Aisholpan is a 13-year-old girl from a remote Mongolian tribe, who dreams of becoming an eagle hunter - just like her father and her grandfather before him. The ancient tradition stretches back over 1,000 years, but Aisholpan's plans are almost dashed at the outset by the male-dominated eagle hunting community, who strongly disapprove of girls taking part, arguing they should stay at home to milk the cows and make the tea. Meanwhile, Aisholpan and her determined father - who passionately believes girls can do anything that boys can - set out to prove she can become Mongolia's first eagle huntress.
Eagle Huntress premiered at Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for best documentary at the 2017 Baftas.
A look back at Victoria Wood's hugely successful television career. Featuring sketches, stand-up, characters and songs from her incredible repertoire as well as exclusive interviews with Victoria and friends and fans, including Dawn French, Julie Walters and Sir Roger Moore.
Phyllida Lloyd directs an all-female production of Shakespeare's great political drama, set in a present-day women's prison.
Julius Caesar depicts the catastrophic consequences of a political leader's extension of his powers beyond the remit of the constitution. As Brutus wrestles with his moral conscience over the assassination of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony manipulates the crowd to frenzied mob violence through his subtle and incendiary rhetoric. What follows is the descent of the country into factions and the outbreak of civil war.
Donmar Warehouse's Shakespeare trilogy began with the production of Julius Caesar - led by Dame Harriet Walter - in 2012 and was followed by Henry IV in 2014 and The Tempest in 2016. All three productions featured all-female casts and were shown to audiences in theatres in London and New York, as well as women and girls in schools and prisons. The film versions were shot in a specially built temporary theatre in King's Cross in 2016.
Anatomist Alice Roberts embarks on an audacious scientific stunt - to rebuild her own body from scratch, editing out errors left behind by evolution; to create the perfect body. With the help of one of the world's best virtual sculptors, Scott Eaton, and top SFX model maker Sangeet Prabhaker, Alice creates a life-size model of the perfect human body, to be revealed in front of 150 people at London's Science Museum.
Through natural selection, animals have evolved incredible biological designs, from supersharp senses to superpowered limbs. Alice is on a hunt to find the very best designs the natural world has to offer and use them to fix the flaws in our own human anatomy.
By meeting leading medical and animal experts, Alice finds out what the body's biggest problems are, and how amazing adaptations in the rest of the animal kingdom could provide inspiration for her perfect body. Using incredible CGI to morph her existing body into new forms, she demonstrates how rethinking our bodies could overcome millennia of natural selection.
Finally, in an epic reveal, Alice unveils the life-sized model of her perfect self in the Science Museum. There, in front of an audience, Alice meets the 'perfect human' version of herself for the first time.
Ambitious, audacious and packed with cutting-edge science, Can Science Make Me Perfect? With Alice Roberts challenges everything you thought you knew about the perfect body.
Kate Williams tells the story of how an unassuming little girl rose to be the most powerful woman in the world. At her birth few believed Princess Victoria would ascend the throne, but a number of untimely deaths and the failure of her uncles to father any children meant that Victoria became heiress to the British throne. The battle between her and her mother the Duchess of Kent, however, was to become a fierce maternal struggle, as the duchess schemed to share in the power and riches that would one day be Victoria's.
Part of the London Review of Books Winter lecture series recorded at the British Museum.
From torn-out tongues to internet trolls, Mary Beard explores how women's voices have been silenced in the public sphere throughout the history of Western culture. Using examples that range from Homer's Odyssey to contemporary politics and from the writings of Henry James to threatening posts on Twitter, Beard argues that public speaking has all too often been regarded as 'men's business' and that commonly held attitudes to the voice of authority need to be readdressed and reappraised. Part of the London Review of Books Winter lecture series recorded at the British Museum.
MONDAY 18 JUNE 2018
MON 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (b0b6z7m2)
Series 1
18/06/2018
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
MON 19:30 Emmeline Pankhurst: The Making of a Militant (b0b7d4jv)
Emmeline Pankhurst led an army of women onto the streets of Britain as the leader of the Suffragettes - but how much do we really know about this global icon? In this documentary, actress Sally Lindsay take a rare look at the personal loves, losses and political passions that transformed this working mum from Manchester into a militant activist campaigning for votes for women.
