Suzy Klein introduces a Prom which celebrates the 200th anniversary of Beethoven's 5th Symphony with a performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under conductor David Robertson.
To celebrate Elliott Carter's 100th birthday, Nicholas Daniel performs Carter's single-movement Oboe Concerto, while the concert open with a full-string version of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, originally written as the final movement of one of his late string quartets.
Two-part adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel. Professor Challenger leads a party of explorers from the smog of Edwardian London to South America in search of a mythical plateau rumoured to be inhabited by dinosaurs.
The team's success is threatened when two of its members compete for the affections of a missionary's daughter, and is further endangered by the possibility of an enemy within the group.
Two-part adaptation of an Arthur Conan Doyle novel. Professor Challenger's quest to find living dinosaurs is in peril. The explorers find themselves trapped on the plateau high above the Amazon jungle, surrounded by prehistoric horrors.
Benedict Allen follows the travels of quintessential British amateur traveller Eric Newby. Born in suburban Hammersmith between the wars, Newby was dismissed by his public school as 'not clever', and his life became a catalogue of challenges. As a teenager, he went to sea to serve as a deck hand, sailing around Cape Horn. During the WW2 he joined the Special Boat Squadron, and was captured by the enemy. After escaping from an Italian POW camp, he met his future wife Wanda.
Newby itched to discover the world and, in the mid-1950s, abandoned an unhappy career in the rag trade to head off with diplomat Hugh Carless into remotest Afghanistan and climb Mir Samir. The journey was immortalised in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.
Fifty years on, Benedict Allen finds this lost corner of Afghanistan little changed - and comes away full of admiration for the author. Newby failed to reach the summit, but for all his sardonic understatement and self-deprecation, he was just a hair's breadth away. And all with the aid of a map drawn on the back of an envelope.
TUESDAY 29 JULY 2008
TUE 19:00 World News Today (b00cvbcf)
The latest news from around the world.
TUE 19:30 Pop Go the Sixties (b00cvzhf)
Series 2
Dusty Springfield
A colourful nugget of pop mined from the BBC's archive. From her own series recorded in 1967, Dusty Springfield performs the Bobby Hebb classic, Sunny, which had been a hit in the UK for Cher and Georgie Fame.
TUE 19:35 Batman (b00ctqsd)
Series 2
The Joker's Last Laugh
Adventures with the caped crusader. On the trail of counterfeit notes, Batman discovers that the chief teller at Gotham National Bank is a Joker-controlled robot raising funds for the Joker's Penthouse Publisher comic book company. Robin is captured and about to be pressed flat into a comic book.
TUE 20:00 Voyages of Discovery (b0074t4k)
Ice King
Explorer Paul Rose tells the story of his hero Fridjtof Nansen who, in 1892, announced a daring plan to be first to the North Pole, an idea considered so off-the-wall that no scientist would volunteer to join him on a venture they believed was nothing short of suicide.
He allowed his ship to become stuck in the crushing pack ice, hoping it would drift to the Pole, and then set off on foot across the frozen wastes. Nansen became the forefather of polar exploration, inventing practical techniques that today allow people to survive, travel and work in the most hostile and forbidding places on our planet.
TUE 21:00 Great British Holiday (b007tr55)
Turkey
The British tourist is fickle, demanding and mean. But in Sunsail's Andy Hancock, it appears we may have met our match.
Twenty-six year-old Andy has four months to save a billion pound business. Bored with package holidays, fed up with bucket and spade, we Britons are going on activity holidays in record numbers from white water rafting to sailing and climbing. Sailing holiday specialist Sunsail have already got the world’s largest yacht fleet, now they are ploughing millions into their resorts.
The flagship of this investment programme is Club Phokaia. Its setting is idyllic; a rocky outcrop of Turkey's Aegean coast, but the hotel is rather less beauteous, run down, and in some places even dangerous. Sunsail have leased it- now they want development manager Andy to transform it into a five star resort in just five months.
As Matt West, Sunsail's CEO comments, 'Well he's got to do it…it's in the brochure...' But for all Matt's determination, events conspire to thwart them. Deadlines aren't so much missed, as completely ignored and the first customers have to be diverted to alternative resorts. Costs are climbing, and the market's collapsing. The certainties of mass tourism are fast vanishing, as the internet, affluence and increasing choice conspire to turn the British tourist into a changeable beast.
