Katty Kay in Washington and Christian Fraser in London report on the events that are shaping the world.
In the third match of the Christmas series for university alumni is the team from the Pembroke College, Cambridge, with host of TV's Impossible Rick Edwards and former Olympic rower Cath Bishop. They fight it out for a place in the semis with King's College, London, whose team includes Any Answers? presenter Anita Anand and Radio 4 The Kitchen Cabinet panellist Zoe Laughlin.
Dr Suzannah Lipscomb explores the time when British people embraced modern design for the first time after years of austerity and self-denial. The look and feel of the postwar 1950s home - a 'modern' world of moulded plywood furniture, fibreglass, plastics and polyester - had its roots in the innovative materials discovered during World War II. In fact, no other war before or since has had such a profound effect on the technologies of our current life. This bright new era encompassed a host of social changes including higher living standards and improved technologies, but - as Suzannah discovers - there were also unexpected dangers lurking throughout the changing home.
The team are on an archaeological hunt of our more recent past as they follow the search for artefacts from World War II. They join marine archaeologists in the Solent as they raise the once-in-a-lifetime find of a Fairey Barracuda dive bomber. More than 2500 Barracudas were in service during the war, but not a single complete plane survives today. Naoíse Mac Sweeney joins the post-excavation to reveal how the find could help bring this rare aircraft back to life.
Also featured, a dig in the Lake District that tells the moving story of the Windermere Boys and the role the area played in rehabilitating these children liberated from the Nazi concentration camps after World War II.
In Aldbourne, Wiltshire, the search is on for the most famous American unit of the US army, 'Easy Company', whose paratroopers were stationed there in 1943 and 1944. Archaeologists are particularly looking for any personal items of this renowned regiment to gain insight into the lives of its soldiers in the months and days leading up to the D-Day invasion.
And off a beautiful beach in Devon, divers plumb the depths to discover more about a secret wartime military exercise that may have remained buried from view if it hadn't been for the curiosity of a local amateur archaeologist.
Vic presents Bob with a striking new wig, Vic reveals his secret to beatboxing, and the Man with the Stick returns. Sketches include the Free Runners and Frank Roddam's latest inventions.
Paul fishes at the famous Bridge Pool near Christchurch in Dorset, hoping to catch sea trout. Bob arrives late but redeems himself by hooking the first fish of the day. After a glorious morning, Paul persuades Bob to charter a boat out to sea in search of sea bass. Bob has a history of sea sickness and is not keen, but eventually they venture out to the Needles, where Paul makes an incredible catch. The fish is too big for Bob to handle, so they head off to a local restaurant to prepare it. Bob performs a small cameo as an irritating waiter.
In this final episode, Paul and Bob decide to try and catch a legendary pike, which is perhaps not the best idea for two men of a certain age with heart problems.
In the cosy cottage where they are staying, they invite a consultant cardiologist for dinner to talk about their medical past and their future, gaining tips on how to live the most healthy life possible. Facing the future, they write a eulogy for each other as the sun sets on their final fishing expedition.
In central Thailand's forests, fertile plains and even city streets, nature finds a way of living alongside people. Spirituality can be found in human and animal relationships, both likely and unlikely. This bustling region is known as the nation's rice bowl - but even here, there are magical places to be found.
Continuing his exploration of the collision of the West and Pacific culture, James Fox explores how, ever since Captain Cook's voyages 250 years ago, the West has created a myth of Polynesia as paradise and, in doing so, destroyed the riches of indigenous culture.
He travels across the Pacific to uncover the sites and masterpieces of pre-contact Polynesian art, from the religious complex Taputapuatea on the island of Raiatea to the feathered 'Ku' heads from Hawaii, testament to the rich and sophisticated societies that once lived there. Yet, when Europeans encountered these cultures, waves of explorers, missionaries and colonisers destroyed what they didn't understand and appropriated what was left.
James Fox shows how, from Captain Cook's time onward, these islands were re-imagined as a paradise with women available to be exploited. It's an idea he traces from the Arcadian landscapes depicted by Cook's on-board artist, William Hodges, through the art of Paul Gauguin and on to the tacky holiday idyll of modern Hawaii. And yet, James Fox finds, some indigenous artists are fighting back, reviving the traditional cultures of Polynesia and using art to protest against the objectification of its women.