MON 20:00 Cake Bakers and Trouble Makers (b063f2m0)
In celebration of the WI's centenary, Lucy Worsley goes beyond the stereotypes of jam and Jerusalem to reveal the surprisingly radical side of this Great British Institution.
Beginning on the Welsh island of Anglesey, where the WI's first meeting was held in a garden shed in 1915, Lucy discovers that its humble origins were no bar to the movement's grand ambitions. Some of the institute's founding members were suffragettes and it saw itself as a campaigning organisation, engaged in the fight for women's rights. Lucy explores some of the WI's most important campaigns, like its 1918 crusade for decent housing and its remarkably radical fight for equal pay in 1943.
Lucy uncovers the crucial role the WI played on the home front during both world wars. In the Second World War, the institute's 350,000 members took a leading role in feeding a hungry nation. With the help of some modern WI ladies, Lucy recreates a wartime institute jam factory, thousands of which were set up by branches up and down the country to produce hundreds of tonnes of jam.
When she traces the story of the WI into the post-war period, Lucy discovers that membership began to decline as the institute struggled to cope with the social revolution of the 1960s. To find out how the WI reinvented itself for the 21st century, Lucy meets some of the members who combatted the WI's staid and stodgy image by stripping naked for a charity calendar in 2000. She also joins a protest alongside the Shoreditch Sisters, one of a number of recently formed new-wave WIs whose proudly feminist stance is attracting a new generation of younger members.
MON 21:00 Joan of Arc: God's Warrior (b05x31w3)
Writer and historian Dr Helen Castor explores the life - and death - of Joan of Arc. Joan was an extraordinary figure - a female warrior in an age that believed women couldn't fight, let alone lead an army. But Joan was driven by faith, and today more than ever we are acutely aware of the power of faith to drive actions for good or ill.
Since her death, Joan has become an icon for almost everyone - the left and the right, Catholics and Protestants, traditionalists and feminists. But where in all of this is the real Joan - the experiences of a teenage peasant girl who achieved the seemingly impossible? Through an astonishing manuscript, we can hear Joan's own words at her trial, and as Helen unpicks Joan's story and places her back in the world that she inhabited, the real human Joan emerges.
MON 22:00 Snatches: Moments from Women's Lives (b0b7pb18)
Series 1
Compliance
An actress recounts her meeting with a powerful producer in a hotel room.
MON 22:15 Snatches: Moments from Women's Lives (b0b7pb1b)
Series 1
Outside
A woman looks back on her life of protest, challenging the colour bars in the 1940s and marching for a better world.
MON 22:30 Rebel Women: The Great Art Fight Back (b0b6zgm0)
Out of the tumult and fervour of the late 1960s emerged a generation of artists who set out to start a revolution. As women around the world joined forces to fight for liberation, the formative art movement of the last four decades was about to explode into being. On both sides of the Atlantic, women were tearing up art history and reinventing the arena of art with experimental new mediums and provocative political statements. Questioning everything from the way women were presented in magazines to the right to equal pay, female artists aimed to radically change the way women were perceived.
Mary Kelly caused outrage in the tabloids by displaying dirty nappies at the ICA, Margaret Harrison's depiction of Hugh Hefner as a bunny girl resulted in her exhibition being shut down by the police, and in Los Angeles Judy Chicago founded the first feminist art course and told her students to only study work by women. Alongside interviews with Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid, Suzanne Lacy, Carolee Schneemann, Rose English, Laurie Simmons and Barbara Kruger, The Great Art Fight Back tells the story of these revolutionary artists and celebrates the grit, humour and determination that wrote women back into art history for good.
MON 23:30 The Culture Show (b0441v2p)
Pop Go the Women: The Other Story of Pop Art - A Culture Show Special
The story of pop art has been culturally canonised as the preserve of a ground-breaking gang of boys, focusing on the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton and Tom Wesselman. Just like Andy Warhol's soup cans or Lichtenstein's comics, women were simply commodified objects.
However, back in the day, pop art was not just a boys' club. The scene was full of female artists, tussling with sexuality, violence and consumer culture every bit as much as their male counterparts. Strangely, their work has been consigned to the margins of history - they started out together, shared the same art dealers and were shown in the same exhibitions, but as the boys' prices skyrocketed, those that the girls could fetch stayed put. By the end of the sixties, they had pretty much been erased from the pop narrative.
