which comes from the Middle East.
On the day Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister, he was appointed the official representative Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East. By January 2009 he had set up Tony Blair Associates - his international consultancy - which handles multi-million-pound contracts in the Middle East. It is so secretive we don't know all the locations in which they do business.
Dispatches shows that at the same time as Blair is visiting Middle East leaders in his Quartet role he is receiving vast sums from some of them. If Blair represented the UK government, the EU, the IMF, the UN or the World Bank, this would not be permitted.
He would also have to declare his financial interests and be absolutely transparent about his financial dealings. But no such stringent rules govern the Quartet envoy.
However, he could opt to abide by the rules and principles of public life. They were introduced by John Major, and Tony Blair endorsed and strengthened them for all holders of public office - but chooses not to himself.
_________________________________________________________
*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 25th September
Factual
Fry's Planet Word
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 1/5, Babel
Stephen Fry explores linguistic achievements and how our skills for the spoken word have developed in a new five-part series for BBC Two.
In Planet Word, Stephen dissects language in all its guises with his inimitable mixture of learning, love of lexicon and humour. He analyses how we use and abuse language and asks whether we are near to beginning to understand the complexities of its DNA.
From the time when man first mastered speech to the cyber world of modern times with its html codes and texting, Planet Word takes viewers on a journey across the globe to discover just how far humans have come when it comes to the written and spoken word.
Factual
Brighton Bomb
More 4, 10:00-11:00pm
On 12 October 1984, the IRA carried out the most audacious terrorist attack in its history. At 2:53am, a huge explosion ripped through the front of Brighton's Grand Hotel, in an effort to kill Margaret Thatcher and decapitate her administration. It was the first attempt to wipe out an entire government in Britain since the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. The programme features interviews with the victims of the bomb, those charged with the rescue effort, the aides who were with Mrs Thatcher on that fateful night, and a former member of the IRA. What emerges is the terrifying real tale of a historic event, including a dramatic assessment of just how close the IRA came to achieving their primary aim: the assassination of the Prime Minister.
__________________________________________________________
Monday 26th September
News
Panorama - Syria: Inside The Secret Revolution
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm
After Libya, will Syria be the next Arab dictatorship to fall to people power? For months, a popular uprising has been fighting an unseen and bloody battle against the Syrian regime. Panorama has been filming inside Syria, and can now tell the full story of those struggling against President Assad and the truth about his brutal crackdown against his own people.
Factual
Exposure: Gadaffi and the IRA
ITV1, 10:35-11:35pm
Colonel Gadaffi gave the IRA enough weapons to turn a militia into an army. Exposure’s first film examines his support for the Republican terrorists and investigates the continuing danger of his legacy.
________________________________________________________
Tuesday 27th September
Religion and Ethics; Documentaries
What's the Point of Religion?
BBC1, 11:15-11:45pm
For his New Year Rosh Hashanah message the Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, puts the case for religion as a vital antidote to what he sees as a crisis in British society.
He focuses on three key parts of British life - family, community and communication between generations - examining the breakdown of each and offering an alternative way forward through religious values and concrete examples within the Jewish community of how society is working and can work.
To debate his case he is joined by two eminent intellectuals: Harvard sociologist, Professor Robert Putnam who, over a period of 25 years, has compiled statistics from over half a million interviews in the US about the state of modern society; and Labour life peer, Maurice Glasman, who is at the forefront of the current political thinking on the Big Society idea.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
Hidden Paintings of the East
BBC4, 7:30-8:00pm
Meera Syal searches for the hidden paintings which reveal the extraordinary story of a Norfolk Prince. At the heart of the film is the story of Frederick Duleep Singh, son of the Last Maharaja of the Punjab. Despite being disinherited by the British Establishment, he spent his life trying to become one of them. The story unfolds through an extraordinary collection of paintings that he bought - bargain hunt style - from the landed gentry, and then donated to the nation.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
Teenage Kicks: The Search for Sophistication
BBC4, 11:30pm-12:30am
The teenage search for sophistication is recalled in this bittersweet film about the people we were and the luxury items we thought would give us the keys to the kingdom.
_________________________________________________________
Wednesday 28th September
Factual; Documentaries
Village SOS
BBC1, 1:30-2:30am, 1/6, Talgarth
Sarah Beeny follows a passionate group of locals as they spend a year trying to rescue their community. When the residents of Talgarth near Brecon applied for a grant from the BIG Lottery fund to renovate a derelict mill, they had no idea what was in store. The mill last ground corn in 1946, but can a bunch of volunteers really turn its fortunes around?
Factual; Science and Nature
Planet Dinosaur
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm, 3/6, Last Killers
By the end of the cretaceous period - 75 millions years ago - these gigantic and specialised hunter-killers had spread throughout the globe. In the southern continents it was the powerful and muscular abelisaurids that reigned supreme but it was the famous tyrannosaurids (or tyrant dinosaurs) that dominated in the north.
Whilst the Northern Daspletosaurus hunted in gangs, using its highly developed smell and hearing to take down opponents like the horned rhino-sized beast, Chasmosaurus, in the Southern hemisphere the small skulled Majungasaurus reigned. And though the sharp toothed Majungasaurus was an efficient killer of the much smaller feathered Rahonavis, that did not stop it from occasionally turning cannibal and hunting its own.
