The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
Five experts - historians and archaeologists - are trying to run a Welsh hill farm for twelve months, as it would have been in the reign of James I.
December, their fourth month on the farm, means turning the clock back 400 years to celebrate Christmas in 17th-century style. They have to cut their own giant yule log, the centrepiece of period festivities, deck the place out with traditional decorations and celebrate with contemporary tipples. Getting ready for the Christmas day feast, it is all hands on deck cooking up a range of recipes from the age of Shakespeare, like mince pies with real meat in them.
Through all this they have got to find time to tend the livestock, make some winter clothes, and build a period wood store - all using tools and materials that would have been available in the year 1620.
At one time, Gaelic Scotland - the people and the language - was central to the collective identity of Scots.
But as Neil Oliver reveals, Scotland's infamous Highland/Lowland divide was the result of a family struggle that divided the kingdom.
This is the story of how the centralising policies of the Stewart royal family in the 15th century led to the Gaels being perceived as rebels and outsiders.
A family and their home are stripped of all their modern technology to live a life of decades past.
The family must live through the digital wilderness of the 1970s at a rate of a year per day, starting in 1970. They have their very own technical support team to source and supply them with the vintage technology that would have been available to British households during the decade.
By modern standards the 1970s are decidedly low-tech and the family face many challenges. They endure a spell without central heating and get to grips with the suburban favourite, the teasmade. They see the effects of 70s industrial unrest on their home when they experience a power cut and home entertainment becomes even more limited when their newly-arrived colour television breaks down.
But it's not all grim - the arrival of chopper bikes, the first video game and a mix-tape expert who shows them how to create the soundtrack for their very own slide show all help to prove that life in the 1970s had its upside too.
Charlie Brooker sets his caustic sights on video games. Expect acerbic comment as he looks at the various genres, how they have changed since their early conception and how the media represents games and gamers. Features interviews with Dara O Briain, sitcom scribe Graham Linehan and Rab and Ryan from Consolevania.
Savage rhetoric from Scotland's string-vested, beer-guzzling sage. With Ella's biological clock ticking loudly and husband Jamesie less potent than a seedless orange, parenthood seems a pretty unlikely prospect. Fortunately, Rab offers to supply the wherewithal needed for such a delicate operation.
The regulars continue to gossip about Ken and Tanya, and his relationship with Mel has turned distinctly cold following the discovery of her and Dean getting close and personal during last week's quiz.
Eddie and Joan discuss with the whole pub their love of circuses, as Phil and Nige divulge that they nearly got caught with their pants down during a police raid. Tommy gets a new job and Jumping Joe's Krazy Road Show gets a gig.
Documentary series telling the history of Scotland's music from its roots to the present day. A look at how spirituality and a belief in other worlds have inspired some of Scotland's most heavenly compositions. Includes performances by Cappella Nova, Aly Bain, Tommy Smith and Catriona McKay.
WEDNESDAY 30 SEPTEMBER 2009
WED 19:00 World News Today (b00n1jnl)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
WED 19:30 Timeshift (b0074s5w)
Series 5
The British Way of Death
Daniela Nardini narrates a documentary exploring why the British funeral has acquired a new spirit of informality.
Today's departed are just as likely to be sent on their way to the strains of Robbie Williams as they are to a classic hymn. A bewildering array of coffin styles is available, with even an environmentally-friendly wicker casket for the organically-minded. Are we improvising new rituals to fill a more profound vacuum in our secular society?
WED 20:10 Seeing Salvation (b0074kbq)
The Cross
Neil MacGregor's series on images of Christ looks at how even the seemingly unvarying image of Christ's cross has meant different things at different times and in different contexts.
For the early Christians, it meant Christ's victory over death - there is no suffering, only triumph -shown in the earliest known narrative depiction of the Crucifixion on the tiny 5th-century Roman ivory plaques now in the British Museum.
But in the new theology preached by Saints Dominic and Francis - illustrated in Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco in Florence and at the Sacro Monte in Varallo - Christ's sufferings are the measure of his love for us.
In Grunewald's Crucifixion for the hospital at Isenheim (now in Colmar), Christ's gruesome injuries resemble those of the patients who suffered from the disfiguring disease then called Saint Anthony's Fire.
WED 21:00 The Art of Dying (b00n1jnn)
In an intimate and moving documentary, art historian Dan Cruickshank confronts the unavoidable issue of his own certain death, whether soon or far in the future. His mission, in this largely secular age, is to see if art can offer either comfort or explanation in the face of the greatest unknown of all.
Confronting death on both an emotional and an intellectual level, Dan relives the sense of loss of close family - his father and grandfather, and the future death of his only child - while also exploring how death has been dealt with through the ages.
He looks at the epic depiction of 'doom' paintings that show the day of judgement and the fashion for death masks and deathbed paintings; he examines the art of the obituary writer; he visits the incredible wartime memorial of Kathe Kollwitz and the medieval tomb of an archbishop of Canterbury; and he even has his own death mask created.
