SATURDAY 14 JANUARY 2012

SAT 19:00 Unnatural Histories (b011wzrc)
Yellowstone

As the world's first national park, Yellowstone has long served as a model for the protection of wilderness around the world. For Americans it has become a source of great national pride, not least because it encapsulates all our popular notions of what a wilderness should be - vast, uninhabited, with spectacular scenery and teeming with wildlife. But Yellowstone has not always been so. At the time of its creation in 1872, it was renowned only for its extraordinary geysers, and far from being an uninhabited wilderness it was home to several American Indian tribes.

This film reveals how a remote Indian homeland became the world's first great wilderness. It was the ambitions of railroad barons, not conservationists, that paved the way for a brand new vision of the wild, a vision that took native peoples out of the picture. Iconic landscape paintings show how European Romanticism crossed the Atlantic and recast the American wilderness, not as a satanic place to be tamed and cultivated, but as a place to experience the raw power of God in nature. Forged in Yellowstone, this potent new version of wilderness as untouched and deserving of protection has since been exported to all corners of the globe.


SAT 20:00 Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity (p00kjqch)
The Age of Invention

Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the electrifying story of our quest to master nature's most mysterious force - electricity. Until fairly recently, electricity was seen as a magical power, but it is now the lifeblood of the modern world and underpins every aspect of our technological advancements.

Without electricity, we would be lost. This series tells of dazzling leaps of imagination and extraordinary experiments - a story of maverick geniuses who used electricity to light our cities, to communicate across the seas and through the air, to create modern industry and to give us the digital revolution.

Just under 200 years ago scientists discovered something profound, that electricity is connected to another of nature's most fundamental forces - magnetism. In the second episode, Jim discovers how harnessing the link between magnetism and electricity would completely transform the world, allowing us to generate a seemingly limitless amount of electric power which we could utilise to drive machines, communicate across continents and light our homes. This is the story of how scientists and engineers unlocked the nature of electricity in an extraordinary century of innovation and invention.


SAT 21:00 Borgen (b019jr89)
Series 1

The Art of the Possible

After only a few short months as prime minister, Birgitte Nyborg has negotiated her first finance bill into place. But before the final ratification, several members of parliament withdraw their support. Ousted politician Michael Laugesen is in a new position as a newspaper editor and is out to get Nyborg, who lets her family down on more than one occasion at home. While Kasper finds a new job, Katrine is still extremely vulnerable as she experiences yet another shock.


SAT 22:00 Borgen (b019jr8c)
Series 1

100 Days

TV journalist Katrine Fonsmark gets the scoop of her life when an anonymous source contacts her with important security policy information. The pressure is on prime minister Birgitte Nyborg to kill the story, but she decides to go her own way. In the process Katrine finds herself in some intense situations and runs into problems with her boss, but in the middle of the turmoil help appears from an unexpected angle.


SAT 23:00 Timeshift (b019c85h)
Series 11

The Rules of Drinking

Timeshift digs into the archive to discover the unwritten rules that have governed the way we drink in Britain.

In the pubs and working men's clubs of the 40s and 50s there were strict customs governing who stood where. To be invited to sup at the bar was a rite of passage for many young men, and it took years for women to be accepted into these bastions of masculinity. As the country prospered and foreign travel became widely available, so new drinking habits were introduced as we discovered wine and, even more exotically, cocktails.

People began to drink at home as well as at work, where journalists typified a tradition of the liquid lunch. Advertising played its part as lager was first sold as a woman's drink and then the drink of choice for young men with a bit of disposable income. The rules changed and changed again, but they were always there - unwritten and unspoken, yet underwriting our complicated relationship with drinking.


SAT 00:00 Horizon (b0148vph)
2011-2012

The Core

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.


SAT 01:00 The Sky at Night (b08spfqw)
Other Solar Systems

We now know there are other solar systems far away in space, but are they like ours and is there life on these strange worlds? Sir Patrick Moore goes on the quest for little green men.


SAT 01:30 Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity (p00kjqch)
[Repeat of broadcast at 20:00 today]


SAT 02:30 Unnatural Histories (b011wzrc)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 today]


SAT 03:30 Timeshift (b019c85h)
[Repeat of broadcast at 23:00 today]