Documentaries
True Stories: Up In Smoke
More4, 10:00-11:00pm
Slash-and-burn farming generates more carbon emissions than all air and road travel combined. It's one of the biggest contributors to deforestation and global warming.
British scientist Mike Hands thinks he has a sustainable alternative for farming in equatorial rainforests. It's taken him 25 years to develop. But can impoverished farmers afford to risk adopting a new farming method, and can Mike convince governments and agencies to back his plans?
Filmed over four years, with Mike and Honduran farmers Faustino and Aladino, Up in Smoke addresses one of the most urgent issues facing humanity.
__________________________________________________________
Thursday 29th September
Factual; Documentaries
Village SOS
BBC1, 3:00-4:00am, 2/6, Honeystreet
Sarah Beeny follows a passionate group of locals as they spend a year trying to rescue their community. When the residents of Honeystreet in Wiltshire applied for a grant from the Big Lottery Fund to renovate their local pub, they had no idea what was in store. With pubs in Britain closing every week, the volunteers must first transform the pub's reputation. But will they really succeed where countless others have failed?
Documentary
Timeshift: Dealer Censor
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm
Documentary lifting the lid on the world of cinema censorship, examining the work of the British Board of Film Classification. With unique access to the files of the BBFC, the programme features explicit and detailed exchanges between the censor and film-makers, and casts a wry eye over some of the most infamous cases in the history of the board. From the now-seemingly innocuous Rebel Without a Cause, through the first 'naturist' films and the infamous works of Ken Russell, up to Rambo III, the programme details how a body created by the industry to safeguard standards and reflect shifts in public opinion has also worked unexpectedly closely with the film-makers themselves to ensure their work reaches an audience.
__________________________________________________________
Friday 30th September
News; Current Affairs and Politics
Dispatches: The Wonderful World of Tony Blair
Channel 4, 2:50-3:45am
Since resigning in June 2007 Tony Blair has financially enriched himself more than any ex-Prime Minister ever. Reporter Peter Oborne reveals some of the sources of his new-found wealth, much of which comes from the Middle East.
On the day Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister, he was appointed the official representative Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East. By January 2009 he had set up Tony Blair Associates - his international consultancy - which handles multi-million-pound contracts in the Middle East. It is so secretive we don't know all the locations in which they do business.
Dispatches shows that at the same time as Blair is visiting Middle East leaders in his Quartet role he is receiving vast sums from some of them. If Blair represented the UK government, the EU, the IMF, the UN or the World Bank, this would not be permitted.
He would also have to declare his financial interests and be absolutely transparent about his financial dealings. But no such stringent rules govern the Quartet envoy.
However, he could opt to abide by the rules and principles of public life. They were introduced by John Major, and Tony Blair endorsed and strengthened them for all holders of public office - but chooses not to himself.
_________________________________________________________
*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.
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Off-air recordings for week 17-23 September 2011
Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*
___________________________________________________________
Saturday 17th September
Documentaries
The Story of Film: An Odyssey
More 4, 9:00-10:25pm, 3/15
The 1920s were a golden age for world cinema. The programme visits Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo to explore the places where movie makers were pushing the boundaries of the medium.
German expressionism, Soviet montage and French impressionism and surrealism were passionate new film movements, but less well known are the glories of Chinese and Japanese films and the moving story of one of the great, now largely forgotten, movie stars, Ruan Lingyu.
________________________________________________________
Monday 19th September
Factual; Life Stories; Religion and Ethics
Buddha in Suburbia
BBC2, 7:00-8:00pm
Buddha in Suburbia tracks the extraordinary journey of 40 year old Lelung Rinpoche, one of Tibetan Buddhism's three principal reincarnations, as he sets out to gather the lost teachings of his faith and to attempt a return to his homeland.
For the past seven years, Lelung Rinpoche has been living in Ruislip North London, in the garden shed of one of his students. He runs a dharma or teaching centre locally, attended by British followers. Now a British passport holder, he embarks on a mission to find previous Lelungs' teachings, and the teachers who hold the key to unlocking their secrets. His odyssey takes him to India, Mongolia and China as he tries to find a way of getting back home to Tibet. He meets some of Tibetan Buddhism's most senior teachers, including the Tibetan Prime Minister in exile.
Lelung is a young, modern lama, with relationships with many across the globe from teenagers in Rusilip to the Dalai Lama. The film includes an interview with Tibetan Buddhist expert Professor Robert Thurman, father of Uma Thurman. Lelung Rinpoche has a daunting task to complete on his quest to recover lost teachings before they disappear, and to try to take the right steps on his own path towards enlightenment.
News
Panorama: Drinking Our Rivers Dry?
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm
Most of our water comes from rivers, and environmentalists fear we are pushing some of them and the wildlife they support to the edge. With many of Britain's rivers at the limit of what can sustainably be taken from them, Simon Boazman investigates whether the water industry and its regulators are doing enough to protect the nation's rivers.
Documentaries; Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
When TV Goes To War
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm
Documentary looking at how war has been dramatised on British television from the Second World War through the Falklands campaign to contemporary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, examining the challenges - both financial and dramatic - in bringing war to the small screen.
Why have so many of our greatest TV writers been drawn to the subject, and why has so much of their work been controversial? Should writers always respect the historical facts, or can dramatic licence reveal the greater truth about war? And in a world of 24-hour news, can drama tell us anything about war we canʼt now see for ourselves?
