Katty Kay in Washington and Christian Fraser in London return to report on the events that are shaping the world.
For one day the canals are closed and fleets of row boats take to the water. As temperatures soar, Venetians and visitors turn out in their thousands to celebrate the ancient tradition of rowing. At the same time, the police try to rein in speeding motor boats while, on the city's outskirts, an enormous anti-flood system is being built. As the team prepares to lower millions of pounds of technology weighing over 20 tons into the Venice lagoon, nerves are mounting. Without it, Venice is at risk of disappearing under the water.
In the first episode, Dr Alice Roberts looks at how our skeleton reveals our incredible evolutionary journey.
Trekking through the forests of our ancient ancestors, she goes to meet the apes who still live there today - chimpanzees. In six million years we have become very different, and what kick-started this can be found in an extraordinary fossil - Sahelanthropus. A single hole where the spine was attached suggests that our ancestors started the journey to being human by standing upright. We take it for granted, but standing up and walking is surprisingly complex - each step involves the co-ordination of over 200 muscles.
Charting the major advances from Australopithecus to Homo erectus and beyond, Alice tells the epic story of human evolution through our body today. New research has uncovered clues in our ankles, waists and necks that show how our ancestors were forced to survive on the open plain - by walking and running for their lives. From the neck down we have inherited the body of our ancestor Homo erectus, who lived on the plains of Africa nearly two million years ago.
Finally Alice looks at probably the most important advance in our evolutionary story. A fortuitous by-product of standing up was freeing up our hands. With pressure-sensitive gloves, she demonstrates how the tiniest of anatomical tweaks to our thumbs and little fingers transformed hands that evolved to grasp branches into ones that could use tools. And with our dexterous hands, our species, Homo sapiens, would change the world.
in the Bones show is in fact KNM-ER 1813 rather than TM266-01-60-1. However, the information stated about the fossil Sahelanthropus is correct.
Isolated since the time of the dinosaurs, New Zealand's wildlife has been left to its own devices, with surprising consequences. Its ancient forests are still stalked by predators from the Jurassic era. It's also one of the most geologically active countries on earth.
From Kiwis with their giant eggs, to forest-dwelling penguins and helicopter-riding sheep dogs, meet the astonishing creatures and resilient people who must rise to the challenges of their beautiful, dramatic and demanding home.
Rosie Yates is a nine-year-old girl with a severe learning disability due to an undiagnosed chromosomal disorder, living with her dad Simon, mum Emily and brother Ben. It's a typical Saturday for the family, starting with an attempt to get Rosie to the park for some fresh air. She refuses to cooperate, and afterwards she's similarly uncooperative with her dinner. As Simon and Emily are later distracted, Rosie causes carnage in the kitchen.
For the first time in Blue Peter's history, this documentary reveals the true character of those working behind and in front of the camera on Britain's longest continuously running children's programme.
It charts Blue Peter's evolution from a hobbies show about dolls and trains to the BBC's flagship children's programme and discovers how Blue Peter was very nearly taken off air.
Presenters of every Blue Peter generation give candid accounts of what it was like to work on the programme, and the editors past and present fight back at critics who say the show was too middle class.
Narrated by Juliet Stevenson, Blue Peter Confidential questions whether Blue Peter still has a future in the multi-channel digital age and sets the record straight on the missing Blue Peter presenter who until now has been written out of the BBC archives.
The story of Blue Peter's fondly remembered canines. The programme follows Bonnie through a normal studio day, uncovers the scandal of the dog who died and had to be replaced, and why John Noakes and the BBC fell out over Shep's future.
A 1968 programme following Blue Peter presenters Valerie Singleton, John Noakes and Peter Purves as they set off from Television Centre in London and go on a safari through Morocco, ending up on the edge of the Sahara.
Profile of the legendary Blue Peter editor Biddy Baxter, with contributions from Sarah Greene, Valerie Singleton, Simon Groom and Peter Purves. Includes clips from previous Blue Peter programmes. Presented by Sarah Dunant.
Following the grandeur of Baroque, Rococo art is often dismissed as frivolous and unserious, but Waldemar Januszczak disagrees. In this three-part series he re-examines Rococo art and argues that the Rococo was actually the age in which the modern world was born. Picking three key territories of Rococo achievement - travel, pleasure and madness - Waldemar celebrates the finest cultural achievements of the period and examine the drives and underlying meanings that make them so prescient.
