The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
Michael Portillo takes to the tracks with a copy of George Bradshaw's Victorian Railway Guidebook. In a series of five epic journeys, Portillo travels the length and breadth of the country to see how the railways changed us and what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.
On a journey taking him coast to coast from Brighton to Cromer, Michael gets the rare chance to drive a heritage diesel train, finds out why Norfolk black turkeys appeared on the Christmas menu in Bradshaw's day and samples some classic Cromer crab.
It is estimated that 99 per cent of species have become extinct and there have been times when life's hold on Earth has been so precarious it seems it hangs on by a thread.
This series focuses on the survivors - the old-timers - whose biographies stretch back millions of years and who show how it is possible to survive a mass extinction event which wipes out nearly all of its neighbours. The Natural History Museum's professor Richard Fortey discovers what allows the very few to carry on going - perhaps not for ever, but certainly far beyond the life expectancy of normal species. What makes a survivor when all around drop like flies? Professor Fortey travels across the globe to find the survivors of the most dramatic of these obstacles - the mass extinction events.
In episode two, Fortey focuses on the 'KT boundary'. 65 million years ago, a 10km-diameter asteroid collided with the Earth and saw the end of the long reign of the dinosaurs. He investigates the lucky breaks and evolutionary adaptations that allowed some species to survive the disastrous end of the Cretaceous Age when these giants did not.
Exploring the essential elements of a great rock album, Danny Baker celebrates the golden age of the analogue, vinyl LP with rock fan Jeremy Clarkson, the Smiths' producer Stephen Street and writer Kate Mossman. With a passionate, fan's-eye view, Baker and his guests select their favourite rock albums and discuss how the LPs of the 60s and 70s were produced - and enjoyed - in quite a different way to their modern equivalents.
The by-election favourite, Nick Edwards, arrives in town and Bob is determined to derail him. From the pubs of Broughty Ferry to a glittering high society dinner, Bob chaotically attempts to gather support for his 'Local Man' campaign.
It is one of Britain's most popular leisure pursuits, but high street bingo came about almost by accident as the result of a loophole in an obscure piece of gambling legislation. Almost overnight, in January 1961 what had been a quiet parlour game or occasional seaside flutter was turned into a brash multimillion-pound business.
As Timeshift affectionately recalls in this documentary, soon nearly a quarter of the population were playing and becoming fluent in the rhyming slang of 'bingo lingo' - from 'Legs Eleven' to 'Clickety Click, Sixty Six'. This explosion of interest quickly led to a moral panic about the dangers of easy prize money, but bingo was defiantly here to stay - and not just as the preserve of older women, as today's mega-halls full of hen night parties show.
WEDNESDAY 06 FEBRUARY 2013
WED 19:00 World News Today (b01qhfk9)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
WED 19:30 Great British Railway Journeys (b00xhxrv)
Series 2
Ledbury to Shrewsbury
Michael Portillo takes to the tracks with a copy of George Bradshaw's Victorian Railway Guidebook. Portillo travels the length and breadth of the country to see how the railways changed us and what remains of Bradshaw's Britain, as he follows the route of the Irish mail from Ledbury to Holyhead.
Michael tastes the Victorian drink perry, a kind of pear cider, gets up close and personal with a pedigree Hereford bull and visits the grandfather of all skyscrapers, the world's first iron-framed building in Shrewsbury.
WED 20:00 Sissinghurst (b00j0c30)
Episode 3
Documentary series about the attempts of writer Adam Nicolson and his wife Sarah Raven to bring farming back into the heart of the estate and garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, their historic home which is owned by the National Trust and was moulded into its present form by Nicolson's grandmother Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson back in the 1930s.
It is March, and Adam and Sarah's quest to change the way Sissinghurst operates is proving difficult, as head gardener Alexis has raised objections to Adam's plans.
Sarah's ideas for transforming the restaurant are not being taken up, so she tries a new tactic and cooks a trial menu. Head chef Steve, trained in French cookery, is not persuaded by Sarah's more rustic ways. She invites Steve and catering manager Ginny to her gardening and cookery school in the hope that they will take her ideas more seriously.
Adam continues to research his book and visits Long Barn, Vita and Harold's first marital home, where Harold announced he had a sexually transmitted disease and confessed to his gay affairs. Adam's sister Juliet takes us to the bedroom where Vita slept and entertained a number of female visitors.