Andrew Graham-Dixon looks at how the seemingly peaceful countries of Holland and Belgium - famous for their tulips and windmills, mussels and chips - were in fact forged in a crucible of conflict and division. He examines how a period of economic boom driven for the first time by a burgeoning and secular middle class led to the Dutch golden age of the 17th century, creating not only the concept of oil painting itself, but the master painters Rembrandt and Vermeer combining art and commerce together as we would recognise it today.
THURSDAY 12 DECEMBER 2019
THU 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m000c5yy)
Series 1
12/12/2019
Katty Kay in Washington and Christian Fraser in London report on the events that are shaping the world.
THU 19:30 University Challenge (b0bx6v9p)
Christmas 2018
Exeter University v Birmingham University
It is match five of the special Christmas series for distinguished alumni. In the Exeter team are producer of The Generation Game and Red Dwarf Paul Jackson and news correspondent Jon Kay. They are fighting it out for a place in the semis against Birmingham University, featuring comedian Chris Addison and actor Nigel Lindsay.
Jeremy Paxman asks the questions.
THU 20:00 Wonders of the Solar System (b00rz5ys)
Original Series
Aliens
Professor Brian Cox visits some of the most stunning locations on earth to describe how the laws of nature have carved natural wonders across the solar system.
Brian descends to the bottom of the Pacific in a submarine to witness the extraordinary life forms that survive in the cold, black waters. All life on Earth needs water so the search for aliens in the solar system has followed the search for water.
Soaring above the dramatic Scablands of the United States, Brian discovers how the same landscape has been found on Mars. And it was all carved out in a geological heartbeat by a monumental flood.
Armed with a gas mask, Brian enters a cave in Mexico where bacteria breathe toxic gas and leak concentrated acid. Yet relatives of these creatures could be surviving in newly discovered caves on Mars.
But Brian's sixth wonder isn't a planet at all. Jupiter's moon Europa is a dazzling ball of ice etched with strange cracks. The patterns in the ice reveal that, far below, there is an ocean with more potentially life-giving water than all the oceans on Earth.
Of all the wonders of the solar system forged by the laws of nature, there is one that stands out. In the final episode of this series, Brian reveals the greatest wonder of them all.
THU 21:00 Timeshift (b01q9vhy)
Series 12
The Joy of (Train) Sets
The Model Railway Story: From Hornby to Triang and beyond, this documentary explores how the British have been in love with model railways for more than a century. What began as an adult obsession with building fully engineered replicas became the iconic toy of 50s and 60s childhood. With unique archive and contributions from modellers such as Pete Waterman, this is a celebration of the joys of miniaturisation. Just don't call them toy trains!
THU 22:00 The Secret Story of Stuff: Materials of the Modern Age (b0bqjrpt)
Welcome to the magical world of materials, where designer, materials engineer and enthusiast Zoe Laughlin explores the stuff that shapes the world around us. Everything, from the cars we drive to the clothes we wear is manufactured from something. From her workshop at the Institute of Making, Zoe travels the country to discover the alchemy behind the latest developments in the science of those materials. Everlasting dental crowns are being 3D printed in Loughborough. In Chester, vets are repairing broken bones with porous metals. New textiles with thread 8 times stronger than cotton is the latest revolution in fashion and in London, fungus is being used to make a self extinguishing insulation that could revolutionise the construction industry. Bringing these wondrous material innovations back to her workshop Zoe puts them through their paces and in the process reveals why now is the most exciting time to be exploring this Stuff.
THU 23:00 Wild West - America's Great Frontier (b07zvr81)
The High Country
America's high country is the land of grizzly bears and giant trees, of frigid winters and scorching summers, of tough ranchers and gold-rush fever. From the Rockies to the Sierra Nevada, survival demands endurance and know-how. From parasitic plants to thieving black bears, tenacious pikas and battling bison, it's in the high country that the west gets really wild.
THU 00:00 Oceans Apart: Art and the Pacific with James Fox (b0blhn4t)
Series 1
New Zealand
Concluding the series on the clash between the West and Pacific peoples and cultures, James Fox explores how New Zealand's indigenous Maori people resisted colonisation and marginalisation and maintained their distinctive culture, so much so that it is now an integral part of modern New Zealand.
He encounters some of the greatest works of Maori carving, from the exquisitely painted paddles given to Captain Cook, to works by one of the great masters of Maori art, Tene Waitere, and shows how, from the beginning of their encounters with Europeans, the Maori adapted outside influences, whether it was modern firearms or the new religion of Christianity and produced fascinating hybrid work that ranges from elaborately carved rifle butts to a Madonna and child statue adorned with the Ta Moko, the sacred Maori facial tattoo.
