Johnny Kingdom, gravedigger-turned-amateur filmmaker spends a year recording the bird life in and around his home on his beloved Exmoor.
Johnny has spent three years creating a wildlife habitat on his 52-acre patch of land on the edge of Exmoor. He's been busy nailing nest boxes on tree trunks, planting a wildflower meadow, dredging his pond, putting up remote cameras and wiring them up to a viewing station in his cabin on the land - all the time hoping against hope that not only will he attract new wildlife but also that he will be able to film it.
He is turning his attention to the bird life, hoping to follow some of the species he finds near his home and on his land, across the seasons. We see the transitions from the lovely autumn mists of the oak wood, through the sparkling snow-clad landscape of a north Devon winter, into spring's woodland carpet of bluebells and finally the golden glow of early summer.
The bulk of the series is from Johnny's own camera. Don't expect the Natural History Unit - instead expect passion, enthusiasm, humour and an exuberant love of the landscape and its wildlife.
As spring moves into summer, Johnny is relieved to find a healthy brood of wren chicks and heartened to see that some adults did survive the cold winter. He is thrilled with his footage of swallow chicks, but now faces the challenges of getting close-up shots of the woodpecker chicks and finding a pair of barn owls to film.
Johnny's old friend Bob tries to help out with the woodpecker chicks by fixing a camera on a long pole and Johnny returns to one of his old hides in an attempt to film owl chicks. While Bob's camera brings mixed results, the owl footage is an overwhelming success.
Simon Sebag Montefiore charts the rocky course of Rome's rise to become the capital of western Christendom and its impact on the lives of its citizens, elites and high priests.
Rome casts aside its pantheon of pagan gods and a radical new religion takes hold. Christianity was just a persecuted sect until Emperor Constantine took a huge leap of faith, promoting it as the religion of Empire. But would this divine gamble pay off?
Bradshaw's 1913 Handbook of Indian, Foreign and Colonial Travel in hand, Michael embarks on a stunning rail journey from the Thar Desert in Rajasthan to the Indian capital, taking in desert landscapes and dazzling historic palaces.
From Jodhpur, Michael strikes out into the desert, taking a camel ride to a village where life has changed little in centuries, before embarking on the Jaipur-Agra-Delhi 'Golden Triangle' tour - India's must-do itinerary in 1913 as today. In Jaipur, Michael enjoys a gin and tonic in a lavish former palace before learning about the close ties between the rajahs of Jaipur and British royalty. He takes a polo masterclass from a maharaja and enjoys a shower with a difference, courtesy of an elephant.
Continuing east, Michael breaks his journey in drought-prone Bandikui, where he marvels at the extraordinary architecture of one of India's largest and deepest step wells. In Agra, Michael first glimpses the Taj Mahal from a luxurious hotel room with a view. Heading for a closer look, he learns how this romantic monument built by a Mughal emperor was restored by a British viceroy at the time of his Bradshaw's guide book. Having pre-ordered an on-train lunch using a mobile app, Michael joins the crowds in 'unreserved class' en route to Delhi, where he samples street food in Chandni Chowk before boarding the sparkling new metro towards New Delhi.
Journey's end is at New Delhi, built to house the rulers of the Raj after the capital moved from Calcutta in 1911 and designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens. But even as the crowds cheered King George V at the Delhi Durbar held the same year, anti-British sentiment was growing and soon after New Delhi was complete, India was granted independence.
Professor Saul David uses the BBC archive to chart the history of the world's most destructive war, by chronicling how the story of the battle has changed. As new information has come to light, and forgotten stories are remembered, the history of World War Two evolves. The BBC has followed that evolution, and this programme examines the most important stories, and how our understanding of them has been re-defined since the war ended over 70 years ago.
This programme is based on a film entitled Divided By Race - United in War and Peace, produced by The-Latest.com.
During the Second World War, thousands of men and women from the Caribbean colonies volunteered to come to Britain to join the fight against Hitler. They risked their lives for king and empire, but their contribution has largely been forgotten.
