SUNDAY 19 AUGUST 2018

SUN 19:00 Eisteddfod (b0bgfbzs)
2018 with Jason Mohammad

Highlights

It is a pop-up city within the capital city that celebrates the best of Welsh culture. The National Eisteddfod, the biggest cultural event in the Welsh year, comes to Cardiff. It is a snapshot of what is happening in Wales, showcasing everything from the classical music stars of the future to rock bands, folk music, dance, cutting-edge contemporary visual art, literature and much more.

Jason Mohammad, himself a local lad, heads down to Cardiff Bay to bring all the highlights and stories from the 'maes' - usually a field but this year an open-to-all festival - no ticket required.

The pavilion - traditionally a large tent and the heart of the official competitions - is this year the Wales Millennium Centre. Bryn Terfel stars in a show about American singer Paul Robeson, while Wales and Lions rugby player Jamie Roberts finds himself joining the 'Gorsedd'.

Jason brings us a flavour of what has been going on this year - a year like no other in the long history of the Eisteddfod.


SUN 19:30 Bute: The Scot Who Spent a Welsh Fortune (b08y60r0)
John Patrick Crichton Stuart, the 3rd Marquess of Bute, was one of the richest men in the British Empire in the late 19th century. With an annual income in excess of £150,000 - around £15 million in contemporary currency - he pursued his passion for architecture with a vengeance. Narrated by Suzanne Packer, The Scot Who Spent a Welsh Fortune delves into the extraordinary world of Lord Bute and reveals what connects the small Scottish island of Bute to modern Cardiff.

Bute was one of the most unconventional mavericks of the Victorian age, passionate about the past but also far ahead of his time - a blue-blooded aristocrat, who supported women's rights and striking miners, a Welsh-speaking intellectual Catholic who was also a ghost hunter. Above all, Bute was a fabulously rich and visionary creator of great architecture including the Gothic fantasy of Cardiff Castle, and Castell Coch - the fairy-tale castle.

The 3rd Marquess got his hands on his fortune at the age of 21, but already when he was 18, he met the outrageous and eccentric Gothic designer William Burges. It was the start of a lifetime's collaboration with artists and architects which would pour Bute's original mind into fabulous buildings in an astonishing variety of styles.

William Burges transformed Bute's medieval Cardiff Castle into a Welsh Camelot. Within fantasy towers, he created lavish interiors, rich with murals, stained glass, marble, gilding and elaborate wood carvings. Then Bute gave Burges the dream commission - to restore the 14th-century Welsh ruins of Castell Coch near Cardiff as a summer party house for the family. He recreated, from a heap of rubble, a fairy-tale castle. The interiors were elaborately decorated, with specially designed furniture. It even had its own vineyard - the first in Britain.

Bute's next target was the family ancestral seat Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute, where he was born. When it was destroyed in a fire, Bute embarked on a huge new Gothic palace, driven by his own taste and design skills.

The footprint of the Bute family still looms large in Cardiff. The Bute obsession with Gothic style entered the architectural DNA of Cardiff's domestic buildings. The green lung at the city's heart - Bute Park - was the family's back garden, and Cathays Park, one of the finest civic centres in Britain, was sold to the city by Lord Bute on condition it would be used for cultural, civic and educational purposes. The Bute family names are everywhere - Bute Street, Mount Stuart Square, after the family estate in Scotland, and the now demolished Ninian Park Football Ground, after the 3rd Marquess's second son, who became MP for Cardiff and died in the First World War.

Bute died in 1900 aged only 53 after a protracted illness and was buried in a small atmospheric mausoleum in the family graveyard on the shores of the Isle of Bute. His heart was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. But his greatest memorials are his Welsh and Scottish grand designs.


SUN 20:30 BBC Proms (b0bgg0nl)
2018

Mozart and Mahler

Performances of two of the best-loved works in the repertoire. Starting with Mozart's ever-popular Clarinet Concerto, written two months before his death, Thomas Dausgaard conducts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, with the Belgian clarinettist Annelien Van Wauwe as soloist. In the second half of the night, Mahler is the star with his Fifth Symphony and its beautiful Adagietto, arguably his most famous single piece of music.


SUN 22:30 Timeshift (b08mp2l8)
Series 17

Dial "B" for Britain: The Story of the Landline

Timeshift tells the story of how Britain's phone network was built. Incredibly, there was once a time when phones weren't pocket-sized wireless devices but bulky objects wired into our homes and workplaces. Over the course of 100 years, engineers rolled out a communications network that joined up Britain - a web of more than 70 million miles of wire. Telephones were agents of commercial and social change, connecting businesses and creating new jobs for Victorian women. Wires changed the appearance of urban skylines and the public phone box became a ubiquitous sight.

Yet despite ongoing technical innovation, the phone service often struggled to meet demand. When the mobile phone arrived, it appeared to herald the demise of the landline. Yet ironically, now we're more connected than ever, it's not the telephone that's keeping us on the landline.