Today, James Fox finds Maori culture in the midst of a full-scale Renaissance, embraced not only by the Maori themselves but all New Zealanders.
THU 01:00 Handmade in the Pacific (b0blhnjs)
Series 1
Pou
Maori master carver Logan Okiwi Shipgood crafts a beautiful 6ft tall 'pou' statue from native New Zealand timber. With chainsaws, adzes, and around 30 chisels, Logan gradually reveals the figure of Hene Te Akiri, a Maori warrior princess, as he lovingly chips away at the wood. Inlaid with sacred shells and given a powerful facial tattoo to denote her social rank, the finished statue is finally revealed to the public.
Logan explores the deep spiritual connection between Maori carvers and the objects they create, and the significance of his home - Rotorua - in the revival of Maori art and culture in the 20th century. For Maori today, carving remains a key way of telling stories and honouring ancestors, and Logan - an internationally famous sculptor and carver - is proud to be doing his bit to keep these traditions alive.
THU 01:30 Handmade in the Pacific (b0bm6pjv)
Series 1
Kapa
Indigenous Hawaiian artist Dalani Tanahy spends weeks painstakingly beating tree bark into a sheets of cloth-like fabric. This ancient Hawaiian artform known as 'kapa' was once the staple material of the islands. But after Captain Cook introduced cotton, and the Americans overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy, kapa-making completely disappeared.
Dalani is one of a handful of dedicated practitioners who has spent her life bringing this artform back. Why? Because kapa-making has become integral to the nascent Hawaiian cultural nationalism that is taking hold in indigenous communities of Hawaii. Kapa-making has become a powerful source of pride and identity, but it's a lot of work. Trees have to be planted and tended, cut, stripped, and the bark beaten and fermented. Then sheets of bark are joined together to make a single sheet. Natural dyes and paints are printed on. And only then is the kapa ready to be worn.
Dalani takes us through the process of making a piece of kapa from start to finish, and delivers her kapa to a dancer, who plans to use this kapa as a traditional 'hula' skirt.
The film ends with an emotional performance at the Royal Palace in Honululu, Hawaii. A traditional 'hula' dance is performed, to honour Hawaii's last monarch, Queen Lilo'uokalani. Like the kapa itself, the Queen, rudely overthrown by Americans, has become a symbol of reborn Hawaiian identity.
THU 02:00 Ovid: The Poet and the Emperor (b09g0l2q)
Michael Wood explores the life, works and influence of one of the world's greatest storytellers who died 2,000 years ago. When an Elizabethan literary critic said that the witty soul of Ovid lived on in 'honey tongued Shakespeare', they were just stating the obvious. Ovid, everyone knew, was simply the most clever, sexy and funny poet in the western tradition. His Metamorphoses, it has often been said, is the most influential secular book in European literature.
Unique among ancient poets, Ovid left us an autobiography, full of riveting intimacy, as well as ironical and slippery self-justification. Using Ovid's own words, brought to life by one of Britain's leading actors, Simon Russell Beale, the film tells the story of the poet's fame, and his fateful falling out with the most powerful man in the world, the Roman emperor Augustus.
Born in Sulmona in central Italy, Ovid moved to Rome to study law but, seduced by 'the muse of poetry', he soon abandoned that career path. Part of Rome's postwar, young generation, Ovid rose to spectacular fame with his poems about sex - Love Affairs (Amores) and The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) - an amoral guide to seduction and adultery. Today some of his poems are seen as problematic and even carry a health warning when studied in US universities. But he is difficult to pigeonhole as he also took the female side in a powerful series of fictional letters by women heroes.
By his twenties he was a literary superstar and a thorn in the emperor's side, his poetry of sex and seduction falling foul of the emperor's new puritanism, which had even outlawed adultery. In the midst of a sensational sex scandal involving his daughter, the Emperor Augustus banished Ovid to the farthest edge of the empire - the wilds of the Black Sea coast and the marshes of the Danube delta. It's a tale full of sex, drama and scandal, but his banishment is still a mystery- as he put it, 'my downfall was all because of a poem - and a mistake- and on the latter my lips are sealed forever'.