In this Culture Show special, Alistair Sooke tracks down the forgotten women artists of pop, finding many of them are still alive and working, their art and their stories ripe for rediscovery. Artists featured include Pauline Boty, Marisol, Rosalyn Drexler, Idelle Weber, Letty Lou Eisenhauer and Jann Haworth.
MON 00:30 Virago: Changing the World One Page at a Time (b0817n9n)
Despite the 1960s free-love and alternative culture, many women found that their lives and expectations had barely altered. But by the 1970s, the Women's Liberation Movement was causing seismic shifts in the march of the world's events, and women's creativity and political consciousness was soon to transform everything - including the face of publishing and literature.
In 1973 a group of women got together and formed Virago Press - an imprint, they said, for 52 per cent of the population. These women were determined to make change - and they would start by giving women a voice, by giving them back their history and reclaiming women's literature.
Patronized and welcomed, criticized and praised, these women published books that showed the world how they saw it. They took out loans and invested their own money into the company, trusting and believing they could change lives through books - novels, nonfiction and polemics.
It is a story that continues today, over 40 years later, as a new generation of young feminists find their voice. This is the account of a determined group of women from 1973 to today - writers and readers who fuelled a revolution in how the world sees women and how women see themselves.
MON 01:30 Suffragettes Forever! The Story of Women and Power (b0544j0j)
Episode 1
In this series, historian Amanda Vickery explores why, in the early 20th century, thousands of British women joined a violent militant organisation. In the struggle for women's political rights in Britain, the most iconic are the suffragettes - but for Vickery the story begins long before these Edwardian activists.
The suffragette campaign was the inevitable conclusion of a fight that women, rich and poor, had been pursuing for hundreds of years against a system that gave men complete legal, political and physical control over the other half of the population. In this first programme Vickery describes how a wife was the property of her husband - who could if he chose, beat, rape or even sell her to another man. But the revolutionary politics of the late 18th century opened a crack in the door.
From a wife sale at Hailsham cattle market, to the bloodstained streets of Paris on the trail of the grandmother of British feminism, to the heroic Manchester women attacked at Peterloo, to the great opportunity of the Great Reform Act, Vickery describes how at every step men furiously resisted giving women an inch.
MON 02:30 Cake Bakers and Trouble Makers (b063f2m0)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
TUESDAY 19 JUNE 2018
TUE 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (b0b6z7mf)
Series 1
19/06/2018
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
TUE 19:30 Up the Women (b02108p1)
Series 1
Episode 1
Margaret has discovered the women's suffrage movement and invites the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle to become (the hilariously ineffectual) Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Requests Women's Suffrage.
TUE 20:00 Fair Cop: A Century of British Policewomen (b0555wj7)
With 2015 marking the 100th anniversary of the first British policewoman being given the power of arrest, this film takes us through the remarkable history of 100 years of Britain's female police force. It explores the individual careers and ambitions of women police officers who, through their bravery and guile, were determined to succeed in a profession that never wanted them. It's a story of class, drive and sheer guts, entwined with a darker side of sexism, snobbery, intimidation and betrayal.
Includes interviews with former policewomen who pushed boundaries in the profession such as Sislin Fay Allen, Britain's first black policewoman, Cressida Dick, Britain's highest-ever-ranking policewoman, Alison Halford, who brought a high-profile sex discrimination charge against the police, and Jackie Malton, who provided the model for Prime Suspect's Jane Tennison. These interviews are combined with fascinating facts and illuminating stories from expert historians and current serving officers who have made their careers in the specialist areas of the mounted police and firearms units.
This is a story about ingenuity and determination as well as law and order. A Fair Cop is a hidden history of our society, depicting a battle of the sexes that masked a battle for power.
TUE 21:00 Kate Adie's Women of World War One (b04dr5pd)
Distinguished war reporter Kate Adie examines the impact of women's work on the Home Front during the First World War.
Innovations included the first women's police force, women's football and female surgeons operating on men. Adie argues that what truly mattered though was whether these changes in women's lives were long-lasting or viewed as 'only for the duration'.