It also looks at the lighter side of war, and why it has inspired some of our most successful sitcoms. Is there something about army life that lends itself to comedy? Soldiers who have had their exploits dramatised for television - Colonel Tim Collins, played by Kenneth Branagh in Ten Days to War, and Robert Lawrence, played by Colin Firth in Tumbledown - talk about the experience.
Other contributors include historians Antony Beevor and Max Hastings, and playwrights Alan Bleasdale (The Monocled Mutineer) and Ian Curteis (The Falklands Play). Ex-MI5 chief Stella Rimington considers television's coverage of the Cold War, and comedy writers Jimmy Perry (Dad's Army) and Greg McHugh (Gary Tank Commander) discuss the rules of the war-based sitcom.
_________________________________________________________
Tuesday 20th September
Documentaries;
Inside Nature's Giants
Channel 4, 8:00-9:00pm, 4/4, The Racehorse
The thoroughbred racehorse is one of the greatest athletes on the planet, galloping with incredible speed and stamina for such a large animal. It is the result of unnatural selection, and exists on a knife edge between glory and catastrophic failure.
The team explore how this animal has been biologically engineered for speed. They dissect an elite racehorse to reveal the extraordinary spring system that propels it to 45mph, its super-sized organs and built-in turbo-booster.
Simon Watt visits the top breeding centre in Europe to find out how to produce a champion; and Mark Evans investigates the science behind their phenomenal performance and their vulnerability to injury.
Documentaries; Historical
America's Planned War on Britain: Revealed
Channel 5, 8:00-9:00pm
Documentary series exploring historical events. Military experts and historians from America, Canada and Britain work through the top secret 'War Plan Red' to see how a battle between America and Great Britain might have unfolded.
__________________________________________________________
Wednesday 21st September
Documentaries; Factual; Science and Nature
How to Build a Dinosaur
BBC4, 9:00-10:00
Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago and we have hardly ever found a complete skeleton. So how do we turn a pile of broken bones into a dinosaur exhibit? Dr Alice Roberts finds out how the experts put skeletons back together, with muscles, accurate postures, and even - in some cases - the correct skin colour.
Documentary
Extinct: A Horizon Guide to Dinosaurs
BBC4, 10:00-11:00
Dallas Campbell delves in to the Horizon archive to discover how our ideas about dinosaurs have changed over the past 40 years. From realising that lumbering swamp dwellers were really agile warm-blooded killers, astonishing new finds, controversial theories and breakthrough technology have enabled scientists to rethink how they lived and solve the mystery of their disappearance. And they can even reveal whether dinosaurs might still be with us today.
_________________________________________________________
Friday 23rd September
Documentaries
Dispatches: Gypsy Eviction: The Fight for Dale Farm
Channel 4, 2:15-3:05am
In a film broadcast on the day that the mass eviction starts on Dale Farm, Britain's largest traveller site, Dispatches reporter Deborah Davies investigates the controversial relations between gypsies and travellers, their neighbours and the law.
Across Britain furious residents complain about the way gypsies and travellers pitch camp illegally in local parks, the damage they cause and the mess they leave behind.
They also accuse gypsies of underhand tactics to win planning permission on green belt land where housing development wouldn't normally be allowed.
Travelling families complain they're constantly moved on by police and bailiffs. They say many council sites are badly maintained and in locations where no one else would want to live. The gypsies and travellers also claim they're refused permission to develop their own sites because of prejudice.
The programme asks whether the government's proposed crackdown on unauthorised development will make things better or worse.
Councils will be given more freedom to decide how many places to allocate in their areas but there's already a shortfall of about 6000 caravan pitches and political reluctance to spend money on the travelling community may mean even fewer places are provided.
Set against that, councils already spend close to £20m a year evicting and clearing up illegal encampments because gypsies claim they have nowhere else to go.
Documentaries; Arts, Culture and Media; History
The Lost Genius of British Art: William Dobson
Documentary in which Waldemar Januszczak argues that the little known 17th-century portrait painter William Dobson was the first English painter of genius. Dobson's life and times are embedded in one of the most turbulent and significant epochs of British history - the English Civil War. As official court painter to Charles I, Dobson had a ringside seat to an period of intense drama and conflict. Based in Oxford, where the court was transferred after parliament took control of London, Dobson produced many high quality portraits of royalist supporters, heroes and cavaliers which Januszczak believes are the first true examples of British art. The film investigates the few known facts about Dobson and seeks out the personal stories he left behind as it follows him through his tragically short career. When he died in 1646 - penniless, unemployed and a drunk - Dobson was just 36. Among the Dobson fans interviewed in the film is Earl Spencer, brother of Princess Diana.
Factual; History
Reel History of Britain
BBC2, 6:30-7;00pm, 15/20, Britain's Secondary Modern Schools
Melvyn Bragg tours the country to show films from the BFI’s collection to tell the history of Britain. In Watford, he looks at films relating to school days in the 1960s.
___________________________________________________________
*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.
___________________________________________________________
Saturday 17th September
Documentaries
The Story of Film: An Odyssey
More 4, 9:00-10:25pm, 3/15
The 1920s were a golden age for world cinema. The programme visits Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo to explore the places where movie makers were pushing the boundaries of the medium.
