WEDNESDAY 08 AUGUST 2018

WED 19:00 World News Today (b0bdvhfh)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.


WED 19:30 Handmade (b05tpx1l)
Wood

As part of BBC Four Goes Slow, this programme follows the slow and painstaking process of making a classic Windsor chair.

A beautifully simple object, it is in fact anything but. Filmed over five days, the film reveals the complex, time-consuming processes involved in creating the chair, made by Jim Steele in his Warwickshire workshop.

This traditional design features woods chosen for their different qualities - ash, elm and hard-to-source yew.

Jim makes just 12 such chairs each year, using traditional techniques and aided by few modern tools. There are just two screws in the finished chair. From the steam bending of the back to the turning of spindles, the carving of the seat to the planing of the arms, it's a remarkable process to observe.

The bold style of the film, making use of long, static shots with no music or commentary allows the viewer to admire in exquisite detail the painstaking craftsmanship.


WED 20:00 1066: A Year to Conquer England (b08jnwlp)
Series 1

Episode 3

In this three-part drama-documentary series, Dan Snow explores the political intrigues and family betrayals between Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and Normans that led to war and the Battle of Hastings.

When the winds finally change, Duke William leads his vast invasion fleet across the Channel after months of being trapped in a port in northern France. But King Harold is 300 miles away in the north, having defeated the Vikings. He has to rush back south, gather a new army and head to Hastings to take on this new invasion. The two armies meet at battle in Sussex on 14 October 1066, and the outcome changes the shape of England and Europe forever.


WED 21:00 Mechanical Monsters (b0bdvzpj)
Simon Schaffer tells the stories behind some of the most extraordinary engineering wonders of the 19th century. These were gigantic feats of technology which transformed everyday life but also had the capacity to challenge the Victorians' faith in God, their place in the universe and their hopes for the future. Through stunning images of these beautiful creations, this film investigates the origins of our love-hate relationship with technology.

First, Simon visits the industrial landscape of Ironbridge in Shropshire to show how new technology of the early 19th century made possible the construction of monstrous machines. He examines a giant steam hammer which could crush a railway sleeper but could also be controlled so precisely that it could crack the shell of an egg and keep the egg intact.

Throughout the film, Simon shows how technological breakthroughs inspired and elevated the Victorians but also unsettled and threatened them. Machines drove the British Empire and held apparently infinite potential, but they were also terrifying - they replaced workers by carrying out their jobs more efficiently, they polluted the environment, and they dwarfed life on a human scale.

Simon tells the story of Charles Babbage, who spent many years devising astonishing calculating engines, effectively giant computers made out of cogs and gears, intended to carry out error-free mathematical processes.

In a park in south London, Simon finds the original Jurassic Park of the Victorian era. Opened in the grounds of the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1854, it was a display featuring life-sized replica dinosaurs, designed to show visitors what dinosaurs may have looked like.

Visiting Birr in central Ireland, Simon comes face to face with the Leviathan. Completed in 1845 in the grounds of an aristocrat's castle, it was a giant telescope designed to crack the mysteries of the skies.

Simon also tells the story of William and Margaret Huggins, who were pioneers in a new scientific method which used beautifully constructed instruments to analyse the wavelengths of light of distant objects, and at an observatory in Hampshire, we see how modern astronomers carry out the same procedures.

Back in London, Simon tells the story of the great stink of 1858, ie how a population boom led to the Thames overflowing with human sewage. He visits Crossness Pumping Station on the banks of the river - an astonishing example of Victorian architecture.

Simon ends his tale of mechanical monsters by investigating the strange story of a machine that never existed except in the heads of its creators. It was a device dreamed up at the end of the 19th century by the famous science fiction writer HG Wells, in concert with an instrument maker called Robert Paul. Their plan was to build a time machine - not a machine which could actually travel through time, but one which would harness revolutionary new technologies to give a paying audience the experience of what time travel might actually be like. As Simon shows, although the time machine was never actually built, it played an extraordinary and unexpected role in the birth of British cinema.


WED 22:00 Timeshift (b0803m60)
Series 16

Bridging the Gap: How the Severn Bridge Was Built

2016 saw the 50th anniversary of the Severn Bridge, which completed the motorway link between England and Wales. Timeshift tells the inside story of the design and construction of 'the most perfect suspension bridge in the world', and how its unique slimline structure arose by accident.