Exile in Romania was unbelievably harsh and dangerous, but worse for Ovid was a sense of separation and loss. His poetry from the Black Sea has inspired the European literature of exile for millennia, from Dante and Petrarch to Mandelstam and Seamus Heaney. The poems, the mystery, and Ovid's immense legacy in world literature and art, are discussed with leading experts, who trace his influence on, among others, Titian, Turner and even Bob Dylan, whose Modern Times album quarries Ovid's exile poetry. His greatest and most influential work Metamorphoses, a compendium of the great tales of Greek myth, became one of the core texts of Western culture. Artistic director of the RSC, Greg Doran looks at Ovid's influence on Shakespeare and the myths in the Metamorphoses that pervade our art, music, and literature. Professor Alessandro Schiesaro discusses Ovid and the postmodern imagination; Professor Roy Gibson untangles his relations with Augustus; while Dr Jennifer Ingleheart, author of a new study on Roman sexual politics, looks at Ovid's ambition, psychology and influence. Lisa Dwan -the leading interpreter of the drama of Samuel Beckett, another exile and Ovid fan, explores the poet's use of the female voice and his poetry of exile, which has influenced western writers and artists for the last two millennia.
Following in Ovid's footsteps, Michael Wood travels from the poet's birthplace in the beautiful town of Sulmona, to the bright lights of the capital, Rome. Here we visit the Houses of Augustus and Livia, recently opened after 25 years of excavation and conservation. Inside the emperor's private rooms glow with the colour of their newly restored frescoes. Wood then follows Ovid into exile in Constanta in today's Romania, and on to the Danube delta, where dramatic footage shows the Danube and the Black Sea frozen over in winter just as Ovid described in his letters.
Throughout the film Ovid's own words reveal an engaging personality: a voice of startling modernity. 'He is funny, irreverent, focused on pleasure and obsessed with sex' says Prof Roy Gibson. But, says Greg Doran, he is also a poet of cruelty and violence, which especially fascinated Shakespeare. Ovid raises very modern questions about the fluidity of identity and gender, and the mutability of nature. He also explores the relationship between writers and power and the experience of exile, themes especially relevant in our time when, as Lisa Dwan observes, exile has become part of the human condition. But above all, says Michael Wood, Ovid is the Poet of Love, and 2,000 years after his death he is back in focus as one of the world's greatest poets: ironical, profound, and relevant.
THU 03:00 Wonders of the Solar System (b00rz5ys)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
FRIDAY 13 DECEMBER 2019
FRI 19:00 Sounds of the 70s 2 (b01jv6sd)
Disco - Ain't No Stopping Us Now
Disco was all pervasive in the mid and early 70s. And while towards the end of the decade punk stole the headlines, disco still had the high street. Everyone was into it and getting down on it at the local discotheque. Join us in a celebration of all things disco including performances by The Jacksons, Thelma Houston, Sylvester, Carl Douglas, George McCrae, Sister Sledge, McFadden and Whitehead, Eruption and Gloria Gaynor.
FRI 19:30 University Challenge (b0bx6tpy)
Christmas 2018
St Catherine's, Oxford v Peterhouse, Cambridge
In the fourth match of the Christmas series for grown-ups, St Catherine's College, Oxford, with Guardian drama critic Michael Billington and novelist Susie Boyt, fights it out against the Peterhouse, Cambridge team, with politician Lord Michael Howard and Coast's Mark Horton. Both teams are playing for a place in the semi-finals.
Jeremy Paxman asks the questions.
FRI 20:00 Barbra Streisand: Becoming an Icon 1942-1984 (b0bt8x6z)
Barbra Streisand grew up in working-class Brooklyn, dreaming of escape from her tough childhood. A stellar student, she resisted the pressure to go to college as her sights were firmly set on Broadway. She was determined to become an actress and landed her first role aged 16, but it was two years later, when she started to sing, that her career took off.
Subverting stereotypes and breaking glass ceilings, this programme looks at her rise to stardom and the remarkable achievements of her early career.
FRI 21:00 Top of the Pops (m000c5y9)
Gary Davies and Mark Goodier present the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 15 December 1988 and featuring Bon Jovi, Petula Clark, U2, New Order, The Four Tops, Kim Wilde, Londonbeat, Erasure, Inner City, Cliff Richard and a-ha.
FRI 21:30 Country Music by Ken Burns (m000c5yc)
Series 1
Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way? (1973-1983)
The 1970s and early 1980s saw country music entering a vibrant era of new voices and attitudes. Dolly Parton made the crossover to mainstream success and became the most famous woman in country music. In 1980 she achieved an entirely new level of national stardom when she joined Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in the hit Hollywood movie Nine to Five.