German expressionism, Soviet montage and French impressionism and surrealism were passionate new film movements, but less well known are the glories of Chinese and Japanese films and the moving story of one of the great, now largely forgotten, movie stars, Ruan Lingyu.
________________________________________________________
Monday 19th September
Factual; Life Stories; Religion and Ethics
Buddha in Suburbia
BBC2, 7:00-8:00pm
Buddha in Suburbia tracks the extraordinary journey of 40 year old Lelung Rinpoche, one of Tibetan Buddhism's three principal reincarnations, as he sets out to gather the lost teachings of his faith and to attempt a return to his homeland.
For the past seven years, Lelung Rinpoche has been living in Ruislip North London, in the garden shed of one of his students. He runs a dharma or teaching centre locally, attended by British followers. Now a British passport holder, he embarks on a mission to find previous Lelungs' teachings, and the teachers who hold the key to unlocking their secrets. His odyssey takes him to India, Mongolia and China as he tries to find a way of getting back home to Tibet. He meets some of Tibetan Buddhism's most senior teachers, including the Tibetan Prime Minister in exile.
Lelung is a young, modern lama, with relationships with many across the globe from teenagers in Rusilip to the Dalai Lama. The film includes an interview with Tibetan Buddhist expert Professor Robert Thurman, father of Uma Thurman. Lelung Rinpoche has a daunting task to complete on his quest to recover lost teachings before they disappear, and to try to take the right steps on his own path towards enlightenment.
News
Panorama: Drinking Our Rivers Dry?
BBC1, 8:30-9:00pm
Most of our water comes from rivers, and environmentalists fear we are pushing some of them and the wildlife they support to the edge. With many of Britain's rivers at the limit of what can sustainably be taken from them, Simon Boazman investigates whether the water industry and its regulators are doing enough to protect the nation's rivers.
Documentaries; Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media
When TV Goes To War
BBC4, 10:00-11:00pm
Documentary looking at how war has been dramatised on British television from the Second World War through the Falklands campaign to contemporary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, examining the challenges - both financial and dramatic - in bringing war to the small screen.
Why have so many of our greatest TV writers been drawn to the subject, and why has so much of their work been controversial? Should writers always respect the historical facts, or can dramatic licence reveal the greater truth about war? And in a world of 24-hour news, can drama tell us anything about war we canʼt now see for ourselves?
It also looks at the lighter side of war, and why it has inspired some of our most successful sitcoms. Is there something about army life that lends itself to comedy? Soldiers who have had their exploits dramatised for television - Colonel Tim Collins, played by Kenneth Branagh in Ten Days to War, and Robert Lawrence, played by Colin Firth in Tumbledown - talk about the experience.
Other contributors include historians Antony Beevor and Max Hastings, and playwrights Alan Bleasdale (The Monocled Mutineer) and Ian Curteis (The Falklands Play). Ex-MI5 chief Stella Rimington considers television's coverage of the Cold War, and comedy writers Jimmy Perry (Dad's Army) and Greg McHugh (Gary Tank Commander) discuss the rules of the war-based sitcom.
_________________________________________________________
Tuesday 20th September
Documentaries;
Inside Nature's Giants
Channel 4, 8:00-9:00pm, 4/4, The Racehorse
The thoroughbred racehorse is one of the greatest athletes on the planet, galloping with incredible speed and stamina for such a large animal. It is the result of unnatural selection, and exists on a knife edge between glory and catastrophic failure.
The team explore how this animal has been biologically engineered for speed. They dissect an elite racehorse to reveal the extraordinary spring system that propels it to 45mph, its super-sized organs and built-in turbo-booster.
Simon Watt visits the top breeding centre in Europe to find out how to produce a champion; and Mark Evans investigates the science behind their phenomenal performance and their vulnerability to injury.
Documentaries; Historical
America's Planned War on Britain: Revealed
Channel 5, 8:00-9:00pm
Documentary series exploring historical events. Military experts and historians from America, Canada and Britain work through the top secret 'War Plan Red' to see how a battle between America and Great Britain might have unfolded.
__________________________________________________________
Wednesday 21st September
Documentaries; Factual; Science and Nature
How to Build a Dinosaur
BBC4, 9:00-10:00
Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago and we have hardly ever found a complete skeleton. So how do we turn a pile of broken bones into a dinosaur exhibit? Dr Alice Roberts finds out how the experts put skeletons back together, with muscles, accurate postures, and even - in some cases - the correct skin colour.
Documentary
Extinct: A Horizon Guide to Dinosaurs
BBC4, 10:00-11:00
Dallas Campbell delves in to the Horizon archive to discover how our ideas about dinosaurs have changed over the past 40 years. From realising that lumbering swamp dwellers were really agile warm-blooded killers, astonishing new finds, controversial theories and breakthrough technology have enabled scientists to rethink how they lived and solve the mystery of their disappearance. And they can even reveal whether dinosaurs might still be with us today.
_________________________________________________________
Friday 23rd September
Documentaries
Dispatches: Gypsy Eviction: The Fight for Dale Farm
Channel 4, 2:15-3:05am
In a film broadcast on the day that the mass eviction starts on Dale Farm, Britain's largest traveller site, Dispatches reporter Deborah Davies investigates the controversial relations between gypsies and travellers, their neighbours and the law.