The final episode focuses on the Rococo's descent into madness. When you spend as much time as the Rococo did having fun and escaping reality, madness soon sets in. The 18th century is seen as the era of frivolity and enjoyment, but in an age of such decadence there was also the brutish satire of Hogarth, the mysterious masked figures of Longhi, the anguish of Messerschmidt and the depths of Goya's macabre genius.
WEDNESDAY 17 OCTOBER 2018
WED 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (b0bmq9kp)
Series 1
17/10/2018
Katty Kay in Washington and Christian Fraser in London return to report on the events that are shaping the world.
WED 19:30 Venice 24/7 (b01fq2l6)
The Grand Finale
The city comes together to celebrate a 500-year-old religious festival... with a rave. The waterways and canal banks are packed as Venetians eat, drink and get merry. There are drunken party-goers at risk of falling in the water, an unconscious patient that paramedics struggle to reach, argumentative revellers, and a giant firework display to end the series with a bang.
WED 20:00 Dancing Cheek to Cheek: An Intimate History of Dance (b04smrrc)
Revolution on the Dance Floor
Len Goodman and Lucy Worsley reveal how Britain's dance floors were revolutionised in the 19th century, as the slow and stately dances of an earlier era were replaced with new dances that were faster, freer and a lot more fun.
The Industrial Revolution changed the way ordinary people danced, and at Queen Street Mill in Burnley, Len uncovers the fascinating story of how factory workers developed clog dancing to imitate the sounds and rhythms of the machinery they used. Lucy discovers how upper-class dancing tastes were transformed by the introduction of the waltz at the beginning of the 19th century, which allowed couples to dance scandalously close.
In the 19th century, a greater proportion of the population than ever before lived in cities, and Len visits one of London's most beautiful Victorian gin palaces to find out about the drinking and the dancing that went on at a typical working-class knees-up. Whilst the working classes were letting their hair down, the middle classes were enjoying the latest dance music in the comfort of their own homes thanks to the invention of the upright piano. Lucy tries her hand at the 19th century's favourite tune - the Blue Danube waltz - on the piano once played by the Brontë sisters.
At the Czech and Slovak Club in London, Len discovers the rustic roots of the 19th century's biggest dance craze - the polka. Together Len and Lucy take a series of polka classes with Darren Royston, historical dance teacher at RADA, as they prepare to dance it at a grand finale ball dressed in their full Victorian finery.
WED 21:00 Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry's Mysterious World of Maths (b0bntkp1)
Series 1
Expanded Horizons
In this new series, mathematician Dr Hannah Fry explores the mystery of maths. It underpins so much of our modern world that its hard to imagine life without its technological advances, but where exactly does maths come from? Is it invented like a language or is it something discovered, part of the fabric of the universe? As we increasingly come to rely on maths, this question becomes more important to answer.
In this episode, Hannah travels down the fastest zip wire in the world to learn more about Newton's ideas on gravity. His discoveries revealed the movement of the planets was regular and predictable. James Clerk Maxwell unified the ideas of electricity and magnetism, and explained what light was. As if that wasn't enough, he also predicted the existence of radio waves. His tools of the trade were nothing more than pure mathematics. All strong evidence for maths being discovered.
But in the 19th century, maths is turned on its head when new types of geometry are invented. No longer is the kind of geometry we learned in school the final say on the subject. If maths is more like a game, albeit a complicated one, where we can change the rules, surely this points to maths being something we invent - a product of the human mind. To try and answer this question, Hannah travels to Halle in Germany on the trail of perhaps one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Georg Cantor. He showed that infinity, far from being infinitely big, actually comes in different sizes, some bigger than others. This increasingly weird world is feeling more and more like something we've invented. But if that's the case, why is maths so uncannily good at predicting the world around us? Invented or discovered, this question just got a lot harder to answer.
WED 22:00 Empire (b01dtk57)
Making a Fortune
Jeremy Paxman continues his personal account of Britain's empire, looking at how the empire began as a pirates' treasure hunt, grew into an informal empire based on trade and developed into a global financial network. He travels from Jamaica, where sugar made plantation owners rich on the backs of African slaves, to Calcutta, where British traders became the new princes of India.