While George Jones and Tammy Wynette seemed to live out their songs’ tragic lyrics, Hank Williams Jr emerged from his father’s shadow. He performed Hank Williams Sr’s music when he was just eight years old, debuted on the Opry at the age of 11 singing Lovesick Blues and recorded an album of his father’s hits at 14. But as soon as he turned 18, he dropped his mother as a manager.
FRI 22:20 Country Music by Ken Burns (m000c5yf)
Series 1
Music Will Get Through (1973-1983)
Though no longer heard on country radio for much of the 1970s and early 1980s, bluegrass still had a strong core of avid fans. Marty Stuart toured with Lester Flatt and sometimes with the ‘father of bluegrass’, Bill Monroe.
Back in his home state of Texas, Willie Nelson discovered a new music scene in Austin, where a mixture of hippies and rednecks seemed to get along and welcomed offbeat artists like Nelson, whose music became a hit.
Ricky Skaggs had deep bluegrass credentials, but his time with Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band inspired him to experiment with a sound combining the acoustic instruments of a string band with something more electric. Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings launched the ‘Outlaw’ movement, and Emmylou Harris bridged folk and rock with country music in a way that influenced a new generation of artists.
FRI 23:15 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 00:15 Ultimate Cover Versions at the BBC (b06ns4gf)
Smash hits from 60 years of great cover versions in performance from the BBC TV archive. Reinterpretations, tributes and acts of subversion from the British invasion to noughties X Factor finalist Alexandra Burke. Artists as varied as The Moody Blues, Soft Cell, Mariah Carey and UB40 with their 'retake' on someone else's song - ultimate chart hits that are, in some cases, perhaps even better than the original.
Arguably The Beatles, alongside Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys, introduced the notion of 'originality' and self-generating artists writing their songs into the pop lexicon in the 60s. One of the most fascinating consequences of this has been the 'original' cover version, a reinterpretation of someone else's song that has transformed it into pop gold with a shift of rhythm, intent and context. The pop cover has proved a remarkably imaginative and durable form and this compilation tracks this pop alchemy at its finest and most intriguing.
FRI 01:15 Bros: After the Screaming Stops (m0001qyv)
A film charting Matt and Luke Goss's reunion 28 years on from when they were one of the biggest bands in the world. The Goss twins have hardly spoken and not played together since their split. With an incredibly fractured relationship and only three weeks to go until sell-out gigs at the O2 London, will they be able to put their history aside and come together as brothers to play the show of their lives?
FRI 02:45 Tunes for Tyrants: Music and Power with Suzy Klein (b099229f)
Series 1
World War
Suzy explores the use, abuse and manipulation of music in the Second World War - from swinging jazz to film soundtracks and from mushy ballads to madcap ballets. The war, she demonstrates, wasn't just a military fight but an ideological battle where both sides used music as a weapon to secure their vision for civilisation.
Suzy reveals how the forces' sweetheart Vera Lynn was taken off air by the BBC's 'Dance Music Policy Committee' for fear her sentimental songs undermined the British war effort. But in Nazi Germany, screen siren Zarah Leander had a hit with a song remarkably like Vera's We'll Meet Again. Meanwhile Nazi band Charlie and his Orchestra reworked Cole Porter classics by adding anti-British lyrics to weaken her morale. Though the Nazis banned jazz at home as 'degenerate', Suzy also explores Occupied Paris's incredible jazz scene. And the film revisits concerts given under extraordinary conditions - not least the performance of Wagner's Gotterdammerung' (Twilight of the Gods), which in April 1945 brought the curtain down on the Third Reich.
Despite Hitler's taunt that Britain was 'Das Land ohne Musik' ('The Land without Music'), Suzy reveals the war work of two great British composers. William Walton's Spitfire Prelude became the archetype for a particularly British form of patriotic music. By contrast Michael Tippett was sent to prison for being a conscientious objector, but his anti-war oratorio A Child of Our Time was showcased at the Royal Albert Hall. The right of people to freely express themselves was, after all, what we were fighting for.
For some, music was a way of transcending desperate circumstances. Suzy examines Olivier Messiaen's haunting Quartet for the End of Time, written amid the desolation of a POW camp. But at Auschwitz, Suzy reveals how music was co-opted to serve the Nazis' evil purposes. Cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch explains how musical ability saved her from the gas chambers. Drafted into the Auschwitz Women's Orchestra, she had to play marches to drive prisoners to and from work and to give a private performance of Schumann's exquisitely innocent Traumerei to the infamous Dr Mengele.
The events of the 20th century show, Suzy concludes, that though we should continue to love and celebrate music, we should also be wary of its seductive power.