Across Britain furious residents complain about the way gypsies and travellers pitch camp illegally in local parks, the damage they cause and the mess they leave behind.
They also accuse gypsies of underhand tactics to win planning permission on green belt land where housing development wouldn't normally be allowed.
Travelling families complain they're constantly moved on by police and bailiffs. They say many council sites are badly maintained and in locations where no one else would want to live. The gypsies and travellers also claim they're refused permission to develop their own sites because of prejudice.
The programme asks whether the government's proposed crackdown on unauthorised development will make things better or worse.
Councils will be given more freedom to decide how many places to allocate in their areas but there's already a shortfall of about 6000 caravan pitches and political reluctance to spend money on the travelling community may mean even fewer places are provided.
Set against that, councils already spend close to £20m a year evicting and clearing up illegal encampments because gypsies claim they have nowhere else to go.
Documentaries; Arts, Culture and Media; History
The Lost Genius of British Art: William Dobson
Documentary in which Waldemar Januszczak argues that the little known 17th-century portrait painter William Dobson was the first English painter of genius. Dobson's life and times are embedded in one of the most turbulent and significant epochs of British history - the English Civil War. As official court painter to Charles I, Dobson had a ringside seat to an period of intense drama and conflict. Based in Oxford, where the court was transferred after parliament took control of London, Dobson produced many high quality portraits of royalist supporters, heroes and cavaliers which Januszczak believes are the first true examples of British art. The film investigates the few known facts about Dobson and seeks out the personal stories he left behind as it follows him through his tragically short career. When he died in 1646 - penniless, unemployed and a drunk - Dobson was just 36. Among the Dobson fans interviewed in the film is Earl Spencer, brother of Princess Diana.
Factual; History
Reel History of Britain
BBC2, 6:30-7;00pm, 15/20, Britain's Secondary Modern Schools
Melvyn Bragg tours the country to show films from the BFI’s collection to tell the history of Britain. In Watford, he looks at films relating to school days in the 1960s.
___________________________________________________________
*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.
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
Off-air recordings for week 27 August - 2 September 2011
Please email Rich Deakin rdeakin@glos.ac.uk , or fchmediaservices@glos.ac.uk if you would like any of the following programmes / series recording.*
_________________________________________________________
Saturday 27th August
Natural World; Documentaries
Great Migrations
Channel 4, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/4 - The Need To Breed
Every day, migrating creatures around the world wage incredible journeys; risking it all in pursuit of the one thing more precious than themselves: the creation and care of their precious young.
From the rocky beaches of the Falkland Islands to the dense forests of Costa Rica and from Australia to the desolate savannah of southern Sudan, this episode follows the countless animals that venture forth on timeless journeys, bent on their own survival, and the survival of their species.
_________________________________________________________
Monday 29th August
Factual; Crime and Justice; Documentaries
Conspiracy Files: 9/11 - Ten Years On
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm
A decade after the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, the Conspiracy Files looks at why some people still question what really happened on 9/11. Conspiracy theories continue to evolve and now question every aspect of the official account. Why, they ask, was the hole in the Pentagon so small? Why did the World Trade Centre buildings collapse as if being demolished by explosives? Why did one skyscraper fall when it was never hit by a plane? And why was the world's greatest military power so unprepared and so slow to react when warnings had been received?
The death of Osama Bin Laden might have been expected to put an end to the conspiracy theories, but the failure to release any pictures of Bin Laden's death and the hasty disposal of his body in the Arabian Sea, has instead given these theories a new burst of life.
Featuring key witnesses, CIA and FBI interviewees and leading sceptics, the programme analyses the evidence and looks at what makes conspiracy theories so persistent and so powerful.
___________________________________________________________
Tuesday 30th August
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
Hidden Paintings of the North West
BBC4, 7:30-8:00pm
Liverpool actor Paul McGann goes in search of the North West's hidden war paintings. With 80 per cent of the national art collection in storage, there are thousands of hidden treasures in the basements and storerooms of our museums and galleries. McGann visits the Walker Art Gallery in his hometown and Manchester Art Gallery in search of the lost art of World War II. In Liverpool he is captivated by the work of Britain's youngest war artist and in Manchester he finds some long-lost depictions of the city's prodigious war effort.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; History
The Art of Russia
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/3, Liberty
Andrew Graham-Dixon explores how Russia changed from a feudal nation of aristocratic excess to a hotbed of revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, and how art moved from being a servant of the state to an agent of its destruction.
From monuments that celebrate the absolutism of the tsars to the epic Russian landscape as inspiration; from the design and construction of gold and glittering palaces to the minutiae of diamond-encrusted Faberge eggs; and eventually to the stark and radical paintings of the avant-garde, the journey through Russian art history is one of extraordinary beauty and surprise.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
The Romantics
BBC4, 11:00pm-12:00am, 1/3 - Liberty
SynopsisPeter Ackroyd reveals how the radical ideas of liberty that inspired the French Revolution opened up a world of possibility for great British writers such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, inspiring some of the greatest works of literature in the English language. Their ideas are the foundations of our modern notions of freedom and their words are performed by David Tennant, Dudley Sutton and David Threlfall.