Some of the last surviving Caribbean veterans tell their extraordinary wartime stories - from torpedo attacks by German U-boats and the RAF's blanket-bombing of Germany to the culture shock of Britain's freezing winters and war-torn landscapes. This brave sacrifice confronted the pioneers from the Caribbean with a lifelong challenge - to be treated as equals by the British government and the British people.
In testimony full of wit and charm, the veterans candidly reveal their experiences as some of the only black people in wartime Britain. They remember encounters with a curious British public and confrontation with the prejudices of white American GIs stationed in Britain.
After the war, many veterans returned to the Caribbean where they discovered jobs were scarce. Some came back to Britain to help rebuild its cities. They settled down with jobs and homes, got married and began to integrate their rich heritage into British culture. Now mostly in their 80s and 90s - the oldest is 104 - these pioneers from the Caribbean have helped transform Britain and created an enduring multicultural legacy.
With vivid first-hand testimony, observational documentary and rare archive footage, the programme gives a unique perspective on the Second World War and the history of 20th-century Britain.
Historian Bettany Hughes is in Greece, on the trail of the hugely influential maverick thinker Socrates, who was executed for his beliefs.
Documentary which takes a glorious journey back to the 1950s, when the coach was king. From its early origins in the charabanc, the coach had always been the people's form of transport. Cheaper and more flexible than the train, it allowed those who had travelled little further than their own villages and towns a first heady taste of exploration and freedom. It was a safe capsule on wheels from which to venture out into a wider world.
The distinctive livery of the different coach companies was part of a now-lost world, when whole communities crammed into coach after coach en route to pleasure spots like Blackpool, Margate and Torquay. With singsongs, toilet stops and the obligatory pub halt, it didn't matter how long it took to get there because the journey was all part of the adventure.
Art historian and curator Tobias Capwell celebrates the great age of armour. Referencing the unstoppable rise of the Royal Almain Armoury at Greenwich, he tells the forgotten story of how Henry VIII fused German high technology with Renaissance artistry in the pursuit of one aim - to become the very image of the perfect knight. Using the talents of foreign craftsmen and his court artist Hans Holbein, Henry transformed himself into a living metal sculpture. His daughter Elizabeth I further exploited that image, making her courtiers parade before her in the most innovative and richly decorated works ever commissioned in steel.
TUESDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2019
TUE 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m0008c41)
Series 1
10/09/2019
The latest news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
TUE 19:30 Great Irish Journeys with Martha Kearney (b054c5gv)
Episode 1
Martha Kearney walks in the footsteps of a 19th-century artist and geologist who spent his life charting the landscape, people and buildings of Ireland. She retraces the journey of George Victor Du Noyer, whose 35-year odyssey left a unique record of how Ireland looked during a period of great change.
In this first episode, Martha introduces us to Du Noyer's work. She enjoys his impressions of Glendalough - a place close to the hearts of her own parents. She gets wet at the Bog of Allen. And she marvels at the majesty of the Old Head of Kinsale.
TUE 20:00 Beyond the Walls: In Search of the Celts (b0bt8w56)
Historian Dr Eleanor Barraclough travels through some of Britain’s most beautiful landscapes – Hadrian’s Wall, the Lake District and Offa’s Dyke – in search of new evidence to reveal the true story of the mysterious ancient British tribes often called the Celts.
According to the official history books, the Celts were defeated and pushed to the edges of Britain by waves of Roman and Anglo Saxon invaders. However, a growing body of evidence suggests this is not the full story.
To help give the Celts back their proper place in our history, Eleanor examines freshly discovered treasures, new archaeological evidence from real photographs and clues hidden in ancient poetry to reveal a fresh narrative - one that suggests the relationship between our ancient British ancestors and those who came to conquer them was much less repressive, and far more co-operative, than we have thought.
TUE 20:30 Spotlight on the Troubles: A Secret History (m0008c47)
Series 1
Episode 1
Fifty years after troops were sent onto the streets of Northern Ireland, a leading team of investigative journalists uncover secrets about the decades-long conflict that claimed more than 3,700 lives. Reporter Darragh MacIntyre opens the series, discovering an array of new evidence, including previously classified documents, unseen film and fresh testimony from key new witnesses to the origins of the Troubles. It throws light on the formation of the Provisional Irish Republican Army as well as the parts played by radicals who became elder statesmen like Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness.