Jeremy then heads to Hong Kong, where British-supplied opium threatened to turn the Chinese into a nation of drug addicts - leading to the brutal opium wars, in which Britain triumphed and took the island of Hong Kong as booty.
Unfair trading helped spark the independence movement in India, led by Mahatma Gandhi; in a former cotton spinning town in Lancashire, Jeremy meets two women who remember Gandhi's extraordinary visit in 1931.
WED 23:00 Building the Ancient City: Athens and Rome (b0680lw2)
Rome
Rome was the world's first ancient megacity. At a time when few towns could number more than 10,000 inhabitants, more than a million lived in Rome. But in a world without modern technology, how on earth did the Romans do it? How did they feed their burgeoning population, how did they house them, and how did they get them into town without buses or trains? How on earth did the Romans make their great city work?
In the final episode of the series, Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill takes us up ancient tower blocks, down ancient sewers, and above 2,000-year-old harbour basins still filled with water, to find out. He reveals how this city surpassed all those from the ancient world that had gone before.
From the pedestrianisation of the forum to a global transport hub built right next to modern Italy's transport epicentre, Fiumicino Airport, we see how this visionary approach to public projects was not matched for nearly 2,000 years. We discover how Nero - the emperor blamed for fiddling whilst Rome burned - was in fact responsible for the transformation of the finest fire brigade in the ancient world and the creation of the first fire regulations. We uncover made-over Roman apartment blocks complete with piped water, and modern libraries that are in fact ancient Roman buildings constructed two millennia ago.
Last but not least, Professor Wallace-Hadrill uncovers the secret of Rome's success - the planning still captured on pieces of an 1,800-year-old marble map of the city, a map which shows that astonishingly, in many places, the street plan of Ancient Rome mirrors that of the city today in exact detail.
WED 00:00 Masters of the Pacific Coast: The Tribes of the American Northwest (b07m772h)
Arrival
Two-part documentary in which archaeologist Dr Jago Cooper explores the extraordinary and resilient culture of the American north west, revealing one the most inspiring stories in human history.
1,400 miles of rugged, windswept and rocky coastline in what is now the Alaskan panhandle, British Columbia and Washington state have been home to hundreds of distinct communities for over 10,000 years. Theirs is the longest continuing culture to be found anywhere in the Americas. They mastered a tough environment to create unique and complex communities that have redefined how human societies develop. They produced art infused with meaning that ranks alongside any other major civilisation on earth. And they were very nearly wiped out - by foreign disease, oppression and theft of their lands. But a deep connection to the environment lies at the heart of their endurance and, unlike many indigenous cultures annihilated following European contact, their culture sustains and has much to offer the rest of the world today.
Jago sees how a complex society developed without agriculture. The answer lies in the extraordinary way in which the people understood and mastered their environment, which in turn is reflected in their identity and social structures. He reveals the hidden significance in totem poles, canoes and intricate textiles, arguing that the peoples of the north west coast achieved the highest levels of cultural achievement.
WED 01:00 Dancing Cheek to Cheek: An Intimate History of Dance (b04smrrc)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
WED 02:00 Carved with Love: The Genius of British Woodwork (b01psbwz)
The Extraordinary Thomas Chippendale
Thomas Chippendale is the most famous furniture designer the world has ever produced, but what about the man behind the chairs? This episode shows how Chippendale worked his way up from humble roots to working for the nobility, but also how he was ruined by the very aristocrats he created such wonders for.
WED 03:00 Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry's Mysterious World of Maths (b0bntkp1)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
THURSDAY 18 OCTOBER 2018
THU 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (b0bmq9l0)
Series 1
18/10/2018
Katty Kay in Washington and Christian Fraser in London return to report on the events that are shaping the world.
THU 19:30 The Sky at Night (b0bntqjf)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:00 on Sunday]
THU 20:00 Human Universe (p0276ppy)
Why Are We Here?
Brian Cox reveals how the wonderful complexity of nature and human life is simply the consequence of chance events constrained by the laws of physics that govern our universe. But this leads him to a deeper question - why does our universe seem to have been set up with just the right rules to create us? In a dizzying conclusion Brian unpicks this question, revealing the very latest understanding of how the universe came to be this way, and in doing so offers a radical new answer to why we are here.
THU 21:00 The Motorway: Life in the Fast Lane (b04jrt72)
The Need for Speed
Documentary series following the army of workers who keep the traffic flowing on one of the busiest stretches of road in Britain - where the country's longest motorway, the M6, meets four other major routes.