WED 23:00 Timeshift (b080dvyc)
Series 16

Sailors, Ships & Stevedores: The Story of British Docks

Throughout the 20th century, Britain's docks were the heartbeat of the nation - bustling, exciting and often dangerous places where exotic goods, people and influences from across the globe ebbed and flowed and connected Britain with the wider world. Thousands of men, with jobs handed down from father to son through generations, sustained these emblems of national pride, typified by London, the hub of the British Empire.

The waterside cities within cities where they lived and worked formed the frontier of the country's postwar recovery. Communities connected to the sea grew around them, some as unique as the multicultural sailortown of Tiger Bay in Cardiff, others like Liverpool primed for a new wave of world fame thanks to the music and style being brought into the country by the city's seafarers. The 1960s heralded the arrival of new forms of technological innovation in our ports, and thanks to a simple metal box, the traditional world of dockside would be radically transformed, but not without a fierce struggle to protect the dock work that many saw as their birthright.

Today, docksides are places of cultural consumption, no longer identifiable as places that once forged Britain's global standing through goods and trade. People visit waterfronts at their leisure in bars, cafes and marinas or buy a slice of waterside living in converted warehouses and buildings built on the connection to the sea. While the business of docks has moved out of sight, over 95 per cent of national trade still passes through the container yard on ever-larger ships. However, it is still possible to glimpse the vanished dockside through the archive films and first-hand stories of those who knew it best.

Narrated by Sue Johnston.


WED 00:00 The Secrets of Quantum Physics (b04tr9x9)
Einstein's Nightmare

Professor Jim Al-Khalili traces the story of arguably the most important, accurate and yet perplexing scientific theory ever - quantum physics.

The story starts at the beginning of the 20th century with scientists trying to better understand how light bulbs work. This simple question led them deep into the hidden workings of matter, into the sub-atomic building blocks of the world around us. Here they discovered phenomena unlike any encountered before - a realm where things can be in many places at once, where chance and probability call the shots and where reality appears to only truly exist when we observe it.

Albert Einstein hated the idea that nature, at its most fundamental level, is governed by chance. Jim reveals how, in the 1930s, Einstein thought he had found a fatal flaw in quantum physics, because it implies that sub-atomic particles can communicate faster than light in defiance of the theory of relativity.

For 30 years, his ideas were ignored. Then, in the 1960s, a brilliant scientist from Northern Ireland called John Bell showed there was a way to test if Einstein was right and quantum mechanics was actually mistaken. In a laboratory in Oxford, Jim repeats this critical experiment. Does reality really exist or do we conjure it into existence by the act of observation?

The results are shocking!


WED 01:00 The Secrets of Quantum Physics (b04v85cj)
Let There Be Life

Physicist Jim Al-Khalili routinely deals with the strangest subject in all of science - quantum physics, the astonishing and perplexing theory of sub-atomic particles. But now he's turning his attention to the world of nature. Can quantum mechanics explain the greatest mysteries in biology?

His first encounter is with the robin. This familiar little bird turns out to navigate using one of the most bizarre effects in physics - quantum entanglement, a process which seems to defy common sense. Even Albert Einstein himself could not believe it.

Jim finds that even the most personal of human experiences - our sense of smell - is touched by ethereal quantum vibrations. According to the latest experiments, it seems that our quantum noses are listening to smells. Jim then discovers that the most famous law of quantum physics - the uncertainty principle - is obeyed by plants and trees as they capture sunlight during the vital process of photosynthesis.

Finally, Jim asks if quantum physics might play a role in evolution. Could the strange laws of the sub-atomic world, which allow objects to tunnel through impassable barriers in defiance of common sense, effect the mechanism by which living species evolve?


WED 02:00 Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry with Jonathan Meades (b03vrphc)
Episode 1

Two-part documentary in which Jonathan Meades makes the case for 20th-century concrete Brutalist architecture in an homage to a style that he sees a brave, bold and bloody-minded. Tracing its precursors to the once-hated Victorian edifices described as Modern Gothic and before that to the unapologetic baroque visions created by John Vanbrugh, as well as the martial architecture of World War II, Meades celebrates the emergence of the Brutalist spirit in his usual provocative and incisive style. Never pulling his punches, Meades praises a moment in architecture he considers sublime and decries its detractors.


WED 03:00 1066: A Year to Conquer England (b08jnwlp)
[Repeat of broadcast at 20:00 today]