In this episode, the Spotlight team traces how, in the 1960s, suspicion led to unrest between unionists and nationalists, undermining Northern Ireland’s government. The arrival of the British Army in August 1969 brought a respite, and the soldiers were enthusiastically greeted as protectors by many nationalists. That relationship was soured by fatal errors and calculated acts of violence. New information about Martin McGuinness’s role at that time is brought to light, and the episode concludes with the destruction of the Northern Ireland government, a moment when IRA members believed they were about to force the British Army out of Northern Ireland.
TUE 22:00 On the Frontline (b09cfyj9)
Squaddies on the Frontline
Squaddies on the Frontline tells the story of the British Army's experience of the Northern Ireland conflict through the eyes of the ordinary men and women that soldiered here. For almost 40 years between 1969 and 2007, a total of over a quarter-of-a-million soldiers served on the streets of Northern Ireland in 'Operation Banner', the British Army's longest ever operation. These men and women were at the heart of the key events of the conflict, with over 700 soldiers killed and more than 6,000 injured, and a further 305 deaths attributed to them. Squaddies on the Frontline is their story, taking viewers into the heart of 'Operation Banner' and the day-to-day realities of life and work here as a soldier through some of the toughest years of the Troubles, looking at the impact that it had, and continues to have, on their lives and the lives of those around them, both here in Northern Ireland and beyond.
TUE 23:00 Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy (b018ct00)
Broadly considered a brand that inspires fervour and defines cool consumerism, Apple has become one of the biggest corporations in the world, fuelled by game-changing products that tap into modern desires. Its leader, Steve Jobs, was a long-haired college dropout with infinite ambition, and an inspirational perfectionist with a bully's temper. A man of contradictions, he fused a Californian counterculture attitude and a mastery of the art of hype with explosive advances in computer technology.
Insiders including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, the chairman who ousted Jobs from the company he founded, and Jobs' chief of software, tell extraordinary stories of the rise, fall and rise again of Apple with Steve Jobs at its helm.
With Stephen Fry, world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and branding guru Rita Clifton, Evan Davis decodes the formula that took Apple from suburban garage to global supremacy.
TUE 00:00 Rebel Physician: Nicholas Culpeper's Fight for Medical Freedom (b0074syr)
Benjamin Woolley presents the gripping story of Nicholas Culpeper, the 17th century radical pharmacist who took on the establishment in order to bring medicine to the masses.
Culpeper lived during one of the most tumultuous periods in British history. When the country was ravaged by famine and civil war, he took part in the revolution that culminated in the execution of King Charles I.
But it is Culpeper's achievements in health care that made him famous. By practicing (often illegally) as a herbalist and publishing the first English-language texts explaining how to treat common ailments, he helped to break the monopoly of a medical establishment that had abandoned the poor and needy. His book The English Physician became the most successful non-religious English book of all time, remaining in print continuously for more than 350 years.
TUE 01:00 Timeshift (b00xf6xk)
Series 10
The Modern Age of the Coach
Documentary which brings the story of the coach up to date, as it explores the most recent phase of Britain's love affair with group travel on four wheels - from school trips and football away-days to touring with bands and 'magic bus' overland treks to India.
The establishment of the National Coach Company may have standardised the livery and the experience of mainstream coach travel in the 1970s, but a multitude of alternative offerings meant the coach retained its hold on the public imagination, with even striking miners and New Age travellers getting in on a very British act.
TUE 02:00 How Quizzing Got Cool: TV's Brains of Britain (b084fs6s)
We all love a good quiz. So here's a question - when did ordinary contestants turn into the pro-quizzers of today? Giving the answers are Victoria Coren Mitchell, Judith Keppel, Chris Tarrant, Mark Labbett, Nicholas Parsons and many more. Narrated by Ben Miller.
TUE 03:00 Smile! The Nation's Family Album (b08j8jj3)
In today's digital age, the classic family photo album has become an object of nostalgic affection. But it's much more than just a collection of sentimental snapshots.