In a last throw of the dice Sunsail starts a million pound lawsuit against the builders. The courts rule against them, and at last there's a chink of hope for Andy.
TUE 22:00 The Armstrong and Miller Show (b008fn10)
Series 1
Episode 6
Scratch beneath the surface of po-faced British respectability and you'll find a wealth of great characters. Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller star in a sketch show.
TUE 22:30 Heist (b00b0bdh)
Drama based on the true story of an outrageous medieval heist, told in the style of Ocean's 11.
When Dick Puddlecote is released from a Flanders jail in 1302 to discover his friends, his livelihood and his woman are all in hock to the king, he decides to exact a very modern form of revenge - break into the vault at Westminster Abbey and steal the king's gold. There’s just one catch - failure would earn him and his gang ruthless torture, swift punishment and potentially an eternity in hell.
A true story sourced from original trial records, this bold comedy-drama combines the energy of a British heist comedy with the veracity of factual dramas and the bawdiness of Chaucer, breathing life into a strange and foreign world full of priests and prostitutes.
TUE 23:40 The Thirties in Colour (b00cp456)
Wright Around the World
Four-part series using rare, private and commercial film and photographic archives to give poignant and surprising insights into the 1930s, a decade which erupted into colour as polychromatic photographic technology came of age and three important processes - Dufaycolour, Technicolor and Kodachrome - were brought to the market.
Together with his younger brother Bolling, the American industrialist Harry Wright was wealthy enough to indulge his twin passions for travel and filmmaking. Both siblings collected and shot films that captured the world at a pivotal time in history.
They captured astonishing images acquired and filmed in the islands of the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, as well as South Africa, Morocco, Palestine, and several countries in Europe, including Britain. These destinations were visited during the golden age of ocean travel, when the well-off could escape the Great Depression and travel the world on luxury cruise ships.
The sea had become a playground but it would soon become a battleground, as the world lurched towards the bloodiest war in history.
TUE 00:40 Great British Holiday (b007tr55)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
TUE 01:40 Heist (b00b0bdh)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:30 today]
TUE 02:50 Voyages of Discovery (b0074t4k)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
WEDNESDAY 30 JULY 2008
WED 19:00 World News Today (b00cvbdv)
The latest news from around the world.
WED 19:30 Pop Go the Sixties (b00cw0pf)
Series 2
Procol Harum
A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum was one of the 1960s' most popular and most-played songs. It's performed here by the group who first recorded it, on Top of the Pops in 1967.
WED 19:35 Batman (b00ctqt0)
Series 2
The Joker's Epitaph
Adventures with the caped crusader. The Joker blackmails Bruce Wayne in order to trap Batman and Bruce has to get married to avoid a scandal.
WED 20:00 Sahara with Michael Palin (b0074p58)
Absolute Desert
Michael reaches Timbuktu along with a camel train carrying the giant salt blocks that made the city one of the greatest centres of Islamic learning up until the 16th century. He wanders through the rubble that is 21st-century Timbuktu to find the Imam who shows him original astronomical textbooks that predate Galileo's discoveries by 200 years.
Leaving one of Timbuktu's most famous addresses, the house of Alexander Laing, the Scottish explorer who had his thoat slit for not converting to Islam, Michael heads east to the land of the Wodaabe. These nomadic herders are some of the last true pastoralists of the African continent - famous as much for their male beauty pageant as their stylish cattle. Living in the bush with them, Michael watches the complex rituals surrounding this extraordinary annual pagaent, the 'Gerewol', where the girls get to choose the prettiest boy.
It is the season after the rains, a time of relative plenty for the nomads, and Michael's Wodaabe family, led by the English-speaking Doulla, travel to Ingall for the Cure Salee - a gathering of clans that takes place every year. Amidst the chaos of camel races, shopping and general mayhem, Michael meets up with a group of Tuareg for the next leg of his journey, a camel train across the Tenere desert to Algeria.
Omar introduces him to the delights and vicissitudes of life on the move in the most desolate landscape on the planet. Walking 12 hours a day, eating the odd sheep and learning the rudiments of Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg, Michael finally gets to grips with the heart and soul of the desert. The going is tough, but the sense of comradeship with both the other cameleers and the camels, who are their lifeline, is palpable.