WED 20:30 Nature's Microworlds (b01qhlfg)
Namib Desert
Steve Backshall takes us on a journey to the oldest desert in the world, the Namib in south west Africa, where the treacherous Skeleton Coast sees freezing waters meet a sea of spectacular dunes. With temperatures regularly reaching 60 degrees and with little to no rainfall, the animals that live here have to be tough. Steve tracks down these amazing animals, showing the clever tactics that each employs to combat the heat, before revealing the unique secret that allows life to survive here at all, in such a harsh environment.
WED 21:00 Danny Baker's Great Album Showdown (b01ql9xk)
File under: Pop
What makes a great pop album? Danny Baker celebrates the golden age of the analogue, vinyl LP with pop star Boy George, writer Grace Dent and journalist David Hepworth. Opinionated and impassioned, Baker and his guests select their favourite pop albums and discuss how the LPs of the 60s and 70s were produced - and devoured - in quite a different way to their modern equivalents.
WED 22:00 Bob Servant (b01qhlfj)
Independent
Women and God
Looking for a campaign boost, Bob courts both the religious vote and the women of Broughty Ferry in a daring twin attack. Can he find himself a girlfriend and turn around his faltering campaign? A romantic date brings unexpected danger.
WED 22:30 The Many Faces of... (b018nvwc)
Series 1
Les Dawson
Les Dawson was one of Britain's all time great comedy talents, best known as a comedian but also a talented musician, writer and actor. This programme traces his career, with familiar favourite TV clips and some rare gems from the archives. Together with interviews from friends, relatives and colleagues, the programme unpicks the secrets of his enduring legacy nearly 20 years after his untimely death.
After 'discovery' on the Opportunity Knocks talent show in the 60s, he quickly became a regular face on TV, hosting comedy-led variety shows like Sez Les and The Les Dawson Show. His trademarks were short, pithy jokes, usually targeting his wife or mother in law, long verbose monologues and, perhaps most famously, piano recitals that went hilariously off key.
His reputation attracted guest appearances from some unexpected fans like John Cleese and Shirley Bassey, and he created an overweight dance troupe, The Roly Polys.
The programme shows how his career unfolded and illustrates the different facets of his comedy genius. John Cleese remembers their unlikely friendship, modern comedy stars Robert Webb and Russell Kane talk about his inspiration and Dawson's widow Tracy recalls their marriage and his joy at being a father late in life.
WED 23:30 Manet: the Man Who Invented Modern Art (b00l9csy)
Manet is one of the main candidates for the title of the most important artist there has been. As the reluctant father of Impressionism, and the painter of Dejeuner sur l'herbe, he can probably be accused of inventing modern art. But his story is fascinating on many other levels.
As a piece of compelling biography, Manet's is the unlikely tale of the stubborn son of the most highly placed judge in France who decides to become an artist and embarrass his father. The resulting family tensions are the stuff of legend. His mother, by the way, was from a family that still supplies Sweden with its royalty.
Then there was Manet's dramatic private life, including exotic romantic affairs and a particularly horrible death when, riddled with syphilis and gangrene, Manet had to have his leg amputated.
But none of this would matter a jot were it not for the revolutionary art it provoked and coloured. Always cited as the father of the Impressionists, Manet stubbornly refused to show with them, and was careful to maintain an aesthetic distance from Monet, Renoir and the others. While they worshipped him, he looked down on them, preferring to continue his own remarkable departure from the traditional ways of art. The scandalous paintings with which he made his reputation - the outrageously sexy Olympia, the relentlessly paraphrased Dejeuner sur l'herbe - are the most totemic images in French 19th-century art. And the story of how Manet was rejected from the official salon, and ended up instigating the Salon des Refuses, can be understood as the epoch's key cultural event.
Using the life of Manet as his narrative arch, Waldemar Januszczak tells the story of a complex and difficult man who started a revolution that continues to rumble on today.
WED 01:00 Turner's Thames (b01jv255)
In this documentary, the presenter and art critic Matthew Collings explores how Turner, the artist of light, makes light the vehicle of feeling in his work, and how he found inspiration for that feeling in the waters of the River Thames.
JMW Turner is the most famous of English landscape painters. Throughout a lifetime of travel, he returned time and again to paint and draw scenes of the Thames, the lifeblood of London. This documentary reveals the Thames in all its diverse glory, from its beauty in west London, to its heartland in the City of London and its former docks, out to the vast emptiness and drama of the Thames estuary near Margate.