Celebrating everyday moments and shared experiences, family photography offers an intimate portrait of Britain's postwar social history. And each generation had a different camera to tell their story.
Discovering how new technologies and evolving social attitudes inspired the nation to pick up a camera, the film charts a journey from the Box Brownie to Instagram, offering a touching portrait of our changing lives, taken not by the professional photographer but on our own cameras.
With increasingly affordable, quick-to-load and easy-to-use cameras, domestic photography became part of family life in the 20th century.
Suddenly we could all now document our family's celebrations, holidays and hobbies, and capture the most fleeting and precious memories, from birth to death.
We became a nation obsessed with taking photos, and tirelessly curating scrapbooks, and filling shoeboxes and albums with pictures that tell our family's own story.
But with the advent of digital cameras, the era of patiently waiting for the holiday snaps to come back from the processor and carefully arranging them in photo albums feels a long way from today's frenzy of digital images, instantly shared and uploaded...
The film features expert voices explaining the impact of different camera technologies, the role of Kodak in helping create an industry of popular photography, the impact of the digital revolution and the way changes in family photography have also reflected shifts in the family dynamic itself. It's no longer just dad in control of the camera, and mobile phones and social media have turned kids into photographers from a young age...
Among the stories featured in the film...
Using her father's Box Brownie as a young girl, then armed with the latest Kodak instamatic in her teens, and now using a digital SLR, Jenny Bowden's photos capture the past 60 years, from the 1950s street parades to the 60s mods, the 70s fashions when she married and started her own family, the various birthdays, graduations and weddings and deaths, and in the past decade the arrival of her own grandchildren, her albums span across her house. Today when her grandchildren visit, they head straight to the shelves as they love to flick through the albums and see themselves as babies.
Besotted and first-time mum Astrid has taken thousands of photos on her iPhone of her son Alexander since his birth eight months ago. Unlike her own mother Terry, whose photos of Astrid as a baby were considered and less frequent due to the costs of 35mm film, Astrid has the luxury of snapping away all day, taking advantage of the ease and low costs of the digital age, as she records her and Alexander's first year together. Proud Astrid spreads the happiness Alexander brings with Terry and other family via WhatsApp and Instagram.
We meet the English eccentric John Dobson, who has 161 carefully annotated scrapbooks - and counting! His careful curating of happy family memories helped him overcome his own childhood spent in a children's home.
We also meet the devoted Yorkshire dad Ian Macleod, who took a photo of his son every single day until his 21st birthday, and the Slight family in Essex, whose larger-than-life characters grew up in a pub and captured an East End way of life that no longer exists.
And we discover the emotional impact of family photos, with a family movingly sharing the very last film taken on a father's camera before he died.
From the extraordinary to the mundane, family photos capture the intimate moments of our lives. Often overlooked in the official story of photography, this film champions the family photo and the unique portrait it reveals of how the nation tells its own story.
WEDNESDAY 11 SEPTEMBER 2019
WED 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m0008c57)
Series 1
11/09/2019
The latest news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
WED 19:30 Great Irish Journeys with Martha Kearney (b05n8tlg)
Episode 2
Martha Kearney walks in the footsteps of a 19th-century artist and geologist who spent his life charting the landscape, people and buildings of Ireland. She retraces the journey of George Victor Du Noyer, whose 35-year odyssey left a unique record of how Ireland looked during a period of great change.
In this episode, Martha travels north, taking in the extraordinary beauty of Dunluce Castle, and onwards to Mussenden Temple - only a romantic would expect to find a house here and only a lunatic would build it. She marvels at how Belfast was shaped by the Victorians, and visits Kearney Point on the Ards Peninsula to find out what's in a name. And she journeys south to Dunmoe, overlooking the site of the Battle of the Boyne.
WED 20:00 Life of a Mountain (b08f1cc0)
A Year on Blencathra
The sequel to Life of a Mountain: Scafell Pike sees award-winning film-maker Terry Abraham return to the Lake District to showcase 'the people's mountain' - Blencathra.