WED 21:00 The Thirties in Colour (b00csk9m)
Adventures in the Americas
Four-part series using rare, private and commercial colour film and photographs to give poignant and surprising insights into the 1930s.
One of the most prolific collectors of colour film in the period was the American industrialist Harry Wright. A self-made millionaire with a passion for film, he acquired and commissioned hundreds of films, which he screened for guests at the private cinema he had built in his home in Mexico City.
The programme examines Wright's extraordinary colour films of Africa and Central America, including his so-called Ethnographic Series of Unknown Mexican Indians, a unique visual record of the lives and customs of indigenous peoples living in the remote rural regions of Mexico.
WED 22:00 Kidult: My Kid Could Paint That (b00csk9p)
Documentary that gets to the heart of an extraordinary artworld cause célèbre.
In the span of only a few months, 4-year-old Marla Olmstead rocketed from total obscurity into international renown - and sold over $300,000 dollars worth of paintings. She was compared to Kandinsky and Pollock, and called 'a budding Picasso'. Inside Edition, The Jane Pauley Show, and NPR did pieces on her, and The Today Show and Good Morning America got in a bidding war over an appearance by the bashful toddler. There was talk of corporate sponsorship with the family fielding calls from The Gap and Crayola.
Then, five months into Marla's new life as a celebrity, and just short of her fifth birthday, a bombshell dropped. CBS's 60 Minutes aired an exposé suggesting strongly that the paintings were painted by her father, himself an amateur painter. As quickly as the public built Marla up, they tore her down. The New York Post asked whether 'the juvenile Jackson Pollock may actually be a full-fledged Willem de Frauding'. The Olmsteads were barraged with hate mail and ostracized, whilst sales of the paintings dried up and Marla's art dealer considered moving. Embattled, the Olmsteads themselves turned to a documentary filmmaker to clear their name.
Torn between his own responsibility as a journalist and the family's desire to see their integrity restored, the director finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into a situation that can't possibly end well for him and them, and could easily end badly for both.
WED 23:20 Coal House (b01rv6l1)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:00 on Sunday]
WED 23:50 The Thirties in Colour (b00csk9m)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
WED 00:50 Timeshift (b0074qcj)
Series 4
Art School
A look at the history of Britain's art schools, the most exciting educational establishments in Britain for two decades. The engines of the 1960s counter culture, they produced a generation of young go-getters who would take on the establishment and create the new industries of fashion, graphic design and pop music. Contributors include Brian Eno, Mary Quant, Kim Howells and Brian Rice.
WED 01:30 Kidult: My Kid Could Paint That (b00csk9p)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:00 today]
WED 02:55 The Thirties in Colour (b00csk9m)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
THURSDAY 31 JULY 2008
THU 19:00 World News Today (b00cvbk7)
The latest news from around the world.
THU 19:30 Born to Be Wild (b00cskdd)
Butterflies
Series on amateur naturalists focuses on those immersed in the strange and colourful world of butterflies and moths. Changes in the numbers of these creatures reflect wider changes in the British countryside, so studying them is both a consuming passion and a conservation challenge.
One enthusiast has walked hundreds of miles to count butterflies; another has devoted his time and his greenhouse to growing one rare butterfly; a third is fanatical about moths and has learned to identify all 2,500 British species; and one has been getting his hands dirty to restore a chalk down and its butterfly star to their former glory.
The programme reveals the highs and lows of British butterflies and moths and gives a window onto the lives of four of the passionate people that are fighting to save them.
THU 20:00 The Way We Travelled (b0074tb9)
The Way We Travelled
Second in a three-part series recalling holiday and travel guides that have graced British television screens focuses on travel's 'golden girls' - Anne Gregg, Judith Chalmers and Jill Dando - and follows their journeys as the programmes and destinations became more adventurous.
THU 21:00 Travellers' Century (b00cskdg)
Laurie Lee
Explorer, writer and broadcaster Benedict Allen retraces part of author Laurie Lee's journey across Spain in 1935, which became the basis for his celebrated travelogue As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.
Lee thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, and the book reveals a poet's sensibility in its meticulous, distilled observations of the country and people he quickly came to love.