TUE 22:00 Snatches: Moments from Women's Lives (b0b7rkk9)
Series 1
Bovril Pam
A secretary in the 1960s starts to explore her sexuality.
TUE 22:15 Snatches: Moments from Women's Lives (b0b7rkkc)
Series 1
Pig Life
A monologue inspired by women who spoke out about their shocking experiences, to make marital rape illegal in England.
TUE 22:30 She-Wolves: England's Early Queens (b01bgpm7)
Matilda and Eleanor
In the medieval and Tudor world there was no question in people's minds about the order of God's creation - men ruled and women didn't. A king was a warrior who literally fought to win power then battled to keep it. Yet despite everything that stood in their way, a handful of extraordinary women did attempt to rule medieval and Tudor England. In this series, historian Dr Helen Castor explores seven queens who challenged male power, the fierce reactions they provoked and whether the term 'she wolves' was deserved.
Eight hundred years ago, Matilda came within a hair's breadth of being the first woman to be crowned queen of England in her own right. Castor explores how Matilda reached this point and why her bid for the throne ultimately failed. Her daughter-in-law Eleanor of Aquitaine was an equally formidable woman. Despite being remembered as the queen of courtly love, in reality during her long life she divorced one king and married another, only to lead a rebellion against him. She only finally achieved the power she craved in her seventies.
TUE 23:30 A Timewatch Guide (b06zdll0)
Series 2
Queen Elizabeth I
Vanessa Collingridge examines the life of Elizabeth Tudor, with particular interest in how documentary television and the BBC has examined her legacy and interrogated her reign. Using Timewatch and other BBC archive stretching back over 60 years, Vanessa looks at her upbringing, her conflicts with her enemies including Mary, Queen of Scots, and her greatest victory against the Spanish Armada. The programme seeks to understand how Elizabeth I created a legacy that we still live with today, and examines how that legacy has changed over the centuries.
TUE 00:30 A Timewatch Guide (b0824wgr)
Series 3
Women, Sex and Society
We are living through one of the greatest revolutions in history. One that has changed how we live in Britain forever, and yet many of us don't even notice it is happening.
This revolution is the ongoing transformation of the rights and role of women. Historian and broadcaster Helen Castor examines the fundamental shifts that have taken place in Great Britain in this Timewatch Guide to Women, Sex and Society.
Drawing on the Timewatch strand through the years plus decades of BBC archive, Helen investigates how this period of tumultuous change in our culture has been documented on television. From the heroic suffragette struggle for the female vote in the early part of the last century, right through the social and sexual rebellion of the 1960s and beyond, Helen explores how change has been driven by successive waves of feminism and activism, with each wave redefining what women want.
TUE 01:30 Suffragettes Forever! The Story of Women and Power (b054qbxy)
Episode 2
In this second programme Vickery describes the paradox for British women of a female queen who thought women's rights campaigners deserved a good whipping. But during Victoria's reign extraordinary women gradually changed the lives and opportunities of their sex despite successive governments furiously resisting giving women the vote.
Vickery introduces us to the spurned mistress of a prime minister, who lost custody of her own children but won the first piece of modern feminist legislation - child custody rights for mothers. Plus a passionate campaigner who raised the age of consent and overthrew pernicious laws against prostitutes, a Cambridge undergraduate who proved that girls could even be better at maths than boys and undermined the centuries old prejudice that a Cambridge education was for men only, and a certain Mrs Pankhurst and her daughters, who decided that after so many years of women campaigning for the vote, it was now time to resort to deeds rather than words.
TUE 02:30 Fair Cop: A Century of British Policewomen (b0555wj7)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
WEDNESDAY 20 JUNE 2018
WED 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (b0b6z7mt)
Series 1
20/06/2018
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
WED 19:30 Up the Women (b02l9j0t)
Series 1
Episode 2
Keen to put the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Requests Women's Suffrage on the map, the women plan to picket the post office with placards.
WED 20:00 Shopgirls: The True Story of Life Behind the Counter (b0485fz3)
Here Come the Girls
Today, it is taken for granted that many shop assistants are women, but 150 years ago, being served by a shopgirl was a strange new phenomenon, and the story of how an army of women swept on to shop floors is a fascinating one.