Turner was among the first to pioneer painting directly from nature, turning a boat into a floating studio from which he sketched the Thames. The river and his unique relationship with it had a powerful impact upon his use of materials, as he sought to find an equivalent in paint for the visual surprise and delight he found in the reality of its waters.
By pursuing this ever-changing tale of light, Turner also documented and reflected upon key moments in British history in the early 19th century; the Napoleonic wars, social unrest and the onset of the industrial revolution. His paintings of the river Thames communicate the fears and exultations of the time.
Turner's greatness as a painter is often attributed to his modern use of colour. Many of his paintings are loved by the British public and regularly celebrated as the nation's greatest art. This film reveals for the first time on television a key inspiration for that modernity and celebrity; a stretch of water of immense importance to the nation in the early 19th century but which today is often taken for granted - the River Thames.
WED 02:00 Nature's Microworlds (b01qhlfg)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:30 today]
WED 02:30 Bob Servant (b01qhlfj)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:00 today]
WED 03:00 Danny Baker's Great Album Showdown (b01ql9xk)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
THURSDAY 07 FEBRUARY 2013
THU 19:00 World News Today (b01qhfkg)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
THU 19:30 The Sky at Night (b08gk543)
The Sun King
The sun is the monarch of the Solar System, but where does its kingdom end? At the furthest outposts, the two Voyager spacecraft are having a surprisingly turbulent time as they leave the sun's realm.
The team are at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, to see how the sun affects our planet. Solar physicist Dr Lucie Green joins them to enjoy the observatory's historic telescopes, which are still being used to gaze at the night sky.
THU 20:00 The Final Frontier? A Horizon Guide to the Universe (p00yjn1x)
Dallas Campbell looks back through almost 50 years of the Horizon archives to chart the scientific breakthroughs that have transformed our understanding of the universe. From Einstein's concept of spacetime to alien planets and extra dimensions, science has revealed a cosmos that is more bizarre and more spectacular than could have ever been imagined. But with every breakthrough, even more intriguing mysteries that lie beyond are found. This great journey of discovery is only just beginning.
THU 21:00 Danny Baker's Great Album Showdown (b01qlcss)
File under: R&B
What is the essence of a great R&B album? Danny Baker celebrates the golden age of the analogue, vinyl LP with soul singer Mica Paris, actor and soul aficionado Martin Freeman and DJ Trevor Nelson. Opinionated and impassioned, Baker and his guests select their favourite soul and funk albums and discuss how the great R&B LPs of the 60s and 70s were a product of their times - and often rapturously received by their audience.
THU 22:00 Lost Kingdoms of South America (b01qhl0d)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 on Monday]
THU 23:00 Queens of British Pop (b00jnjfm)
[Repeat of broadcast at
23:00 on Saturday]
THU 00:05 The Bridges That Built London with Dan Cruickshank (b01jv5nr)
Dan Cruickshank explores the mysteries and secrets of the bridges that have made London what it is. He uncovers stories of Bronze-Age relics emerging from the Vauxhall shore, of why London Bridge was falling down, of midnight corpses splashing beneath Waterloo Bridge, and above all, of the sublime ambition of London's bridge builders themselves.
THU 01:05 The Sky at Night (b08gk543)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]
THU 01:35 America on a Plate: The Story of the Diner (b017ss8x)
Writer and broadcaster Stephen Smith re-envisions the story of 20th-century American culture through its most iconic institution - the diner. Whether Edward Hopper's Nighthawks or the infamous encounter between Pacino and de Niro in Heat, these gleaming, gaudy shacks are at the absolute heart of the American vision.
Stephen embarks on a girth-busting road journey that takes him to some of America's most iconic diners. He meets the film-makers and singers who have immortalised them, and looks at the role diners have played not only in America's greatest paintings and movies, but also in the fight against racial oppression and the chain restaurants' global takeover.
For Stephen, it is because the diner is the last vestige of a vital part of the American psyche - the frontier. Like the Dodge City saloon it is a place where strangers are thrown together, where normal rules are suspended and anything can happen. And it is this crackle of potentially violent and sexual energy that have drawn so many artists to the diner, and made it not a convenient setting but an engine room of 20th-century American culture.