This spectacular documentary looks at the lives of local residents, schoolchildren and visitors to the mountain with contributions from comedian Ed Byrne, broadcaster Stuart Maconie, mountaineer Alan Hinkes OBE and record-breaking fell runner Steve Birkinshaw.
Abraham's breathtaking photography and stunning time-lapse sequences of this unique landscape will inspire newcomers and regular visitors alike.
WED 21:00 Raiders of the Lost Past with Janina Ramirez (m0008c5c)
Series 1
The Lion Man
The Lion Man takes Nina deep into the dark heart of Nazi Germany, where in a remote cave in late August 1939, archaeologist Robert Wetzel came across the 40,000-year-old artwork now known as the Lion Man.
Just a week later, WWII broke out, the excavation came to halt and, in one of the great mysteries of archaeology, Wetzel never mentioned his incredible find again.
As Janina discovers, the Lion Man represents a revolution in the human story. Half-man and half-animal, it is the first artwork created from the human imagination, revealing the very origins of human art, religion and culture.
But, in fact, Janina learns that it is almost a miracle the Lion Man came to light at all, because it was not pulled out of the cave as a single artwork but as hundreds of tiny ivory shards, found in numerous chance discoveries across eight decades.
This incredible tale of exploration takes Janina from caves in southern Germany to Arctic Norway, as she finds out how the Lion Man gave us our first understanding of the birth of civilisation.
She also explores how the artwork gives us a disturbing insight into one of the most troubled periods in our recent history, asking how a pioneering archaeologist like Robert Wetzel could also believe that an ice-age artwork like the Lion Man could support the ideology of Nazi Germany.
WED 22:00 Vikings (b01ms4xm)
Episode 1
Neil Oliver heads for Scandinavia to reveal the truth behind the legend of the Vikings. In the first programme, Neil begins by discovering the mysterious world of the Vikings' prehistoric ancestors. The remains of weapons-filled war boats, long-haired Bronze Age farmers and a Swedish site of a royal palace and gruesome pagan rituals conjure up an ancient past from which the Viking Age was to suddenly erupt.
WED 23:00 Hidden Killers (b050d700)
The Tudor Home
Dr Suzannah Lipscomb takes us back to Tudor times in search of the household killers of the era.
It was a great age of exploration and science where adventurers returned from the New World with exotic goods previously unknown in Europe. An era in which the newly emergent middle classes had, for the first time, money for luxuries and early consumer goods, many of which contained hidden dangers.
The period also saw a radical evolution in the very idea of 'home'. For the likes of Tudor merchants, their houses became multi-room structures instead of the single-room habitations that had been the norm (aristocracy excepted). This forced the homebuilders of the day to engineer radical new design solutions and technologies, some of which were lethal.
Suzannah discovers that in Tudor houses the threat of a grisly, unpleasant death was never far away in a world (and a home) still mired in the grime and filth of the medieval period - and she shows how we still live with the legacy of some of these killers today.
WED 00:00 Timeshift (b053pxdr)
Series 14
The Nation's Railway: The Golden Age of British Rail
Timeshift revisits Britain's railways during the era of public ownership. For all its bad reputation today, the old British Rail boldly transformed a decayed, war-torn Victorian transport network into a system fit for the 20th century. With an eye firmly on the future, steam made way for diesel and electric, new modern stations like Euston were built, and Britain's first high-speed trains introduced.
Made with unique access to the British Transport Films archive, this is a warm corrective to the myth of the bad old days of rail, but even it can't hide from the horror that was a British Rail sandwich.
WED 01:00 Patrick Kielty's Mulholland Drive (b06wy729)
Patrick Kielty's journey to find the truth about William Mulholland, the man who provided water for Los Angeles. Patrick's family are water men - from his great-grandfather to his father, they all worked for the water company in Northern Ireland. Water runs in his veins, along with gin on a Sunday night. Nowadays his second home is Los Angeles, so he was surprised to discover that the man who gave LA its water, and hence made the city we know today possible, was from Belfast. That man was William Mulholland, and this is Patrick's journey to find out why no-one has really heard of him.