Meet the Highways Agency staff who scour 450 motorway CCTV cameras, on the lookout for anything that that can cause a problem in this high-speed environment. Whether it is a lost caravan wheel in the fast lane or a broken-down sewage lorry straddling the slow lane, their mission is to alert other drivers to the danger and to clear the lanes as quickly as possible.
Out on the road, pothole inspector Steve Taylor travels the motorway at a steady 50mph on the lookout for potentially dangerous potholes in need of urgent repair. Steve feels he's stuck right in the middle of a go-fast world, as his team of road workers have to close a carriageway of the M6 to fill a pothole - and face the wrath of frustrated drivers.
The Central Motorway Police Group is a specialist team working across the West Midlands motorways. PCs Mark Crozier and Karl Davies work for the Collision Investigation Unit. They respond to a fatal incident where a person has jumped from a motorway bridge on to a live carriageway in the early hours of a Saturday morning. The resulting investigation means two different motorways are closed for a number of hours but whilst the subsequent congestion is a problem, it is the emotional cost to those working in a high-speed environment that is all too evident. To help them cope with incidents like this, chaplain Viv Baldwin volunteers one day a week as an independent listening ear for police officers dealing with the more traumatic aspects of the motorway.
THU 22:00 Simon Schama's Rough Crossings (b00796gl)
Simon Schama presents a drama-documentary that charts the extraordinary journey of the American slaves who fought for the British side in the American War of Independence and were then led by a young Englishman to Africa. There, they struggled to establish a colony in Sierra Leone, where they could be free.
THU 23:25 Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners (b062nqpd)
Profit and Loss
In 1834 Britain abolished slavery, a defining and celebrated moment in our national history. What has been largely forgotten is that abolition came at a price. The government of the day took the extraordinary step of compensating the slave owners for loss of their 'property', as Britain's slave owners were paid £17bn in today's money, whilst the slaves received nothing.
For nearly 200 years, the meticulous records that detail this story have lain in the archives virtually unexamined - until now. In an exclusive partnership with University College London, historian David Olusoga uncovers Britain's forgotten slave owners. Forensically examining the compensation records, he discovers the range of people who owned slaves and the scale of the slavery business.
What the records reveal is that the slave owners were not just the super-rich. They were widows, clergymen and shopkeepers - ordinary members of the middle-classes who exploited slave labour in distant lands. Yet many of them never looked a slave in the eye or experienced the brutal realities of plantation life.
In Barbados, David traces how Britain's slave economy emerged in the 17th century from just a few pioneering plantation owners. As David explores the systemic violence of slavery, in Jamaica he is introduced to some of the brutal tools used to terrorise the slaves and reads from the sadistic diaries of a notorious British slave owner. Elsewhere, on a visit to the spectacularly opulent Harewood House in Yorkshire, he glimpses how the slave owners' wealth seeped into every corner of Britain.
Finally, amongst the vast slave registers that record all 800,000 men, women and children in British hands at the point of abolition, David counts the tragic human cost of this chapter in our nation's history.
THU 00:25 Tom Jones at the BBC (b00vz5ml)
An archive celebration of Tom Jones's performances at the BBC from the start of his pop career in the mid-60s to Later...with Jools Holland in 2010 and all points in between, including Top of the Pops and The Dusty Springfield Show. A chronological celebration of Sir Tom through the years that is also a history of music TV at the BBC over most of the past 50 years.
THU 01:25 Classic Albums (b07ljcxf)
[Repeat of broadcast at
23:45 on Saturday]
THU 02:25 Human Universe (p0276ppy)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
FRIDAY 19 OCTOBER 2018
FRI 19:00 World News Today (b0bmq9lf)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
FRI 19:30 Top of the Pops (b0bntnh0)
Simon Bates and Bruno Brookes present the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 10 July 1986. Featuring Midnight Star, The Real Roxanne, Owen Paul, Rod Stewart, Bananarama and Madonna.
FRI 20:00 Synth & Beyond with Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert (b0bnk6vc)
New Order's Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert unpack a playlist of electro, pop and new wave classics spanning four decades. Stephen and Gillian have been married for 24 years and have been in New Order together for even longer, but they still manage to surprise one another with their musical tastes. While Stephen declares Captain Beefheart an early influence, Gillian confesses her teenage love for a disco classic. During an hour of top tunes, Stephen also reveals the moment he was mistaken for Stevie Wonder, and Gillian recalls how her Dad was a fan of punk.
