TUESDAY 13 JUNE 2017

TUE 19:00 100 Days+ (b08tnnjd)
Series 1

13/06/2017

Katty Kay in Washington and Christian Fraser in London report on the events that are shaping our world.


TUE 19:30 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World (p04xk69m)
2017

Round 1

Petroc Trelawny and American soprano Angel Blue present highlights from the first night of the biennial competition which has been described as the greatest opera singing competition in the world. Past winners and finalists command top billing on the world stages and this year twenty more promising young singers arrive in Cardiff to compete in front of a distinguished jury for the coveted title. Acclaimed British soprano Lucy Crowe and American tenor Lawrence Brownlee provide expert analysis and commentary as singers from Italy, Russia, Norway, Mongolia and the USA compete for a place in the grand final. Music includes arias by Mozart, Rossini, Puccini and Donizetti amongst others. The singers are accompanied by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Thomas Sondergard.


TUE 21:00 Ryan Gander: The Idea of Japan (b08v8jd1)
Ryan Gander OBE is a leading conceptual artist. He creates artworks full of symbolic meaning – images, sculpture, installations and films that may appear to be about one thing, but contain further messages for the thoughtful. And this, he believes, is why he is “big in Japan.” Ryan believes he is appreciated there because the country has a highly sophisticated visual culture, expressed through images and symbols that broadcast cultural messages to the world, as well as to the Japanese themselves. The Geisha and the Samurai are obvious examples; bullet train, tattoo art, and Tokyo street style are less so. The exploration of these signs and symbols takes him six thousand miles east of his Suffolk studio, to investigate how Japanese visual culture is closely linked to a special relationship with time, as the country’s past and future inform its present tense.

The journey begins at Tokyo and the famous Scramble Crossing at Shibuya, where crowds race across a huge junction. It looks like chaos, but it’s actually an affirmation of an unwritten Japanese code of civic conduct and an underlining of the power of Buddhism, and the state religion, Shinto. Visiting a series of temples Ryan investigates the teachings of Shinto, a word which means Way of the Gods and demands civic responsibility of citizens who have always lived cheek-by-jowl in Japanese cities.

Cleanliness is famously of special interest to the Japanese. In pursuit of the meaning behind everyday objects, Ryan visits a shop selling humble cleaning cloths that are nevertheless beautifully printed, raising chores to the level of art. At a primary school he observes students gleefully cleaning their classroom between lessons, aware of their shared obligations as citizens.

In a film that allows him to make unexpected connections between subjects, musing on a society that appears to march in step leads to those who don’t – the Yakuza. These gangsters are despised for their lack of civic sense, yet are frequently on hand with earthquake relief and in plain sight at religious festivals. Ryan’s interested in their tattoos, exquisite designs that in the West would be a source of pride, but which here exclude the wearer from beaches and bathhouses. He meets an art collector for whom he designed a simple tattoo that nevertheless suggests to other citizens that this law-abiding businessman is a friend to outlaws. Will perceptions ever shift? They might, as change is an important factor in Japanese culture. In Kyoto, Ryan discovers that the meaning of even the powerful Geisha has changed. He arrives expecting a therapist-entertainer-confidant, but learns that today these powerful businesswomen are now most frequently found in conference centres delivering PR messages. Their traditional role is now partly filled, he believes, by soft-spoken Host Boys in Tokyo night-clubs.

Dr Angus Lockyer, lecturer at the School of African and Oriental Studies, explains that the Japanese live in the present, savouring the moment, a mind-set reinforced by their home-grown religion, in a country that is in constant geological peril. This is the only nation to have experienced the horror of instant change by thermonuclear means, symbolised for Ryan by the small pocket watch stopped by the detonation, exhibited in a Hiroshima museum. Ryan makes another turn, noting the Japanese ability to move on, evidenced in their embrace of nuclear power within a decade of the bombings, and by the emergence, in 1954, of the mutant Godzilla. Spawned in nuclear disaster, the saurian was, to Japanese movie-goers, also an agent of change with messages about endings and new beginnings.