WED 01:50 Life of a Mountain (b08f1cc0)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
WED 02:50 Raiders of the Lost Past with Janina Ramirez (m0008c5c)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
THURSDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2019
THU 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m0008c3c)
Series 1
12/09/2019
The latest news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
THU 19:30 The Sky at Night (m0008c3h)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:30 on Sunday]
THU 20:00 Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession (b00s77pc)
Spirit of the Age
In a series about the extraordinary stories behind maps, Professor Jerry Brotton shows how maps can reveal the fears, obsessions and prejudices of their age.
Religious passion inspires beautiful medieval maps of the world, showing the way to heaven, the pilgrims' route to Jerusalem and monstrous children who eat their parents. But by the Victorian era society is obsessed with race, poverty and disease. Royal cartographer James Wyld's world map awards each country a mark from one to five, depending on how 'civilised' he deems each nation to be. And a map made to help Jewish immigrants in the East End inadvertently fuels anti-semitism.
'Map wars' break out in the 1970s when left-wing journalist Arno Peters claims that the world map shown in most atlases was a lie that short-changed the developing world. In Zurich, Brotton talks to Google Earth about the cutting edge of cartography and at Worldmapper he sees how social problems such as infant mortality and HIV are strikingly portrayed on computer-generated maps that bend the world out of shape and reflect the spirit of our age.
THU 21:00 Lost Films of WWII (m0008c3m)
Series 1
Episode 2
The story of the last years of World War Two, and its immediate aftermath, told through a series of films shot by both civilians and members of the armed forces. They include fascinating footage of Warship Week fundraising events at home, digging for victory, life in the Lincolnshire town of Louth and a first-hand account by an SIS covert operations agent on active duty in the field.
This second episode includes the British breakthrough at El Alamein, revealed by a sergeant who filmed the guns pounding the German positions, and the most complete film of a Bomber Command squadron in action, made by a serviceman stationed at a Lincolnshire base.
Footage shot secretly by islander Olive Thompson offers a unique insight into life under German occupation, while a guard with an interest in home movie-making captured the daily routine of German prisoners of war in POW Camp 633 (Boughton Camp, New Ollerton, Nottinghamshire).
These lost films are a striking reminder of Britain in a different era. With much of the footage in colour, the past leaps to life with immediacy and reveals how world events impacted on the individual at home as well as in action.
THU 22:00 Britain's Greatest Pilot: The Extraordinary Story of Captain Winkle Brown (b045pbq2)
Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown recounts his flying experiences, encounters with the Nazis and other adventures leading up to and during the Second World War. Illustrated with archive footage and Captain Brown's own photos.
THU 23:00 Blackadder (b0078vyl)
Blackadder II
Money
Sitcom set in Tudor England. Edmund is in trouble when he is visited by a debt-collecting bishop armed with a red-hot poker.
THU 23:30 Blackadder (b0078w0y)
Blackadder II
Beer
Comedy series set in Tudor England. There are problems in the Blackadder household due to an embarrassing incident with a turnip, an ostrich feather and a puritanical fat aunt.
THU 00:00 Blackadder (b01jhk72)
Blackadder II
Chains
Classic historical comedy. The evil Prince Ludwig kidnaps both Blackadder and Lord Melchett, and the Queen remembers Blackadder's earlier advice to have nothing to do with any ransom notes. Is our hero doomed, or does Baldrick have a cunning plan?
THU 00:30 Tom Waits: Tales from a Cracked Jukebox (b08g8hj3)
Tom Waits is one of the most original musicians of the last five decades. Renowned for his gravelly voice and dazzling mix of musical styles, he's also one of modern music's most enigmatic and influential artists.
His songs have been covered by Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart and Norah Jones, among many others. But Waits has always pursued his own creative vision, with little concern for musical fashion.
In a long career of restless reinvention, from the barfly poet of his early albums to the junkyard ringmaster of Swordfishtrombones, his songs chronicle lives from the margins of American society - drifters, dreamers, hobos and hoodlums - and his music draws on a rich mix of influences, including the blues, jazz, Weimar cabaret and film noir.