From Kraftwerk to Can, David Bowie to Kate Bush, Magazine to Grace Jones and many more, this stellar playlist by Stephen and Gillian is brimming with iconic performances.
FRI 21:00 Rock 'n' Roll America (b0623809)
Be My Baby
In the years bookended by Buddy Holly's death in early 1959 and The Beatles landing at JFK in spring 1964, rock 'n' roll calmed down, went uptown and got spun into teen pop in a number of America's biggest cities. Philadelphia produced 'teen idols' like Fabian who were beamed around the country by the daily TV show Bandstand. Young Jewish songwriters in New York's Brill Building drove girl groups on the east coast who gave a female voice to teenage romance. Rock 'n' roll even fuelled the Motown sound in Detroit and soundtracked the sunshiny west coast dream from guitar instrumental groups like The Ventures to LA's emerging Beach Boys.
In the early 60s, rock 'n' roll was birthing increasingly polished pop sounds across the States, but American teens seemed to have settled back into sensible young adulthood. Enter the long-haired boys from Liverpool, Newcastle and London.
Featuring exclusive interviews with Jerry Lee Lewis, Ben E King, Chubby Checker, Ronnie Spector, Barrett Strong, Eric Burdon and Pat Boone.
FRI 22:00 Synth Britannia at the BBC (b00n93c6)
A journey through the BBC's synthpop archives from Roxy Music and Tubeway Army to New Order and Sparks. Turn your Moogs up to 11 as we take a trip back into the 70s and 80s!
FRI 23:00 The People's History of Pop (b07ycbr8)
1976-1985 Tribal Gatherings
Pauline Black, lead singer of Two Tone band The Selecter, looks at the years 1976-1985, when she first picked up a guitar and when music got involved in passionate protest and the high street filled with colourful factions of music lovers.
After a lot of big hair and big rock stars, punks brought pop back down to earth and, out of that, music lovers shattered into an array of pop tribes who posed with passion.
We hear from a man who loved listening to pop hits on Radio 1 and who recorded his own 'Record for the Day' in his incredible picture diary every day. And one former student at a college in Surrey tells how a ball at his graduation was saved by a favourite rock star when the headline act pulled out - neighbour Elton John popped over and played an intimate set on the college's grand piano.
We speak to fans whose lives were changed forever by punk, and the members of an Asian punk band who were inspired by the music to shout for what they believed in at Rock Against Racism gigs and marches. Mods, a Numanoid and a fan of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal explain why they chose their tribes, while Two Tone was the music that tried to unite the kids and just get them dancing. The reverend of Kerry parish shares her unstoppable love of Duran Duran, much to the regret of her punk fiancé. And pop fans were brought together by the experience of Live Aid, when music changed the world outside of us.
Unearthed pop treasures include a tambourine punched through by Sid Vicious, played by a Sex Pistols fan as he sang with the band on the Great Rock n Roll Swindle album. A former music promoter shares some rare items from the Sex Pistols' ill-fated Anarchy in the UK tour, and the son of artist Ray Lowry shows Pauline the drawings his dad did of The Clash's summer American tour in 1979, when Ray was taken as their 'war artist'. We feature some precious material that gives us an insight into the thinking of The Clash's lead singer, Joe Strummer.
FRI 00:00 Top of the Pops (b0bntnh0)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]
FRI 00:30 Sound of Song (b04y4qpt)
The Recording Revolution
Songs are the soundtrack of our lives and it takes a kind of genius to create a true pop masterpiece. But, as Neil Brand argues, there is more to consider in the story of what makes a great song. Neil looks at every moment in the life cycle of a song - how they are written, performed, recorded and the changing ways we have listened to them. He reveals how it is the wonderful alchemy of all of these elements that makes songs so special to us.
To open the series, Neil investigates how songs were recorded for the first time, the listening revolution in the home that followed and the birth of a new style of singing that came with the arrival of the microphone - crooning. He also looks at the songwriting genius of Irving Berlin and the interpretative power of singers Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby.
FRI 01:30 Synth & Beyond with Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert (b0bnk6vc)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
FRI 02:30 Rock 'n' Roll America (b0623809)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]