SUNDAY 30 MARCH 2014

SUN 19:00 Timeshift (b03fv7sl)
Series 13

Full Throttle: The Glory Days of British Motorbikes

Timeshift returns with an exploration of the British love of fast, daring and sometimes reckless motorbike riding during a period when home-grown machines were the envy of the world. From TE Lawrence in the 1920 to the 'ton-up boys' and rockers of the 1950s, motorbikes represented unparalleled style and excitement, as British riders indulged their passion for brands like Brough Superior, Norton and Triumph.

But it wasn't all thrills and spills - the motorbike played a key role during World War II and it was army surplus bikes that introduced many to the joy and freedom of motorcycling in the 50s, a period now regarded as a golden age. With its obsession with speed and the rocker lifestyle, it attracted more than its fair share of social disapproval and conflict.

Narrated by John Hannah.


SUN 20:00 The Review Show (b03zq4c8)
Martha Kearney and guests Sarah Churchwell, Sarfraz Manzoor and Paul Morley discuss Harry Hill's X Factor musical I Can't Sing; the UK premiere of the Tony Award-winning Urinetown; Richard Ayoade's film adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Double; Designs of the Year at the Design Museum; BBC One's World War One drama The Crimson Field; and Richard King's book On Offence. Plus music from Ben Watt and Bernard Butler.


SUN 21:00 The Poet who Loved the War: Ivor Gurney (b03zq4cb)
Documentary presented by writer Tim Kendall which tells the remarkable story of the First World War soldier-poet who broke all the rules. Ivor Gurney wasn't an officer but a private who bizarrely joined up in the hope that the ordered army life would help ease a mental health condition. Initially this shock therapy worked, but he was eventually shot and gassed and spent the last 15 years of his life in an asylum.

Yet the poetry he wrote there is uniquely powerful - capturing the experience of the ordinary soldier - and the film argues that it is the equal of the work of any of the more well-known soldier-poets of WWI. Gurney was also an accomplished composer and all the music used in the film is his, some of it hauntingly written on the Western Front.


SUN 22:00 Mark Lawson Talks To... (b03zq4cd)
Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending and his latest, Levels of Life is a memoir of bereavement following the loss of his wife to cancer. He talks candidly to Mark Lawson about love, death, memory and grief.


SUN 23:00 What Do Artists Do All Day? (b03y85dl)
Albert Watson

Documentary following Albert Watson over the course of a day photographing the barren, beautiful landscape of the Isle of Skye.

Edinburgh-born Albert Watson is one of the world's most successful commercial and fashion photographers. He has lived in the US for over 30 years, where he has photographed more than 100 Vogue covers and created some of the most iconic celebrity images of the 20th century, from Albert Hitchcock to Naomi Campbell.

In recent years he has turned to landscape photography, and in this film he comes back to Scotland for his latest project. Albert reflects on his past work and discusses the challenges of transferring his unique style to landscape photography.


SUN 23:30 The Pendle Witch Child (b013fj47)
Simon Armitage presents the extraordinary story of the most disturbing witch trial in British history and the key role played in it by one nine-year-old girl. Jennet Device, a beggar-girl from Pendle in Lancashire, was the star witness in the trial in 1612 of her own mother, her brother, her sister and many of her neighbours and, thanks to her chilling testimony, they were all hanged.

Armitage explores the lethal power and influence of one child's words - a story of fear, magic and demonic pacts retold partly with vivid and innovative hand-drawn animation. He discovers how Jennet's appearance in the witness box cast its shadow way beyond Lancashire, impressing lawyers, politicians, clerics and even King James I himself, and setting a dark precedent for child testimony in witch trials as far away as America. Finally, in a dramatic twist to the tale, he reveals how, 22 years after the original trial, Jennet's own words were very nearly the death of her - when she herself was put on trial, accused of being a witch by a 10-year-old boy.

With the help of historians Malcolm Gaskill, Diane Purkiss and Ronald Hutton, Armitage attempts to get inside Jennet's head and understand how the illegitimate and illiterate youngest child of a family of beggars could become both pawn and player in a much bigger story of 17th-century religion, power, law, science and the monarchy.

What made Jennet speak out so everyone she knew would die? And how did the courts decide to admit her evidence and allow her example to create a precedent for accepting the testimony of other child witnesses who wanted to send their neighbours to the gallows?

Although the events in this film may date back 400 years, its issues resonate today as much as ever - when to believe our children, how the police and the court system should handle child witnesses and above all how, in times of crisis, fear of evil can easily lead us to behave in ways which may corrode the very values that we most wish to protect.


SUN 00:30 Timeshift (b03fv7sl)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 today]


SUN 01:30 Robert Plant: By Myself (b00vy78w)
Documentary in which Robert Plant discusses his musical journey from Stourbridge, the British blues boom, superstardom with Led Zeppelin in the 70s to 2010's Band of Joy album. He also looks at his work with the Honeydrippers and North African musicians, his reunion with Jimmy Page and his pairing with Alison Krauss.


SUN 02:30 The Genius of Bert Jansch: Folk, Blues and Beyond (b03tdd6m)
Interviews and rare archive footage weave together performances from a landmark multi-artist concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London, celebrating the songs and artistry of the great folk-blues troubadour Bert Jansch.

Ralph McTell, Robert Plant, Donovan, members of Pentangle, Bernard Butler, Martin Carthy, Martin Simpson, Lisa Knapp and more pay tribute to Jansch, who died in 2011.

Robert Plant shows his vocal prowess with a powerful rendition of Go Your Way My Love, joined by Jansch collaborator Bernard Butler. Martin Simpson and Danny Thompson surprise with a version of Heartbreak Hotel, a track covered by Jansch. Ralph McTell tackles the seminal Angie and Lisa Knapp and Martin Carthy combine for Blackwaterside - Jansch's arrangement of which heavily influenced Led Zep's Black Mountain Side.

An effortlessly cool singer-songwriter and virtuoso guitarist, Bert Jansch came to prominence in the folk clubs of the mid-1960s: the concert's stage set recalls the legendary Les Cousins club in London's Soho, where he was a resident artist, and the Royal Festival Hall itself was the venue for Pentangle's first and final major gigs. Jansch galvanized a whole scene, through his solo work, as a duo with John Renbourn and with his folk-jazz supergroup Pentangle. Neil Young called him the Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar, Led Zeppelin and Paul Simon were weaned on him and younger generation musicians including Beth Orton and Johnny Marr beat a path to his door. Bert Jansch's influence reached far and wide.