Dan meets art historian and nun Sister Wendy to quiz her on the helpfulness of art in the face of death; painter Maggi Hambling, who portrayed her own mother on her deathbed; and Jamie McCartney, who took a plaster cast of his dead father.
The film moves from from the sanitised spartan interior of a modern anatomy school to the unaccountable beauty of the dead human form in art throughout the ages. And, in a television first, Dan persuades the BBC's obituary department to let him see his own obituary - an experience he rather regrets. As he comments: 'In the making of this programme I have confronted what most of us avoid in daily life. Nothing will ever be the same for me after this.'.
WED 22:00 Mark Lawson Talks To... (b00l22n2)
Richard Wilson
Mark Lawson talks to the actor and director Richard Wilson about his life and work. Best known for playing the irascible character of Victor Meldrew in the hit BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave, Wilson reflects on the opportunities that have come his way as a result of the staggering success of the series, as well as the drawbacks of being famously associated with one character and catchphrase.
Wilson talks about life before acting, growing up in Greenock, working as a laboratory technician and doing military service in Singapore. He remembers working with David Lean in A Passage to India, and his rise to stardom through sitcoms such as Hot Metal and Tutti Frutti before agreeing to play Victor, a part written for him, after initially turning it down.
He also discusses more recent roles in Merlin and as a documentary presenter, as well as looking forward to future projects and ambitions.
WED 23:00 Dan Cruickshank's Adventures in Architecture (b009vs89)
Death
Historian and writer Dan Cruickshank celebrates the creative force of architecture as he explores the world's greatest cities, buildings and monuments.
Dan travels the globe to explore how different cultures have created architecture inspired by our mortality. In the Czech Republic, he reveals the macabre tale of a chapel decorated with human bones. Even more shocking is the Yaxha Mayan pyramids in Guatemala, sites of brutal human sacrifice.
In Egypt, Dan explores how pharaohs ensured the passage of their spirit to the afterworld through elaborate mortuary temples. He visits Europe's greatest cemetery in Genoa, Staglieno, home to a spectacular collection of beautiful and erotic memorial statues. And finally, Dan comes face-to-face with death itself in Varanasi in India, a sacred Hindu town where people come to die.
WED 00:00 The Treasures of Tutankhamun (b0084xgd)
Magnus Magnusson's guide to the Egyptian king Tutankahmun's celebrated visit to a London museum in 1972.
WED 00:50 Masterpieces of the British Museum (b0074sm2)
The Sutton Hoo Helmet
The story of the discovery in East Anglia and restoration of the most iconic piece of the Sutton Hoo treasure, Britain's richest ever archaeological find.
WED 01:20 Timewatch (b0074pmc)
2001-2002
The Victorian Way of Death: From Body Snatching to Burning
Dan Cruickshank investigates the circumstances and rituals surrounding death in Victorian Britain by piecing together the fate of five apparently unrelated corpses.
The story he uncovers is one of bizarre extremes - of bodysnatchers and the bodies they snatched; of inner-city graveyards so overflowing that the limbs of the dead could be seen protruding from the newly dug earth; of the great new cemeteries where a tomb cost as much as a terrace of houses in east London; of the suspicious resistance which greeted the 'heathenish' practice of cremation; and of the carnage of the Western Front where Victorian ideals about death - and the afterlife - were finally shattered by the violence of the Great War.
WED 02:10 The Art of Dying (b00n1jnn)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
WED 03:10 Mark Lawson Talks To... (b00l22n2)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:00 today]
THURSDAY 01 OCTOBER 2009
THU 19:00 World News Today (b00n1jt9)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
THU 19:30 A Poet's Guide to Britain (b00kfc1f)
Sylvia Plath
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.
Sylvia Plath is one of the most popular and influential poets of recent history but her poetry is often overshadowed by her life - the story of her marriage to Ted Hughes, her mental health problems and her tragic suicide at the age of 30. A rich and important area of her work that is often overlooked is the wealth of landscape poetry which she wrote throughout her life, some of the best of which was written about the Yorkshire moors.
Sheers explores this rich seam, which culminated in a poem called Wuthering Heights. It takes its title from Emily Bronte but the content and style is entirely Plath's own remarkable vision of the forbidding Pennine landscape.
Sheers visits the dramatic country around Heptonstall where the newly-married Plath came to meet her in-laws, a world of gothic architecture and fog-soaked landscapes, where the locals have a passion for ghost stories that connect directly with the tales that were told in the kitchen of the Bronte parsonage. His journey eventually leads out onto the high moors and the spectacular ruin known as Top Withens. Here amongst the wind and sheep 'where the grass is beating its head distractedly', Plath found the material for some of her most impressive writing.
