SATURDAY 30 AUGUST 2008

SAT 19:00 Coal House (b01rv7z6)
Series 1

Episode 8

Deep in the Welsh Valleys three families give up their 21st century creature comforts and time-travel back to face the hardships of life in a 1927 mining community.

The families add preparation for the final concert to their exhausting daily life. As the community thinks about its goodbye to life in 1927, will the children be saying goodbye to the pigs and their mums goodbye to the tin baths?


SAT 19:30 Jane Eyre (b0074t82)
Episode 3

Dramatisation of Charlotte Bronte's classic novel. On her deathbed, Aunt Reed reveals important information about Jane's family which she has hidden for years. Returning to Thornfield, Jane expects Rochester to wed Blanche Ingram and is shocked by an altogether different marriage proposal. Just as Jane's dreams are about to come true, she discovers a terrible secret from the past that could destroy everything.


SAT 20:30 Jane Eyre (b0074t83)
Episode 4

Dramatisation of Charlotte Bronte's classic novel. Having left Thornfield, a heartbroken Jane finds herself alone, penniless and starving on the moors. She lies down in a final act of surrender to the elements, but is rescued by clergyman St John Rivers who, together with his sisters, Diana and Mary, nurses her back to health. Jane begins a new life as the parish teacher, but when Rivers proposes marriage she thinks she hears Rochester call out her name and knows she must go back to Thornfield.


SAT 21:30 Outnumbered (b007yrz9)
Series 1

Episode 4

Dad finds himself being quizzed about his friendship with Gordon Brown and his SAS training when seven-year old Ben takes his talent for lying to a whole new level.

Mum makes plans for a romantic night in, but first she has to get rid of Karen's little friend and Karen's friend's overwrought mother.

As the romantic evening recedes into the distance, Jake raises fears about his friend's parents' divorce, and calls from his form tutor bring more alarming news.


SAT 22:00 Takin' Over the Asylum (b00d97nh)
You Always Hurt the One You Love

Drama series set in psychiatric hospital. Eddie and the gang pull out all the stops to save the radio station by staging a coup at the open day.


SAT 22:50 Takin' Over the Asylum (b00d97nk)
Fool on the Hill

Drama series set in a psychiatric hospital. The possibility of a discharge means Fergus must find a job. The aftermath of the open day is felt by Campbell, Eddie, Francine and the hospital radio.


SAT 23:40 Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go (b00bfmf5)
Documentary which explores the remarkable relationships which are formed between the staff and pupils at Mulberry Bush, a private school where local authorities send children with such extreme behavioural and emotional problems that they have been rejected by other schools, their families and care homes.


SAT 01:20 Travellers' Century (b00crnkq)
Eric Newby

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.


SAT 02:20 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.


SAT 03:20 Travellers' Century (b00cp4nx)
Patrick Leigh Fermor

Benedict Allen follows Patrick Leigh Fermor's epic 1931 quest across Europe, tracing the inns, haystacks and castles the young adventurer stayed in as he foot-slogged his way through Holland, Germany, Hungary and Romania towards Byzantium.

With his academic career punctuated by numerous school expulsions, the young Patrick Leigh Fermor put aside his troubles and set out across Europe to reach Constantinople in Turkey. It was the original backpacker journey, but also a quest in the romantic tradition of Lord Byron - that of the man of action and the intellectual combined.

His two accounts of that journey, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and Water, are a masterly portrait of a Europe about to be swept aside by war, and also an insight into the brilliant, classically educated mind of the author.

It is in remotest Greece that Benedict Allen finally tracks down the great man himself to discuss the nature, purpose and future of travel writing.