THU 02:35 Danny Baker's Great Album Showdown (b01qlcss)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
FRIDAY 08 FEBRUARY 2013
FRI 19:00 World News Today (b01qhfkm)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
FRI 19:30 The Prince and the Composer: A Film about Hubert Parry by HRH The Prince of Wales (b011g941)
Sir Hubert Parry is simultaneously one of Britain's best-known and least-known composers. Jerusalem is almost a national song, regularly performed at rugby grounds, schools, Women's Institute meetings and the Last Night of the Proms, while Dear Lord and Father of Mankind is one of Britain's best-loved hymns. Everyone knows the tunes, yet hardly anyone knows much about the man who wrote them.
In this film, HRH The Prince of Wales, a longstanding enthusiast of Parry's work, sets out to discover more about the complex character behind it, with the help of members of Parry's family, scholars and performers. This feature-length documentary by the award-winning director John Bridcut offers fresh insight into the life and work of Hubert Parry through the unique perspective of HRH The Prince of Wales.
FRI 21:00 When Albums Ruled the World (b01qhn70)
Between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, the long-playing record and the albums that graced its grooves changed popular music for ever. For the first time, musicians could escape the confines of the three-minute pop single and express themselves as never before across the expanded artistic canvas of the album. The LP allowed popular music become an art form - from the glorious artwork adorning gatefold sleeves, to the ideas and concepts that bound the songs together, to the unforgettable music itself.
Built on stratospheric sales of albums, these were the years when the music industry exploded to become bigger than Hollywood. From pop to rock, from country to soul, from jazz to punk, all of music embraced what 'the album' could offer. But with the collapse of vinyl sales at the end of the 70s and the arrival of new technologies and formats, the golden era of the album couldn't last forever.
With contributions from Roger Taylor, Ray Manzarek, Noel Gallagher, Guy Garvey, Nile Rodgers, Grace Slick, Mike Oldfield, Slash and a host of others, this is the story of When Albums Ruled the World.
FRI 22:30 Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here (b01j0yyv)
John Edginton's documentary explores the making of Pink Floyd's ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here, which was released in September 1975 and went on to top the album charts both in the UK and the US.
Featuring new interviews with band members Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason alongside contributions from the likes of sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson and photographer Jill Furmanovsky, the film is a forensic study of the making of the follow-up to 1973's Dark Side of the Moon, which was another conceptual piece driven by Roger Waters.
The album wrestles with the legacy of the band's first leader, Syd Barrett, who had dropped out of the band in 1968 and is eulogised in the album's centrepiece, Shine On You Crazy Diamond. Pink Floyd had become one of the biggest bands in the world, but the 60s were over and the band were struggling both to find their purpose and the old camaraderie.
FRI 23:30 The Doors - The Story of LA Woman (b01f7y7c)
By 1969, the Doors had found themselves at the forefront of a movement that consisted of a generation of discontents. Operating against a backdrop of the Vietnam War and of social unrest and change in the USA, the Doors were hip, they were dangerous, they were anti-establishment, anti-war and they were hated by middle-America.
Featuring exclusive interviews with surviving band members Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Robby Kreiger and their closest colleagues and collaborators, along with exclusive performances, archive footage and examination of the original multi-track recording tapes with producer Bruce Botnick, this film tells the amazing story of landmark album LA Woman by one of the most influential bands on the planet.
FRI 00:30 Pop Charts Britannia: 60 Years of the Top 10 (b01nwfxs)
Documentary chronicling our ever-changing love affair with the British singles chart on the occasion of its sixtieth anniversary. From the first NME chart in 1952, via Pick and Top of the Pops to home-taping the Radio One chart show and beyond, we have measured out our lives to a wonderful churn of pop driven, unbeknownst to us, by a clandestine world of music biz hustle. Featuring contributions by 60 years of BBC chart custodians from David Jacobs to Reggie Yates, chart fans Grace Dent and Pete Paphides and music biz veterans Jon Webster and Rob Dickins.
FRI 02:00 When Albums Ruled the World (b01qhn70)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
FRI 03:30 Sounds of the 70s 2 (b01hz75h)
Guilty Pleasures - Love Will Keep Us Together
An unashamed celebration of the instantly recognisable classics from the decade of love. A half hour of 'Our Tune' anthems and the soundtrack to many a love affair and wedding party, including performances from The Carpenters, Bread, Charles Aznavour, John Denver, 10cc, Bellamy Brothers, Exile, Captain and Tennille, and Dr Hook.