What Ryan labels a fixation on novelty is also explored through distinctive Tokyo street fashion, and with a deconstruction of the cherry blossom fever that breaks out every spring, impelling droves of city-dwellers to leap onto trains bound for the trees. Ryan links the interest in rejuvenation with an urgent issue facing the nation – they have the greatest population of aged citizens and a fast-falling birth-rate. Since the Japanese economic crisis of the nineties, the certainties of a corporate job for life are gone, and with it the hopes of up to a million would-be workers, the Hikokomori, who lock themselves in their bedrooms to avoid the new, uncertain world. Perhaps, says the artist, they should look to the past for inspiration, and the message of the Samurai. This A-list icon speaks of individualism, courage and iron will. But Ryan also finds him in toy stores in the form of robotic Gundam figures, and then, with the head of design at Nissan, injecting his aesthetic into auto bodies. The robots that we fear might be about to take over are welcomed in Japan, their futuristic qualities tempered by their ancient inheritance: here to protect and serve, nothing more.


TUE 22:00 Natural World (b01ntt8p)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 on Saturday]


TUE 23:00 A Day in the Life of Andy Warhol (b067fw3w)
Andy Warhol created some of the most instantly recognisable art of the 20th century. But perhaps his greatest work of art was himself - the cool, enigmatic pop art superstar.

In this film, Stephen Smith sets out to discover the real Andy Warhol - in the hour-by-hour detail of his daily life.

Taking a playful approach, mixing archive and entertaining encounters with Warhol's closest friends and confidantes, Stephen pieces together a typical day in the mid 1960s.

By 1964, Warhol had established himself as a famous pop artist and his creative ambitions were exploding in new directions in a creative frenzy of art, films - and even music.

From an early-hours chat with John Giorno, Warhol's lover and star of his notorious film Sleep, to recreating Warhol's intimate telephone conversations with Factory superstar Brigid Berlin, Stephen immerses himself in the round-the-clock whirl of Warhol's daily life.

Visiting the church where Warhol worshipped with his mother, discussing the day-to-day running of the Factory with Warhol's assistant Gerard Malanga, talking to Bibbe Hansen and Jane Holzer, stars of his famous Screen Tests, the film offers a fresh and illuminating new portrait of Warhol.

And from the obsessive desire to document his everyday life to the endless fascination with fame and his own celebrity image, a day with Andy Warhol appears surprisingly familiar to 21st century eyes.

"In his lifetime", concludes Stephen, "some people thought Warhol came from another planet. But in fact he hailed from somewhere equally exotic - the future.".


TUE 00:00 The Magic of Mushrooms (b041m6fh)
Professor Richard Fortey delves into the fascinating and normally hidden kingdom of fungi. From their spectacular birth, through their secretive underground life to their final explosive death, Richard reveals a remarkable world that few of us understand or even realise exists - yet all life on earth depends on it.

In a specially built mushroom lab, with the help of mycologist Dr Patrick Hickey and some state-of-the-art technology, Richard brings to life the secret world of mushrooms as never seen before and reveals the spectacular abilities of fungi to break down waste and sustain new plant life, keeping our planet alive.

Beyond the lab, Richard travels across Britain and beyond to show us the biggest, fastest and most deadly organisms on the planet - all of them fungi. He reveals their almost magical powers that have world-changing potential - opening up new frontiers in science, medicine and technology.


TUE 01:00 Forest, Field & Sky: Art out of Nature (b079ckkf)
Dr James Fox takes a journey through six different landscapes across Britain, meeting artists whose work explores our relationship to the natural world. From Andy Goldsworthy's beautiful stone sculptures to James Turrell's extraordinary sky spaces, this is a film about art made out of nature itself. Featuring spectacular images of landscape and art, James travels from the furthest reaches of the Scottish coast and the farmlands of Cumbria to woods of north Wales. In each location he marvels at how artists' interactions with the landscape have created a very different kind of modern art - and make us look again at the world around us.


TUE 02:00 How to Build a Cathedral (b00b09rb)
The great cathedrals were the wonders of the medieval world - the tallest buildings since the pyramids and the showpieces of medieval Christianity. Yet they were built at a time when most of us lived in hovels. Architectural historian Jon Cannon explores who the people were that built them and how they were able to achieve such a bold vision.


TUE 03:00 Ryan Gander: The Idea of Japan (b08v8jd1)
[Repeat of broadcast at 21:00 today]