WEDNESDAY 15 OCTOBER 2008

WED 19:00 World News Today (b00dzyz3)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.


WED 19:30 Britain from Above (b00d4pwc)
The Land

Turning back time and drawing on previously unseen archive footage and photography to focus on the dramatic transformation of Britain's cities, landscape and industry. Focusing on the period since the Second World War, Britain from Above explores the greatest period of change in the nation in the last 200 years.

Nowhere shows the transformation that has swept the British countryside in the last 60 years more than East Anglia. Aerial photographs taken by both the RAF and the Luftwaffe before the war show an isolated rural landscape of small fields, hordes of labourers and horse drawn ploughs. But all that changed. Sparked by the war itself, East Anglia became the crucible of a land revolution as its agriculture was industrialised faster and on a larger scale than anywhere else.

Today hedgerows, horses and farm workers have all gone. While the number of people working on the land has collapsed, rural villages have grown, bursting through their old boundaries as commuters arrive. New roads and new employers such as Stansted Airport have heated up an already fast growing economy and the impact on the landscape can be clearly seen from above.

Using hitherto unseen land-use maps of the 1930s, together with wartime aerial reconnaissance photos, the programme reveals how and why East Anglia, and by extension Britain's rural landscape, has been shaped the way it has. Today we see a landscape under ever greater pressure from new housing, crowded roads and the sudden surge in food prices which makes farmland ever more valuable.


WED 20:00 Britain from Above (b00d4v3n)
Man-made Britain

Andrew Marr goes on a journey to discover how some of the greenest landscapes in the British Isles were in fact shaped and moulded by human hands down the centuries.

He looks at the ancient 'wild wood' and Iron Age forts lurking in Britain's forests to the present-day strain modern economic needs put on the countryside, and how town planners restrict urban growth through the establishment of greenbelt areas.

He also looks down on Britain's national parks to show how we go to extraordinary lengths to preserve them as beautiful but artificial playgrounds. We also see how Britain's rugged landscape is used as the ideal testing ground for the Eurofighter.


WED 21:00 Wilderness Explored (b00dzyz5)
Australia's Red Heart

Australia's stark and beautiful red centre is now seen as part of the country's national identity, with Uluru, or Ayres Rock, a national symbol. But this vast desert centre was originally seen as a place of death and silence by the first white explorers. It has taken 200 years for a new perception to emerge, one that recognises it as a place of life and creation - the way it has always been seen by the continent's original inhabitants, the Aborigines.


WED 22:00 Wild Down Under (b0074pnx)
Wild Down Under

Series exploring the wildlife and landscape of Australia. An introduction to the continent and surrounding islands, capturing the enormity of this vast and exotic land which is home to some of the most unique wildlife in the world.


WED 22:50 Wild Down Under (b0074ppm)
Desert Heart

Series exploring Australia's wildlife and landscape. This edition features the huge desert in the centre - no barren wasteland but home to a surprising diversity of flora and fauna. Nomadic budgerigars and giant red kangaroos flourish in a land battered by unpredictable cycles of drought and flood. Aborigines have lived here for thousands of years, but modern Australians are only just beginning to understand the terrain.


WED 23:40 Wilderness Explored (b00dzyz5)
[Repeat of broadcast at 21:00 today]


WED 00:40 Travellers' Century (b00crnkq)
Eric Newby

Benedict Allen follows the travels of quintessential British amateur traveller Eric Newby. Born in suburban Hammersmith between the wars, Newby was dismissed by his public school as 'not clever', and his life became a catalogue of challenges. As a teenager, he went to sea to serve as a deck hand, sailing around Cape Horn. During the WW2 he joined the Special Boat Squadron, and was captured by the enemy. After escaping from an Italian POW camp, he met his future wife Wanda.

Newby itched to discover the world and, in the mid-1950s, abandoned an unhappy career in the rag trade to head off with diplomat Hugh Carless into remotest Afghanistan and climb Mir Samir. The journey was immortalised in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

Fifty years on, Benedict Allen finds this lost corner of Afghanistan little changed - and comes away full of admiration for the author. Newby failed to reach the summit, but for all his sardonic understatement and self-deprecation, he was just a hair's breadth away. And all with the aid of a map drawn on the back of an envelope.


WED 01:40 Travellers' Century (b00cskdg)
Laurie Lee

Explorer, writer and broadcaster Benedict Allen retraces part of author Laurie Lee's journey across Spain in 1935, which became the basis for his celebrated travelogue As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

Lee thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, and the book reveals a poet's sensibility in its meticulous, distilled observations of the country and people he quickly came to love.

Allen tries to find out whether Lee's evocative prose actually works as travel writing and Lee is revealed as an enigmatic, mercurial figure in the tradition of the wandering minstrel or troubadour, with a huge array of talents and an astonishing facility to charm.


WED 02:40 Wilderness Explored (b00dzyz5)
[Repeat of broadcast at 21:00 today]