_________________________________________________________
Wednesday 31st August
Factual; Science and Nature Format; Documentaries
Horizon: The Core
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 4/6
For centuries we have dreamt of reaching the centre of the Earth. Now scientists are uncovering a bizarre and alien world that lies 4,000 miles beneath our feet, unlike anything we know on the surface. It is a planet buried within the planet we know, where storms rage within a sea of white-hot metal and a giant forest of crystals make up a metal core the size of the Moon.
Horizon follows scientists who are conducting experiments to recreate this core within their own laboratories, with surprising results.
Factual; Documentaries
The Secret War on Terror
BBC2, 11:20pm-12:20am, 1/2
The Secret War on Terror reveals the astonishing inside story of the intelligence war which has been fought against Al Qaeda over the last decade since 9/11.
With unparalleled access to Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies and with a host of exclusive interviews with those who have been at the sharp end of fighting the terrorists - from the CIA and the FBI to MI5 - Peter Taylor asks whether, with the death of Osama Bin Laden, there is any end in sight and whether we are any safer from attack. The series includes the first ever television interview with the former director general of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, and an extensive interview with the recent director of the CIA, General Michael Hayden.
This episode looks at how the West became involved in abductions, secret prisons and even torture and how the intelligence services successfully disrupt major terrorist plots.
__________________________________________________________
Thursday 1st September
Factual; Science and Nature; Nature and Environment; Documentaries
The Secret Lives of Waves
BBC4, 1:30-2:30am
Documentary-maker David Malone delves into the secrets of ocean waves. In an elegant and original film he finds that waves are not made of water, that some waves travel sideways and that the sound of the ocean comes not from water but from bubbles. Waves are not only beautiful but also profoundly important, and there is a surprising connection between the life cycle of waves and the life of human beings.
Factual; History; Documentaries
Elegance and Decadence - The Age of the Regency
BBC4, 8:00-9:00pm, 1/3, Warts and All - Portrait of a Prince
Colourful series marking the 200th anniversary of one of the most explosive and creative decades in British history. It presents a vivid portrait of an age of elegance presided over by a prince of decadence - the infamous Prince Regent himself, a man with legendary appetites for women, food and self-indulgence. Yet this was the same man who would rebuild London, carving out the great thoroughfare of Regent Street and help establish the Regency look as the epitome of British style through his extravagant patronage of art and design.
In this first episode, historian Dr Lucy Worsley chronicles the Regency's early years, which culminated in victory over Napoleon in 1815, and explores the complicated character of the Prince Regent, a man with legendary appetites for women, food, art and self-indulgence.
For Lucy, the Regency was an age of contradictions and extremes that were embodied in the person of the Prince Regent himself. She uncovers Prince George's modest childhood; bright and talented, the young George was beaten with a whip by his tutors and it was small wonder that he would later rebel, eventually embracing a scandal-ridden lifestyle that included illegal marriages and discarded mistresses.
So how did this overweight popinjay preside over an age in which art and culture mattered? A tour of his treasures in the Royal Collection shows Lucy that George was a genuine connoisseur, buying up Rembrandts and French furnishings while his excesses were at the same time inspiring satirical caricatures that mocked him as the 'Prince of Whales'. And she investigates George's collaboration with portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, who left the definitive images of Regency society and became George's flatterer-in-chief; Regency wags laughed at how his paintings magically transformed an overweight bald fifty-something into a 'well-fleshed Adonis'.
Meanwhile, the long war with France was having a huge impact on the British psyche; travel and trade with Europe were impossibly restricted. Lucy follows in the footsteps of painter JMW Turner who, unable to travel to the continent, toured the south coast in 1811 and captured startling images of a country at war.
George liked to think of himself as a man of fashion, and Lucy takes us through surviving accounts from his tailors that reveal his shopaholic ways. These were the years in which the Prince's sometime friend Beau Brummell, the famous dandy, ruled fashionable London like a dictator, and Lucy samples a bit of butch Regency style by trying on some of the fashions he popularised, as well as joining Brummell biographer Ian Kelly on a tour of London's fashionable Regency haunts. She also discovers Brummell's spectacular fall from favour, after loudly referring to the Regent as someone's 'fat friend'.
Lucy visits the battlefield of Waterloo and discovers that the site became a prototype of battlefield tourism - Turner, Byron and many others all visited in the years after the battle and Lucy handles some grisly memorabilia purchased by Lord Byron.
The episode concludes with the most spectacular royal art commission of them all - Lawrence's series of paintings in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, paid for by George to memorialise his victory over Napoleon. Never mind that George wasn't at any of the battles - this was an age in which appearance and reality fused together to create monumental art.
Factual
9/11: The Day That Changed The World
ITV1, 9:00-10:45pm
On September 11th, 2001 millions shared with the people of New York the unimaginable horror of the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Now, through the memories of America’s key decision makers this film goes behind the scenes to show, minute by minute, how the men and women at the heart of American power struggled to manage the assault on their nation.
Together with the record of events filmed on that day The Day That Changed The World is the inside story of what happened on one extraordinary day ten years ago.
Told entirely through archive and interview, it goes behind the scenes and shows how the events unfurled in the aircraft, the offices, the bunkers and the military headquarters as the President, advisors, security services and the military tried to piece together what was happening, who was attacking the country and what was going to happen next.