In 1877, Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell returned to Britain from America to showcase a revolutionary new electric device - the telephone. After impressing no less than Queen Victoria, Bell helped drive uptake of the telephone in Britain, tapping into the growth of a growing commercial phenomenon - the office. Soon, whole networks of telephone lines were being built, connected together by exchange switchboards. Female switchboard operators were preferred by telephone companies as they were cheaper and perceived as more polite, opening up new employment opportunities for women in late Victorian Britain.

At first only the wealthiest people had phones in their homes, but the public call box soon emerged, although when the GPO - the General Post Office - took over the private networks, it initially struggled to find an acceptable design for its box and met some resistance to its now iconic bright red colour.

The introduction of direct dial telephones and automatic exchanges, as well as services like the 999 emergency number and the speaking clock, helped drive private uptake of phones in the 1930s. However, with the onset of World War Two, military concerns took priority. Gene Toms, a switchboard operator, recalls her time during the war, trying to work while wearing a helmet during air raids, dealing with self-important officers and doing her best to assist servicemen phoning home.

A renewed drive to restore, modernise and expand the network after the war kept a legion of engineers busy. Former GPO engineers Jim
Coombe, Bryan Eagan and Dez Flahey share their memories of dubious safety practices and difficult customers. Despite the expansion, the network still had limited capacity relative to demand, and one cheaper solution was the "party line", shared with another household, although it created problems of privacy.

The introduction of STD - subscriber trunk dialling - in the late 1950s enabled callers to make long distance calls without the help of an operator. But STD, like the network itself, was taking a long time to roll out; and despite the introduction of stylish coloured telephones and the Trimphone in the 1960s to tempt customers, the service acquired a bad reputation among many users. Even an episode of the children's series Trumpton reflected the general frustration. Archive footage shows the then postmaster general, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, being grilled by an interviewer about the shortcomings of the phone service.

But there was an exciting new symbol of the future under construction - the Post Office Tower, part of a network of towers designed to expand the capacity of the network using a wireless, microwave system. By the 1970s telephone supply was catching up with demand. People were increasingly moving home around the country, relocating for work, and young families expected to have a phone as a standard mod con. An advertising campaign featuring a talking cartoon bird - Buzby - encouraged customers to make more calls. What was once a service had become a thriving business, and British Telecommunications was privatised in 1984.

The arrival of the mobile phone soon threatened to supersede the landline - but the internet, a technology that the founding fathers of telephony could never have dreamed of, has given the landline a new lease of life.


SUN 23:30 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.


SUN 00:30 Jerusalem: The Making of a Holy City (b017znj7)
Wellspring of Holiness

Jerusalem is one of the oldest cities in the world. For the Jewish faith, it is the site of the Western Wall, the last remnant of the second Jewish temple. For Christians, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the site of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Muslims, the Al-Aqsa mosque is the third holiest sanctuary of Islam.

In episode one, Simon delves into the past to explore how this unique city came into being, explaining how it became of such major importance to the three Abrahamic faiths, and how these faiths emerged from the Biblical tradition of the Israelites.

Starting with the Canaanites, Simon goes on a chronological journey to trace the rise of the city as a holy place and discusses the evidence for it becoming a Jewish city under King David. The programme explores the construction of the first temple by Solomon through to the life and death of Jesus Christ and the eventual expulsion of the Jews by the Romans, concluding in the 7th century AD, on the eve of the capture of Jerusalem by the Muslim caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab.


SUN 01:30 Sounds of the 70s 2 (b01glwkz)
Arthouse Glam - Get in the Swing

Performances from The Kinks, Roxy Music, Elton John, New York Dolls, Queen, Sparks, Rod Stewart and the rediscovered David Bowie performance of The Jean Genie from January 1973.

Welcome to gender-bending, boys getting in the swing and girls who would be boys and boys who would be girls in this mixed-up, shook-up 70s world.


SUN 02:00 Arena (b08t14wf)
American Epic

Out of the Many, the One

A look at the influence of Hawaiian music and more specifically, the steel guitar, which became a central sound to a range of musical styles. When Joseph Kekuku picked up a metal bolt as he wandered down a train track, the bolt hit the strings of his guitar and the sound was born. He perfected his slide to create a new instrument that would travel the world.

The programme continues with an exploration of Cajun music, the blended music of Louisiana that reflects the winding landscape of the bayous. This appealed to the record companies as something set apart from the established genres of country, jazz and blues. Central to the scene were the Breaux family, who talk about continuing their musical heritage today.

Finally we hear the story of Mississippi John Hurt - discovered in the 1920s but soon forgotten, he represents the odyssey of American Epic in microcosm. After travelling to Memphis where his music was recorded, he returned home to Avalon, a tiny spot on the map of Mississippi. With the Depression, recording in the south came virtually to a halt and Hurt simply went back to sharecropping, his music forgotten by all but a few dedicated collectors. 35 years after those first recordings, folklorist Dick Spottswood tracked down Hurt in 1963, sparking a revival of his music. He starred at the Newport Folk Festival and became celebrated all over the world.


SUN 03:00 Bute: The Scot Who Spent a Welsh Fortune (b08y60r0)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:30 today]