MONDAY 01 JUNE 2009

MON 19:00 World News Today (b00ktrbt)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.


MON 19:30 Terry Jones's Barbarians (b00791nv)
The Primitive Celts

Terry Jones pieces together new archaeological evidence to reveal the startling truth about the Barbarians, in the process discovering how the Roman propaganda machine was able to pull off a great con-trick and turn their enemies into monsters fit for childrens' stories.

In 58 BC Julius Caesar invaded Celtic Gaul. He claimed it was to protect the northern borders of the Empire from these volatile people. But Terry discovers that Caesar's account was a smokescreen for a more sinister truth.

The Celts, according to Rome, were a warring and illiterate people. Yet Terry discovers that these people had mathematical know-how way beyond the Romans. They also had a society that, in stark contrast to Rome, was compassionate and protected the young and the weak, one built on an advanced and complex trading network that spread way beyond the borders of the Celtic world.

So why was Caesar so hell-bent on the destruction of these civilised people? The latest archaeological evidence has revealed that the Celtic world was built on vast deposits of gold, and the Celts were gold miners par excellence. The ambitious Caesar was in poverty and the rich, sophisticated Celts were there for the taking.


MON 20:30 A Poet's Guide to Britain (b00ktrbw)
Lynette Roberts

Poet and author Owen Sheers presents a series in which he explores six great works of poetry set in the British landscape. Each poem explores a sense of place and identity across Britain and opens the doors to captivating stories about the places and the lives of the poets themselves.

Lynette Roberts is not a famous poet. She only published one full collection of poems and her work has been almost forgotten, but her vivid, modern, hot-blooded writing about a Welsh village and her time there during the Second World War reveals an extraordinary woman and a brilliant poetic voice who Robert Graves described in the 1940s as 'one of the few true poets now writing'.

Roberts was brought up in a wealthy family in Argentina but married a writer from Carmarthenshire in 1939 at the outbreak of war and spent the next nine years living in poverty in a Welsh-speaking village. She involved herself in every aspect of village life and despite being accused of being a spy found a fierce passion for the local people and the landscape.

Sheers visits the unassuming village of Llanybri where she lived and is now buried, and uncovers the moving story behind her poem called simply Poem from Llanybri, an invitation to the young soldier poet Alun Lewis to pay her a visit. He talks to locals who remember her and admire her work, and to the National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke.


MON 21:00 How the Celts Saved Britain (b00ktrby)
Salvation

Provocative two-part documentary in which Dan Snow blows the lid on the traditional Anglo-centric view of history and reveals how the Irish saved Britain from cultural oblivion during the Dark Ages.

He follows in the footsteps of Ireland's earliest missionaries as they venture through treacherous barbarian territory to bring literacy and technology to the future nations of Scotland and England.


MON 22:00 Storyville (b00ktrc0)
The Genius and the Boys

D Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Prions - the particles that would emerge as the cause of Mad Cow disease - while working with a cannibal tribe on New Guinea. He was a star of the scientific world. Over his years working amongst the tribes of the South Seas, he adopted 57 kids, bringing them to a new life in Washington DC. His adoptions were hailed as wonderful fatherly beneficence. But, at the height of his career, rumours began to spread he was a paedophile.

Gajdusek would argue that if sex with children was okay in their own cultures, he wasn't wrong to join in. How could a great mind like Gajdusek's lose insight so totally, and why would the scientific community to which he was a hero be so quick to leap to his defence and dismiss the allegations?

Carleton Gajdusek himself participates in the film, as well as some of the men and women who came to know him closely as children - a majority of whom, when contacted by the film, claimed not to have been abused.

Leading scientist friends of Gadjusek, including Benoit Mandelbrot, one of the founders of Chaos Theory; Robert Gallo, who discovered HIV; and the world-famous author and neurologist Oliver Sacks, discuss whether matters of science can seem more important to some than questions about sex and criminality.

The film also features Gajdusek's own - previously never before released - films of first contact with stone-age communities in the South Seas.

This striking and powerful documentary explores the limits of insight and the power of self-delusion, through one of the century's true geniuses - a man prepared to defy convention and challenge people's most cherished beliefs, a man whose scientific brilliance seemed to blind many to his extraordinary personal failings.


MON 23:20 Michael Wood on Beowulf (b00kpv23)
Historian Michael Wood returns to his first great love, the Anglo-Saxon world, to reveal the origins of our literary heritage. Focusing on Beowulf and drawing on other Anglo-Saxon classics, he traces the birth of English poetry back to the Dark Ages.

Travelling across the British Isles from East Anglia to Scotland and with the help of Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, actor Julian Glover, local historians and enthusiasts, he brings the story and language of this iconic poem to life.


MON 00:20 A Poet's Guide to Britain (b00ktrbw)
[Repeat of broadcast at 20:30 today]


MON 00:50 How the Celts Saved Britain (b00ktrby)
[Repeat of broadcast at 21:00 today]


MON 01:50 Terry Jones's Barbarians (b00791nv)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:30 today]


MON 02:50 Merlin the Legend (b00dpspb)
A look at the mythical roots in art and literature of Merlin - magician, hero and historical mystery. Merlin is the archetypal wizard, Welsh and Celtic in origin but with connections across the water in Cornwall and middle Europe, and, of course, the Arthurian legends. Clearly, Merlin is the distant relative of Dumbledore and all those weird and wonderful wizards in literature.


MON 03:50 A Poet's Guide to Britain (b00ktrbw)
[Repeat of broadcast at 20:30 today]