Dr Pamela Cox presents this three-part series following the journey of the shopgirl from an almost invisible figure in stark Victorian stores, to being the beating heart of modern shops. With retail the biggest private sector employer in the UK today, this series charts how shopgirls have been central to Britain's retail revolution and at the cutting edge of social change.
Pamela begins in the mid-19th century, when shops up and down the country were owned and staffed by men, and shop work was a closed world for most women. A new, emerging middle class had money to spend, but the idea of shopping as a pleasurable experience was still a world away.
As jobs opened in factories, shops no longer had the same ready supply of young male apprentices, and groups actively sought to promote women's employment and shrug off the notion that shop work was somehow 'unladylike'.
The Victorians became consummate shoppers and the experience of shopping became more attuned to the demands of female customers who preferred being served by women. By the late 19th century, the doors to shops across the country were flung open and thousands of women poured in looking for work. Pamela lifts the lid on the working conditions and realities of life for shopgirls, many of whom 'lived in' above the shops and new department stores.
By the turn of the century, nearly a quarter of a million women were employed in shop work. They had forged new kinds of work for women and even helped transform the experience of shopping itself. The shopgirl was here to stay.
WED 21:00 The Many Primes of Muriel Spark (b09qlx14)
Kirsty Wark celebrates the life and work of Dame Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and one of the 20th century's most enigmatic cultural figures, on the one-hundredth anniversary of her birth.
Born in Edinburgh, Muriel's extraordinary life took her to colonial Africa, wartime London, literary New York and vibrant 1960s Rome. Her most famous novel - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - immortalised the city of her childhood but with an added darkness and acerbic wit that became her trademark style.
Kirsty retraces Muriel's footsteps from the cobbled streets of Edinburgh to the sublime beauty of Victoria Falls. Contributions from writers AL Kennedy, Janice Galloway, Ali Smith, William Boyd and Val McDermid tell of Muriel Spark's unique literary style and a life full of reinvention.
Kirsty meets with the journalist Alan Taylor, who has recently published his memoir of Muriel, and she travels to Italy for the first television interview with Penelope Jardine, Muriel's close friend of 40 years.
WED 22:00 Snatches: Moments from Women's Lives (b0b7rmkx)
Series 1
Reclaim the Night
A monologue capturing the moment when a 19-year-old in Leeds in 1977 decides she won't be confined to her house.
WED 22:15 Snatches: Moments from Women's Lives (b0b7rml0)
Series 1
Pritilata
A monologue inspired by the story of Pritilata Waddedar, who campaigned for Bengali women to get the right to vote in 1930s colonial India.
WED 22:30 Being the Brontes (p03kcd3l)
To mark the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Bronte's birth, Martha Kearney, novelist Helen Oyeyemi and journalist Lucy Mangan travel to Haworth Parsonage, the home of Charlotte and her sisters Emily and Anne, to discover the inspiration behind their classic novels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.
Just two years before the books were published, prospects for the three unmarried sisters were bleak. Their brother was battling alcoholism, Charlotte was hopelessly in love with a married man and their father was going blind. But by 1848 they were a literary sensation. To find out how this extraordinary turnaround happened, Martha, Lucy and Helen each immerse themselves in the life of a Bronte sister. From everyday routines at the Parsonage to walks on windswept moors, from harsh schooldays to misadventures as governesses, the trio learn how the Brontes combined literary genius with real-life experience to create some of the best-loved novels in the English language.
WED 23:30 The Culture Show (b048s4tj)
2014/2015
Girls Will Be Girls
At the height of the punk explosion almost 40 years ago, a handful of women completely redefined what a woman in music could do. Through sheer talent and lack of fear, they pushed themselves on to a male-dominated music scene and became part of a movement that radically changed the cultural landscape.
Along with Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene and Chrissie Hynde, the Slits were among punk's most important figures and their guitarist Viv Albertine’s memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, chronicles life as part of this revolutionary vanguard.
Miranda Sawyer meets up with Viv Albertine and some of the other key female figures of the era, including Chrissie Hynde, The Raincoats, and punk anti-heroine Jordan, to look at how they inspired a generation of young women with the notion that anyone could do anything if they wanted to. And she explores whether the punk spirit still survives today.