THU 20:00 Electric Dreams (b00n1j8n)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 on Tuesday]
THU 21:00 Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life (b00hd5mf)
David Attenborough is a passionate Darwinian, and sees evolution as the cornerstone of all the programmes and series he has ever made. Here, he shares his personal view on Darwin's controversial idea. Taking us on a journey through the last 200 years, he tracks the changes in our understanding of the natural world. Ever since Darwin, major scientific discoveries have helped to underpin and strengthen Darwin's revolutionary idea so that today, the pieces of the puzzle fit together so neatly that there can be little doubt that Darwin was right. As David says: 'Now we can trace the ancestry of all animals in the tree of life and demonstrate the truth of Darwin's basic proposition. All life is related.'
David asks three key questions: how and why did Darwin come up with his theory of evolution? Why do we think he was right? And why is it more important now than ever before?
David starts his journey in Darwin's home at Down House in Kent, where Darwin worried and puzzled over the origins of life. He goes back to his roots in Leicestershire, where he hunted for fossils as a child and where another schoolboy unearthed a significant find in the 1950s, and he revisits Cambridge University, where both he and Darwin studied and where many years later the DNA double helix was discovered, providing the foundations for genetics.
At the end of his journey in the Natural History Museum in London, David concludes that Darwin's great insight revolutionised the way in which we see the world. We now understand why there are so many different species, and why they are distributed in the way they are. But above all, Darwin has shown us that we are not set apart from the natural world and do not have dominion over it. We are subject to its laws and processes, as are all other animals on earth to which, indeed, we are related.
THU 22:00 Fear of Fanny (b0074sz9)
Dramatisation of Fanny Cradock's career, scripted by Brian Fillis based on interviews with her friends and family, reveals the private vulnerability behind her tart public persona. Not only a moving and insightful portrait of this enduring culinary icon, it's a black comedy about family, food and heavily-applied foundation.
THU 23:20 Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe (b00n1j8q)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:00 on Tuesday]
THU 00:10 Upgrade Me (b00n1hwj)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 on Monday]
THU 01:10 A Poet's Guide to Britain (b00kfc1f)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]
THU 01:40 Fear of Fanny (b0074sz9)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:00 today]
THU 03:00 Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe (b00n1j8q)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:00 on Tuesday]
FRIDAY 02 OCTOBER 2009
FRI 19:00 World News Today (b00n1k0y)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
FRI 19:30 Leeds International Piano Competition (b00n1k10)
2009
Episode 3
Every three years since 1963, Leeds plays host to the cream of young international concert pianists who travel there to take part in the city's International Piano Competition. Past winners have included musical greats like Rada Lupu and Murray Perahia.
Huw Edwards is joined by concert pianists Cristina Ortiz and Lucy Parham to review the third finalist in 2009's contest. David Kadouch from France is the second of the competitors to play Beethoven's piano concerto No 5. Away from the concert hall, Clemency Burton-Hill looks at the mystique of the piano.
FRI 20:30 Transatlantic Sessions (b00n1k12)
Series 4
Episode 3
Folk musicians come together in what have been called 'the greatest backporch shows ever', as Shetland fiddle virtuoso Aly Bain and dobro ace Jerry Douglas host a Highland gathering of the cream of Nashville, Irish and Scottish talent.
Rosanne Cash, up-and-coming Scottish singer Emily Smith, and Irish pipes and fiddle duo Mike McGoldrick and Dezi Donnelly are among the featured stars.
FRI 21:00 Glastonbury (b00mgwsz)
2009
Madness
Highlights of the performance by Madness on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury 2009.
FRI 22:00 Young Guns Go for It (b007gt6c)
Series 2
Madness
United by a love of ska music and skinhead style, seven mates from London's Camden Town became the 1980s most distinctively English pop band - Madness. Members of the band reflect on brushes with National Front, hits, splits and their reunion concert.
FRI 22:40 The Liberty of Norton Folgate (b00n1jpf)
Filmed concert from the Hackney Empire consisting of a sustained music hall-style performance of Madness's acclaimed concept album The Liberty of Norton Folgate. The concert uses a vocal audience and some atmospheric interstitial pieces to camera with Suggs and Carl, filmed in the murky haunts of London around the Norton Folgate area, which explore the context of this most London of albums and bands.
FRI 23:45 Spiral (b00n1h67)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:00 on Sunday]
FRI 00:35 Madness: Take It or Leave It (b00n1k2b)
Produced and directed by Stiff Records owner Dave Robinson in 1981, this docudrama chronicles the rise of Madness from their first gig as The Invaders in June 1977 to the release of their initial single and their first taste of fame.
The members of Madness play themselves, whilst supporting roles are filled by relatives, actors, friends of the band and business acquaintances. Filmed on location in Camden Town, the production utilises well known local landmarks such as the Dublin Castle pub, Rock On record shop and Pathway Studios, but many scenes were also filmed in flats, houses and gardens occupied by band members.
FRI 02:00 Cambridge Folk Festival (b00n1hwg)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 on Monday]
FRI 02:30 Transatlantic Sessions (b00n1k12)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:30 today]
FRI 03:00 Leeds International Piano Competition (b00n1k10)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]