SATURDAY 28 AUGUST 2010

SAT 19:00 Nature's Great Events (b00hq341)
The Great Salmon Run

Every year grizzly bear families in North America depend for their survival on a spectacular natural event: the return of hundreds of millions of salmon from the Pacific Ocean to the mountain streams where they were born. The salmon travel thousands of miles to spawn and then die. The great run not only provides food for bears, but for killer whales, wolves, bald eagles, and even the forest itself. The question is: will the salmon return in time to keep hungry bears alive?

A mother grizzly and her cubs emerge from their den high in snowy Alaskan mountains. Filming from the air, the team capture a TV first, following the bears as they negotiate a near-vertical slope on their journey to the coast where they await the return of the salmon.

Meanwhile, the salmon are making their way to the river mouths where they must swim upstream and against the current. The programme reveals how they tackle the torrents and leap over waterfalls, a feat equivalent to a human jumping over a house.

Dozens of hungry bears eagerly await the salmon that make it up river. In another TV first, underwater cameras record the ingenuity and fancy footwork they use to collect dead salmon from the bottom of deep pools.

In the final ten-minute diary, Close Encounters of a Grizzly Kind, wildlife cameraman Jeff Turner, who has filmed bears for 20 years, reveals how he pioneered techniques to show for the first time how bears caught salmon underwater.


SAT 20:00 Natural World (b00tcf7z)
2010-2011

Echo - An Unforgettable Elephant

A celebration of the life and legacy of Echo, the world's most famous elephant, who was born in 1945 and died in 2009, and who Natural World followed for the last 20 years of her life.

The timing of Echo's death could not be worse. The wise old matriarch had guided her family for half a century, but the cruellest drought in living memory devastated her home under the shadow of Kilimanjaro. Will her 38-strong band of relatives and descendants overcome the loss of their leader, hunger and poachers to survive?


SAT 21:00 Wallander (b00g2j7h)
Series 1

Mastermind

Investigating a grisly local murder and the disappearance of a policeman's daughter, Kurt Wallander and his colleagues at the Ystad station begin to suspect the two are connected. As the investigation proceeds it seems that the criminal knows every move they will make and is practically controlling them. So begins a struggle to outwit a master criminal.

In Swedish with English subtitles.


SAT 22:40 Roger and Val Have Just Got In (b00tkzp7)
Series 1

Be Our Guests

Real-time sitcom following the lives of a middle-aged couple during their first half-hour home from work. Roger is a botanist at the Winter Gardens and Val is a food technology teacher at a local school. With no children, the couple rely only on each other for distraction.

Roger's dad is slipping away. His cousin Cathy is arriving with her loner husband Bob to bid his father farewell, and Val has been panicked into inviting them to stay in their spare room. No one has ever stayed there before. Now they must go into it and get it ready for guests.

The whole process of spare-room-preparation is so exhausting that Roger decides to have a little lie down on the bed. He receives a phone call from his brother at the hospital and at first thinks his father has died; he is wrong, but it precipitates a crisis which stems from Roger wearing a cagoule when he takes the call.


SAT 23:10 Storyville (b0074t65)
When the Levees Broke

Act I

As the world watched in horror, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on Aug 29th, 2005. Declaring that the city had avoided the worst of the storm, city and state officials were caught off-guard when the levees that had been designed to protect low-lying areas of the city from flooding were breached, and the 9th Ward District was inundated.

Like many who watched the unfolding drama on television news, director Spike Lee was shocked not only by the scale of the disaster, but by the slow, inept and disorganised response of the emergency and recovery effort.

To give this extraordinary account, Lee interviewed nearly 100 people - Governor Kathleen Blanco, Mayor Ray Nagin, residents Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, Kimberly Polk, Shelton 'Shakespeare' Alexander and Rev Williams, activists Al Sharpton and Harry Belafonte and musicians Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard and Kanye West to name but a few.

This intimate portrait of New Orleans in the wake of the destruction tells the heartbreaking personal stories of those who endured the harrowing ordeal and survived to tell the tale of misery, despair and triumph.


SAT 00:15 Storyville (b00tlvc0)
When the Levees Broke

Act II

As the world watched in horror, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on Aug 29th, 2005. Declaring that the city had avoided the worst of the storm, city and state officials were caught off-guard when the levees that had been designed to protect low-lying areas of the city from flooding were breached, and the 9th Ward District was inundated.

Like many who watched the unfolding drama on television news, director Spike Lee was shocked not only by the scale of the disaster, but by the slow, inept and disorganised response of the emergency and recovery effort.

To give this extraordinary account, Lee interviewed nearly 100 people - Governor Kathleen Blanco, Mayor Ray Nagin, residents Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, Kimberly Polk, Shelton 'Shakespeare' Alexander and Rev Williams, activists Al Sharpton and Harry Belafonte and musicians Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard and Kanye West to name but a few.

This intimate portrait of New Orleans in the wake of the destruction tells the heartbreaking personal stories of those who endured the harrowing ordeal and survived to tell the tale of misery, despair and triumph.


SAT 01:25 Biology of Dads (b00rvv6t)
'Every child needs a father' is a phrase heard often enough, but is there any evidence to support it? In this enlightening documentary, child psychologist Laverne Antrobus goes on a quest to discover why a dad's relationship with his offspring is so important. She uncovers fascinating new research which is shedding light onto the science of fatherhood.

Laverne meets a new dad who is experiencing Couvade Syndrome, a condition sometimes known as 'sympathetic pregnancy'. She is keen to explore if the symptoms - which are similar to those felt by pregnant women, such as nausea and sickness - might be physiological as well as psychological. The dad takes a blood test shortly after the birth of his third child and Antrobus discovers that hormones could be the cause of his symptoms: possibly nature's way of 'priming' him to become a more nurturing father.

Laverne then meets one of the UK's leading experts in the father's role within the family. While observing father and toddler play in his lab, she finds out how the rough-and-tumble play they witness is classic 'dad behaviour'. It is believed that this type of fatherly play is essential in teaching toddlers the boundaries of aggression and discipline.

In the final investigation, Antrobus looks into recent research which claims that men who have a good relationship with their daughters can influence the kind of husband the daughters choose. The study also found that girls whose fathers were absent during their formative years tend to reach puberty sooner and age quicker. Laverne recruits a team of married women to take part in one final, fascinating experiment.


SAT 02:25 Timeshift (b00sxh8c)
Series 9

Disappearing Dad

Novelist Andrew Martin investigates the curious case of absent fathers in fiction. Far from being a repository of fatherly role models, English literature has preferred to do away with dads. If literary fathers survive the first chapter of a novel - which they often don't - their idea of quality time seems to be going off to kill foreigners or sailing round the world. Alternatively, they absent themselves mentally, brooding in their studies, conducting mysterious experiments and generally being keen on activities that can't possibly involve their children.

Surveying fathers in fiction from Austen and Dickens, via E Nesbit and the Just William stories, to the novels of Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons, Andrew Martin finds that literature says a great deal about the peculiar history of fatherhood over the past 200 years.


SAT 03:25 Men about the House (b00sxhl5)
Father may be the head of the family, a potent symbol of authority, but he has always been the butt of some of our biggest laughs in British sitcom. Over the last five decades some of our most iconic comedy dads have been bewildered by a changing world and struggled with the work/life balance. These dads have coped with every curveball their writers threw at them and in the process changed the course of British comedy. They remain our most enduring Men About The House.