WED 00:00 The Culture Show (b038zfvb)
2013/2014
The Culture Show at Edinburgh: Funny Women
Sue Perkins explores the highs and lows of being a woman in the unashamedly macho world of stand-up comedy. With unique behind-the-scenes access to the most important date in the stand-up comedy calendar, Sue discovers the thrills of a good gig and the spills of a disparaging review as she follows three stand-up comedians at the Edinburgh Festival: Bridget Christie, Claudia O'Doherty and Dana Alexander.
Also featuring interviews with Jo Brand, Lucy Porter, Jo Caulfield, Andi Osho and Shappi Khorsandi; Sue finds out how her fellow female stand-ups got hooked on comedy and why they keep taking the knocks and coming back for more.
WED 00:30 Shopgirls: The True Story of Life Behind the Counter (b0485fz3)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
WED 01:30 Suffragettes Forever! The Story of Women and Power (b055npp6)
Episode 3
In the final episode of her story of British women's fight for power, the historian Amanda Vickery explores how the Edwardian suffragette movement became a quasi-terrorist organisation. She asks what they achieved with their violent campaign and argues they are best understood as part of a war still going on today.
Vickery brings to life the enemies of female suffrage too, from the golfing prime minister Herbert Asquith, who had nightmares of being stripped naked by angry suffragettes, to the furious anti-suffrage societies and their mass meetings in the Royal Albert Hall. She describes the political skulduggery to stop women getting the vote and the increasing extremism of the suffragettes in response.
So what did the suffragettes achieve? Vickery describes the political backroom deal that finally allowed some women the vote, the abusive treatment of the first female MP Lady Astor and the misogynistic backlash of the 1920s, revealed through attitudes to a great women's football team. The series concludes looking ahead 50 years after women won the vote to Margaret Thatcher. Was her election a sign that the suffragette dream had been fulfilled, or is this a fight that is still going on today?
WED 02:30 The Many Primes of Muriel Spark (b09qlx14)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
THURSDAY 21 JUNE 2018
THU 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (b0b6z7nc)
Series 1
21/06/2018
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
THU 19:30 Up the Women (b02w7hlx)
Series 1
Episode 3
The Banbury Intricate Craft Circle try to win approval to become an official league of the Women's Social and Political Union.
THU 20:00 Egypt's Lost Queens (b04gnhv5)
Professor Joann Fletcher explores what it was like to be a woman of power in ancient Egypt. Through a wealth of spectacular buildings, personal artefacts and amazing tombs, Joann brings to life four of ancient Egypt's most powerful female rulers and discovers the remarkable influence wielded by women, whose power and freedom was unique in the ancient world.
Throughout Egypt's history, women held the title of pharaoh no fewer than 15 times, and many other women played key roles in running the state and shaping every aspect of life. Joann Fletcher puts these influential women back at the heart of our understanding, revealing the other half of ancient Egypt.
THU 21:00 The Genius of Marie Curie - The Woman Who Lit up the World (b01s954d)
Over 80 years after her death, Marie Curie remains by far the best-known female scientist. In her lifetime, she became that rare thing - a celebrity scientist, attracting the attention of the news cameras and tabloid gossip. They were fascinated because she was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and is still the only person to have won two Nobels in two different sciences. But while the bare bones of her scientific life, the obstacles she had to overcome, the years of painstaking research and the penalty she ultimately paid for her discovery of radium have become one of the iconic stories of scientific heroism, there is another side to Marie Curie - her human story.
This multi-layered film reveals the real Marie Curie, an extraordinary woman who fell in love three times, had to survive the pain of loss, and the public humiliation of a doomed love affair. It is a riveting portrait of a tenacious mother and scientist, who opened the door on a whole new realm of physics, which she discovered and named - radioactivity.
THU 22:00 Snatches: Moments from Women's Lives (b0b7rpjd)
Series 1
Multiples
The experience of a woman accused of killing her child, who fights to overturn her conviction.
THU 22:15 Snatches: Moments from Women's Lives (b0b7rpjg)
Series 1
Tipping Point
A pregnant woman in the future is being pursued on social media. She contemplates what world she will be bringing her child into.