Using rare archive, audio recordings and interviews, this film is a bewitching after-hours trip through the surreal, moonlit world of Waits' music - a portrait of a pioneering musician and his unique, alternative American songbook.
THU 01:30 Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession (b00s77pc)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
THU 02:30 Lost Films of WWII (m0008c3m)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
FRIDAY 13 SEPTEMBER 2019
FRI 19:00 World News Today (m0008c33)
The latest news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
FRI 19:30 BBC Proms (m0008c35)
2019
Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique
Mathew Baynton, Nicholas Collon and the Aurora Orchestra present Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique from memory, in a specially devised production incorporating elements of theatre, spectacular lighting and choreography as well as Berlioz’s own words about his music.
FRI 21:00 Showbands: How Ireland Learned to Party (m00038lv)
Ardal O'Hanlon looks at what started the showband era in Ireland, the people involved, and how it came to an end in the 1980s.
FRI 22:00 Totally British: 70s Rock 'n' Roll (b01r3pm9)
1970-1974
Trawled from the depths of the BBC Archive and classic BBC shows of the day - Old Grey Whistle Test, Top of the Pops and Full House - a collection of performance gems from a totally rock 'n' roll early 1970s.
This was a golden era for British rock 'n' roll as everyone moved on from the whimsical 60s and looked around for something with a bit more oomph! In a pre-heavy metal world bands were experimenting with influences that dated back to 50s rock 'n' roll, whilst taking their groove from old-school rhythm and blues. It was also a time when men grew their hair long!
In a celebration of this era, we kick off with an early 1970s Badfinger number direct from the BBC library and continue the groove from the BBC vaults with classic rock 'n' roll heroes like Free, Status Quo, the Faces, Humble Pie and Mott the Hoople. Plus from deep within the BBC archives we dig out some rarities from the likes of Babe Ruth, Stone the Crows, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Man, Heavy Metal Kids and original rockers Thin Lizzy... to name but a few.
Sit back and enjoy a 60-minute non-stop ride of unadulterated Totally British 70s Rock 'n' Roll!
FRI 23:00 BBC Proms (m0008c37)
2019
Jonny Greenwood Curates
Jess Gillam introduces an evening of music curated by Radiohead lead guitarist and award-winning film composer Jonny Greenwood. Hugh Brunt conducts the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and BBC Proms Youth Ensemble, joined by pianist Katherine Tinkler and violinist Daniel Pioro, in a varied programme culminating in the world premiere of Greenwood’s own Horror vacui for solo violin and 68 strings.
FRI 00:30 The Girl from Ipanema: Brazil, Bossa Nova and the Beach (b07mlkzl)
Documentary in which Katie Derham travels to Rio de Janeiro (where her father was born) to explore the story behind Brazil's most famous and enduring song. Written in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim with lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes, and a later English translation by Norman Gimbel, The Girl from Ipanema defines the moment Brazil charmed the world with a laid-back song about a haunting woman.
It's a vibrant musical journey to the stunning beaches, majestic mountains and buzzy clubs of Rio, where Katie meets key musicians and architects of bossa nova, including Carlos Lyra, Roberto Menescal, Joyce, Daniel Jobim and Marcos Valle, witnesses intimate musical performances, and uncovers the genesis and story behind Brazil's most successful musical export.
The Girl from Ipanema is quintessential bossa nova and tracing its roots reveals the fascinating story of this unique musical style. Invented by a gang of young bohemians in Rio in the late 50s, bossa grew into a 60s phenomenon, especially in the US where it became a youth craze and later a significant part of the modern jazz repertoire. The Girl from Ipanema, as sung by Astrud Gilberto with sax from Stan Getz, went top five in the US and became a major international hit in 1964.
Nothing sums up Rio as well as the simple and seductive lyrics to The Girl from Ipanema. What better way to get to understand the city, its people and its mid-60s zeitgeist than through its most famous song?
FRI 01:30 Showbands: How Ireland Learned to Party (m00038lv)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
FRI 02:30 Totally British: 70s Rock 'n' Roll (b01r3pm9)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:00 today]