Now America’s top decision makers on 9/11 including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani as well as America’s top generals, CIA and FBI anti-terror chiefs as well as those in the White House Situation Room, on board Air Force One and on the ground in New York reveal the inside story of 9/11.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
Arena: Chelsea Hotel
BBC4, 11:00-11:55pm
Arena explores New York's legendary haven for performers and artists from Mark Twain to Sid Vicious.
___________________________________________________________
Friday 2nd September
Factual; Documentaries
Fraud Squad
ITV1, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/2
Concluding the two-part documentary following detectives as they investigate one of the biggest share frauds in Britain, perpetrated by 30-year-old fraudster George Abrue and his criminal associates. The police have nine suspects in custody, but Abrue remains out of reach somewhere in Europe, and other key gang members involved in laundering their victims' money still need to be tracked down. In Spain, detectives try to recover the stolen money for the victims, but it looks as though the gang were only interested in maintaining their own luxury lifestyle, not in building up assets. When Abrue is finally caught and extradited back from Sweden, detectives have the tough job of telling the victims where all their money has gone.
___________________________________________________________
*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.
_________________________________________________________
Saturday 27th August
Natural World; Documentaries
Great Migrations
Channel 4, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/4 - The Need To Breed
Every day, migrating creatures around the world wage incredible journeys; risking it all in pursuit of the one thing more precious than themselves: the creation and care of their precious young.
From the rocky beaches of the Falkland Islands to the dense forests of Costa Rica and from Australia to the desolate savannah of southern Sudan, this episode follows the countless animals that venture forth on timeless journeys, bent on their own survival, and the survival of their species.
_________________________________________________________
Monday 29th August
Factual; Crime and Justice; Documentaries
Conspiracy Files: 9/11 - Ten Years On
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm
A decade after the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, the Conspiracy Files looks at why some people still question what really happened on 9/11. Conspiracy theories continue to evolve and now question every aspect of the official account. Why, they ask, was the hole in the Pentagon so small? Why did the World Trade Centre buildings collapse as if being demolished by explosives? Why did one skyscraper fall when it was never hit by a plane? And why was the world's greatest military power so unprepared and so slow to react when warnings had been received?
The death of Osama Bin Laden might have been expected to put an end to the conspiracy theories, but the failure to release any pictures of Bin Laden's death and the hasty disposal of his body in the Arabian Sea, has instead given these theories a new burst of life.
Featuring key witnesses, CIA and FBI interviewees and leading sceptics, the programme analyses the evidence and looks at what makes conspiracy theories so persistent and so powerful.
___________________________________________________________
Tuesday 30th August
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
Hidden Paintings of the North West
BBC4, 7:30-8:00pm
Liverpool actor Paul McGann goes in search of the North West's hidden war paintings. With 80 per cent of the national art collection in storage, there are thousands of hidden treasures in the basements and storerooms of our museums and galleries. McGann visits the Walker Art Gallery in his hometown and Manchester Art Gallery in search of the lost art of World War II. In Liverpool he is captivated by the work of Britain's youngest war artist and in Manchester he finds some long-lost depictions of the city's prodigious war effort.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; History
The Art of Russia
BBC4, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/3, Liberty
Andrew Graham-Dixon explores how Russia changed from a feudal nation of aristocratic excess to a hotbed of revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, and how art moved from being a servant of the state to an agent of its destruction.
From monuments that celebrate the absolutism of the tsars to the epic Russian landscape as inspiration; from the design and construction of gold and glittering palaces to the minutiae of diamond-encrusted Faberge eggs; and eventually to the stark and radical paintings of the avant-garde, the journey through Russian art history is one of extraordinary beauty and surprise.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
The Romantics
BBC4, 11:00pm-12:00am, 1/3 - Liberty
SynopsisPeter Ackroyd reveals how the radical ideas of liberty that inspired the French Revolution opened up a world of possibility for great British writers such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, inspiring some of the greatest works of literature in the English language. Their ideas are the foundations of our modern notions of freedom and their words are performed by David Tennant, Dudley Sutton and David Threlfall.
_________________________________________________________
Wednesday 31st August
Factual; Science and Nature Format; Documentaries
Horizon: The Core
BBC2, 9:00-10:00pm, 4/6
For centuries we have dreamt of reaching the centre of the Earth. Now scientists are uncovering a bizarre and alien world that lies 4,000 miles beneath our feet, unlike anything we know on the surface. It is a planet buried within the planet we know, where storms rage within a sea of white-hot metal and a giant forest of crystals make up a metal core the size of the Moon.
Horizon follows scientists who are conducting experiments to recreate this core within their own laboratories, with surprising results.
Factual; Documentaries
The Secret War on Terror
BBC2, 11:20pm-12:20am, 1/2
The Secret War on Terror reveals the astonishing inside story of the intelligence war which has been fought against Al Qaeda over the last decade since 9/11.
With unparalleled access to Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies and with a host of exclusive interviews with those who have been at the sharp end of fighting the terrorists - from the CIA and the FBI to MI5 - Peter Taylor asks whether, with the death of Osama Bin Laden, there is any end in sight and whether we are any safer from attack. The series includes the first ever television interview with the former director general of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, and an extensive interview with the recent director of the CIA, General Michael Hayden.