THU 22:30 Horizon (b00791tq)
2005-2006
The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow
Dr Temple Grandin can talk to the animals; she has a legendary ability to read the animal mind and understand animal behaviour when no-one else can. But this is no feat of telepathy; her explanation is simple - she is convinced she experiences the world much as an animal does, and it is all down to her autistic brain. Labelled 'retarded' at three years old, she didn't learn to speak until she was five, but at nearly 60 she is an associate professor of animal science and one of the most famous people with autism on the planet. This is the intimate story of Temple's journey from despair to worldwide fame.
THU 23:20 Beautiful Minds (b00ry9jq)
Series 1
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Who are the modern men and women who will be remembered for the brilliance of their minds? What are their legacies and what can their extraordinary discoveries tell us about the nature of science and the nature of truth?
In the first of a three-part series, Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell describes how she discovered pulsars, the by-products of supernova explosions which make all life in the universe possible. She describes the moments of despair and jubilation as the discovery unfolded and her excitement as pulsars took the scientific world by storm.
Profoundly reflective about the nature of scientific discovery, she shares her thoughts on the connections between religion and science and describes how she see science as a search for understanding rather than a quest for truth.
THU 00:20 Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing (p030s5bx)
Ada Lovelace was a most unlikely computer pioneer. In this film, Dr Hannah Fry tells the story of Ada's remarkable life. Born in the early 19th century, Ada was a countess of the realm, a scandalous socialite and an 'enchantress of numbers'. The film is an enthralling tale of how a life infused with brilliance, but blighted by illness and gambling addiction, helped give rise to the modern era of computing.
Hannah traces Ada's unlikely union with the father of computers, Charles Babbage. Babbage designed the world's first steam-powered computers - most famously the analytical engine - but it was Ada who realised the full potential of these new machines. During her own lifetime, Ada was most famous for being the daughter of romantic poet Lord Byron ('mad, bad and dangerous to know'). It was only with the advent of modern computing that Ada's understanding of their flexibility and power (that they could be far more than mere number crunchers) was recognised as truly visionary. Hannah explores how Ada's unique inheritance - poetic imagination and rational logic - made her the ideal prophet of the digital age.
This moving, intelligent and beautiful film makes you realise we nearly had a Victorian computer revolution.
THU 01:20 Egypt's Lost Queens (b04gnhv5)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
THU 02:20 Rebel Women: The Great Art Fight Back (b0b6zgm0)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:30 on Monday]
FRIDAY 22 JUNE 2018
FRI 19:00 World News Today (b0b6z7nv)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
FRI 19:30 Secret Knowledge (b05wps6k)
Nina Simone & Me with Laura Mvula
Over half a century since she first performed her songs, Nina Simone is more popular than ever. From Sinnerman to Mississippi Goddam, Feeling Good to My Baby Just Cares for Me, she is an artist with an extraordinary songbook that mixes jazz, blues, soul and even classical.
British soul singer Laura Mvula travels to New York to celebrate the Nina songs that mean most to her and explore their musical roots. Performing with a Harlem gospel choir, uncovering the influence of Nina's classical training and meeting Simone's long-time guitarist Al Shackman, Laura presents a personal tribute to the genius of her musical hero.
FRI 20:00 Unsung Heroines: Danielle de Niese on the Lost World of Female Composers (b0b6znwz)
Danielle de Niese explores the lives and works of five female composers - from the Middle Ages to the late 20th century - who were famous in their lifetimes, but whose work was then forgotten.
Western classical music has traditionally been seen as a procession of male geniuses, but the truth is that women have always composed. Hildegard of Bingen, Francesca Caccini, Clara Schumann, Florence Price and Elizabeth Maconchy - all these women battled to fulfil their ambitions and overcome the obstacles that society placed in their way. They then disappeared into obscurity, and only some have found recognition again.
FRI 21:00 Girl in a Band: Tales from the Rock 'n' Roll Front Line (b06l17fn)
All too often, every great female rock musician has to answer a predictable question - what is it like being a girl in a band?
For many, the sight of a girl shredding a guitar or laying into the drums is still a bit of a novelty. As soon as women started forming their own bands they were given labels - the rock chick, the girl band or one half of the rock 'n' roll couple.
Kate Mossman aims to look beyond the cliches of fallen angels, grunge babes and rock chicks as she gets the untold stories from rock's frontline to discover if it has always been different for the girl in a band.