Allen tries to find out whether Lee's evocative prose actually works as travel writing and Lee is revealed as an enigmatic, mercurial figure in the tradition of the wandering minstrel or troubadour, with a huge array of talents and an astonishing facility to charm.
THU 22:00 Journeys into the Ring of Fire (b0074sqz)
Series 1
Peru
Iain Stewart tours the perilous and spectacular landscape of the Pacific Rim to discover how the rocks beneath our feet have shaped human history. In Peru, he reveals how the Incas were able to build a huge and successful empire in some of the most hostile and unforgiving terrain on the planet. He climbs high into the Andes to reveal clues hidden in the landscape, which show how the Incas mastered their rocky world and fed their millions.
THU 23:00 BBC Four Sessions (b007t3kj)
Nick Lowe
At East London's LSO St Luke's, singer-songwriter Nick Lowe performs a set comprising of familiar songs from his long and illustrious career alongside new songs from his latest album At My Age. He's joined by a specially assembled band including longtime cohorts Robert Treherne on drums and Geraint Watkins on keys, plus a horns section featuring legendary bandleader and trombonist Chris Barber.
THU 00:00 Born to Be Wild (b00cskdd)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]
THU 00:30 Travellers' Century (b00cskdg)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
THU 01:30 Journeys into the Ring of Fire (b0074sqz)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:00 today]
THU 02:30 Born to Be Wild (b00cskdd)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]
THU 03:00 Travellers' Century (b00cskdg)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
FRIDAY 01 AUGUST 2008
FRI 19:00 World News Today (b00cvbmt)
The latest news from around the world.
FRI 19:30 A Seaside Parish (b0078xjv)
Series 2
Episode 2
Documentary series following Rev Christine Musser in her Cornish parish. For Christine, it's a miracle that not a single person lost their life in the flooding disaster, but bringing the villagers back from the edge of despair will be the biggest challenge of her career.
FRI 20:00 Classic Britannia (b007r8g8)
Modernism and Minimalism
Three-part series looking at British classical music from the end of World War Two to the present day. In the 1960s, classical music finally shook off the past and embraced its own revolution.
A generation of young radicals, from Cornelius Cardew and Gavin Bryars to Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, reclaimed their right to provoke, shock and inspire, reinventing classical music for the modern world.
FRI 21:00 Marc Bolan: The Final Word (b007y9t2)
Fellow glam rock star Suzi Quatro narrates a documentary which examines Marc Bolan's childhood ambitions of fame and where it led him, using previously lost TV and radio interviews, rediscovered Top of the Pops recordings, unseen concert footage and unique home movies.
Includes contributions from his companion Gloria Jones, brother Harry Feld, producer Tony Visconti, Queen's Roger Taylor, Steve Harley, Zandra Rhodes and more, with Visconti also deconstructing the track Ride a White Swan.
FRI 22:00 Glastonbury (b00cskgk)
2008
Neil Diamond
The teatime set by the US singer-songwriter Neil Diamond on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury 2008. Including classic songs such as I'm a Believer, Sweet Caroline and Red Red Wine, plus a couple of numbers from his recent No 1 album Home Before Dark.
FRI 23:00 In Concert (b0074sd5)
Neil Diamond
Songsmith Neil Diamond performs live with strings and horns laid on by the BBC, including hits such as Sweet Caroline, Solitary Man, Cracklin' Rosie and Holly Holy.
FRI 23:30 The Avengers (b0074spk)
Series 4
Town of No Return
Bowler-hatted Steed finds a town full of ghosts, and slinky sidekick Emma Peel gets into harness, as they investigate the disappearance of top intelligence agents from a sleepy village on the Norfolk coast and uncover a plot to take over the country.
FRI 00:20 The Avengers (b0074sq4)
Series 4
The Gravediggers
Steed and Mrs Peel suspect foul play when a sudden fault develops in the nation's early-warning radar. They investigate a dead scientist who won't stay buried and Emma meets a brute of a railway enthusiast.
FRI 01:10 Arena (b00cthtz)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:15 on Saturday]
FRI 02:10 Marc Bolan: The Final Word (b007y9t2)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
FRI 03:10 Classic Britannia (b007r8g8)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]