This episode looks at how the West became involved in abductions, secret prisons and even torture and how the intelligence services successfully disrupt major terrorist plots.
__________________________________________________________
Thursday 1st September
Factual; Science and Nature; Nature and Environment; Documentaries
The Secret Lives of Waves
BBC4, 1:30-2:30am
Documentary-maker David Malone delves into the secrets of ocean waves. In an elegant and original film he finds that waves are not made of water, that some waves travel sideways and that the sound of the ocean comes not from water but from bubbles. Waves are not only beautiful but also profoundly important, and there is a surprising connection between the life cycle of waves and the life of human beings.
Factual; History; Documentaries
Elegance and Decadence - The Age of the Regency
BBC4, 8:00-9:00pm, 1/3, Warts and All - Portrait of a Prince
Colourful series marking the 200th anniversary of one of the most explosive and creative decades in British history. It presents a vivid portrait of an age of elegance presided over by a prince of decadence - the infamous Prince Regent himself, a man with legendary appetites for women, food and self-indulgence. Yet this was the same man who would rebuild London, carving out the great thoroughfare of Regent Street and help establish the Regency look as the epitome of British style through his extravagant patronage of art and design.
In this first episode, historian Dr Lucy Worsley chronicles the Regency's early years, which culminated in victory over Napoleon in 1815, and explores the complicated character of the Prince Regent, a man with legendary appetites for women, food, art and self-indulgence.
For Lucy, the Regency was an age of contradictions and extremes that were embodied in the person of the Prince Regent himself. She uncovers Prince George's modest childhood; bright and talented, the young George was beaten with a whip by his tutors and it was small wonder that he would later rebel, eventually embracing a scandal-ridden lifestyle that included illegal marriages and discarded mistresses.
So how did this overweight popinjay preside over an age in which art and culture mattered? A tour of his treasures in the Royal Collection shows Lucy that George was a genuine connoisseur, buying up Rembrandts and French furnishings while his excesses were at the same time inspiring satirical caricatures that mocked him as the 'Prince of Whales'. And she investigates George's collaboration with portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, who left the definitive images of Regency society and became George's flatterer-in-chief; Regency wags laughed at how his paintings magically transformed an overweight bald fifty-something into a 'well-fleshed Adonis'.
Meanwhile, the long war with France was having a huge impact on the British psyche; travel and trade with Europe were impossibly restricted. Lucy follows in the footsteps of painter JMW Turner who, unable to travel to the continent, toured the south coast in 1811 and captured startling images of a country at war.
George liked to think of himself as a man of fashion, and Lucy takes us through surviving accounts from his tailors that reveal his shopaholic ways. These were the years in which the Prince's sometime friend Beau Brummell, the famous dandy, ruled fashionable London like a dictator, and Lucy samples a bit of butch Regency style by trying on some of the fashions he popularised, as well as joining Brummell biographer Ian Kelly on a tour of London's fashionable Regency haunts. She also discovers Brummell's spectacular fall from favour, after loudly referring to the Regent as someone's 'fat friend'.
Lucy visits the battlefield of Waterloo and discovers that the site became a prototype of battlefield tourism - Turner, Byron and many others all visited in the years after the battle and Lucy handles some grisly memorabilia purchased by Lord Byron.
The episode concludes with the most spectacular royal art commission of them all - Lawrence's series of paintings in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, paid for by George to memorialise his victory over Napoleon. Never mind that George wasn't at any of the battles - this was an age in which appearance and reality fused together to create monumental art.
Factual
9/11: The Day That Changed The World
ITV1, 9:00-10:45pm
On September 11th, 2001 millions shared with the people of New York the unimaginable horror of the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Now, through the memories of America’s key decision makers this film goes behind the scenes to show, minute by minute, how the men and women at the heart of American power struggled to manage the assault on their nation.
Together with the record of events filmed on that day The Day That Changed The World is the inside story of what happened on one extraordinary day ten years ago.
Told entirely through archive and interview, it goes behind the scenes and shows how the events unfurled in the aircraft, the offices, the bunkers and the military headquarters as the President, advisors, security services and the military tried to piece together what was happening, who was attacking the country and what was going to happen next.
Now America’s top decision makers on 9/11 including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani as well as America’s top generals, CIA and FBI anti-terror chiefs as well as those in the White House Situation Room, on board Air Force One and on the ground in New York reveal the inside story of 9/11.
Factual; Arts, Culture and the Media; Documentaries
Arena: Chelsea Hotel
BBC4, 11:00-11:55pm
Arena explores New York's legendary haven for performers and artists from Mark Twain to Sid Vicious.
___________________________________________________________
Friday 2nd September
Factual; Documentaries
Fraud Squad
ITV1, 9:00-10:00pm, 2/2
Concluding the two-part documentary following detectives as they investigate one of the biggest share frauds in Britain, perpetrated by 30-year-old fraudster George Abrue and his criminal associates. The police have nine suspects in custody, but Abrue remains out of reach somewhere in Europe, and other key gang members involved in laundering their victims' money still need to be tracked down. In Spain, detectives try to recover the stolen money for the victims, but it looks as though the gang were only interested in maintaining their own luxury lifestyle, not in building up assets. When Abrue is finally caught and extradited back from Sweden, detectives have the tough job of telling the victims where all their money has gone.
___________________________________________________________
*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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