FRI 22:00 Sisters in Country: Dolly, Linda and Emmylou (b081sx50)
Documentary which explores how Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris's careers took off in the 1970s with very distinct takes on country before they ended up uniting as close harmony singers and eventually collaborated on 1987's four-million-selling debut album, Trio.
In the 60s country music was viewed by most of America as blue collar, and Dolly was country through and through. Linda Ronstadt's take on classic country helped make her the biggest female star in mid-70s America. Folkie Emmylou learned about country from mentor Gram Parsons and, after his death in 1973, she became a bandleader in her own right. It was Emmylou and Linda - the two west coast folk rockers - who voiced their mutual appreciation of Dolly, the mountain girl singer from Tennessee, when they became early students of her work.
The artists talk about uniting as harmony singers and eventually collaborating on their debut album, Trio. The album helped launch the mountain music revival that would peak with the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou. In 2012 Linda Ronstadt was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which left her unable to sing, but 2016 saw unreleased songs from their sessions compiled to create a third Trio album. This is the story of how their alliance made them pioneers in bringing different music worlds together and raising the game for women in the country tradition.
Contributors: Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Rodney Crowell, George Lucas, Peter Asher, Chris Hillman, Laura Cantrell, Robert K Oermann, John Boylan, Phil Kaufman, David Lindley, Albert Lee, Herb Pedersen, George Massenberg and Applewood Road.
FRI 23:00 Girls in Bands at the BBC (b06mxpjc)
Compilation celebrating some guitar band performances at the BBC that feature some of the best female musicians in rock. Beginning with the oft-forgotten American group Fanny performing You're the One, it's a journey along rock's spectrum from the 1970s to now.
The selection includes the powerful vocals of Elkie Brooks on Vinegar Joe's Proud to Be a Honky Woman, the mesmerising poetry of Patti Smith's Horses and the upbeat energy of The Go-Go's on We Got the Beat.
Mighty basslines come courtesy of Tina Weymouth on Psycho Killer and Kim Gordon on Sugar Kane, whilst we trace the line of indie rock from the Au Pairs through Lush, Elastica and Garbage to current band Savages.
FRI 00:00 Queens of British Pop (b00jnjfm)
Episode 1
Queens of British Pop and narrator Liza Tarbuck offer a celebration of six female pop stars, singers and icons that lit us up from the early 60s to the late 70s.
Programme one tells the story of Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw, Marianne Faithfull, Suzi Quatro, Siouxsie Sioux and Kate Bush - some of the female artists that emerged alongside some of Britain's defining musical movements, from the swinging sixties through to glam rock and punk.
The programme gives an insight into the lives of these top female artists, offering first-hand or eyewitness accounts of the highs, the lows and the obstacles they had to overcome. The selected artists have pushed boundaries, played around with gender roles and had their private lives overshadow their success, but it is their experiences that have helped change the face of British pop as we know it today.
Includes new interviews with Sandie Shaw, Marianne Faithfull, Suzi Quatro, Siouxsie Sioux and contributions from Tom Jones, Lulu, Burt Bacharach, John Lydon, Martha Reeves, Nancy Sinatra, Mark Radcliffe, Henry Winkler, Marc Almond, Peter Gabriel, Claire Grogan, Jarvis Cocker, Kiki Dee, Nigel Havers, Lily Allen and Adele, to name but a few.
FRI 01:00 Queens of British Pop (b00jt56r)
Episode 2
A celebration of six queens of British pop music, and a look at their impact between 1980 and 2009.
This programme profiles Annie Lennox, Alison Moyet, Kylie Minogue, Geri Halliwell, Amy Winehouse and Leona Lewis. These female stars take us from post-punk to The X Factor, with a slice of girl power along the way.
Narrated by Lisa Tarbuck, with contributors including Annie Lennox, Dawn French, Dave Stewart, Alison Moyet, Pete Waterman, Alexandra Burke, Leona Lewis, Lily Allen, Adele, Marc Almond and more.
FRI 02:00 Unsung Heroines: Danielle de Niese on the Lost World of Female Composers (b0b6znwz)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
FRI 03:00 Secret Knowledge (b05wps6k)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]