Craig Henderson celebrates the remarkable Sussex landscapes that have inspired generations of writers, as he journeys from the mud and unpredictable tides of Chichester harbour to the South Downs national park. Among the authors offering unique insights into how writers capture a sense of place are best-selling novelists Kate Mosse and Jane Rusbridge.
American painter Bob Ross captures the innocence of a cottage by the side of a stream by creating a giant mountain standing majestically in the distance.
Dr Suzannah Lipscomb explores the time when British people embraced modern design for the first time after years of austerity and self-denial. The look and feel of the postwar 1950s home - a 'modern' world of moulded plywood furniture, fibreglass, plastics and polyester - had its roots in the innovative materials discovered during World War II. In fact, no other war before or since has had such a profound effect on the technologies of our current life. This bright new era encompassed a host of social changes including higher living standards and improved technologies, but - as Suzannah discovers - there were also unexpected dangers lurking throughout the changing home.
Is there a wild side to Britain’s busiest road? Author and naturalist Helen Macdonald embarks on a clockwise loop around London’s orbital motorway - searching for hidden wildness and natural beauty within the sight and sound of the M25. Along her journey, Helen encounters the remarkable people, plants and animals living above, beside and beneath the motorway, and delves into the controversial history of the UK’s longest and least-loved bypass.
The M25 has been part of Britain’s landscape for nearly 35 years, so how has the natural world adapted to the motorway carving a path through its environment? Starting just south of the Thames at Kent’s Junction 1, Helen explores the woodland that lines the first 40 miles of the M25. In a first sign of how animals’ lives are shaped by the man-made world, great tits are changing the pitch of their calls in order to be heard above the roar of the road. But humans have often been less willing to adapt to the M25’s noisy presence.
The village of Shoreham won a battle to divert the motorway, thanks to the landscape paintings of 19th-century artist Samuel Palmer. Palmer’s paintings are highly prized today for their pre-impressionistic style and their idyllic visions of a benign countryside. Although Palmer’s vision was at odds with the harsher reality for farmworkers of the time, 20th-century locals leveraged their emotive value to save Shoreham’s valley and re-route the motorway through nearby woods.
Autumn rains trigger fungi to emerge into the roadside woodland. One species, Neurospora, offers a potential solution to our congested highways. Neurospora’s mobile DNA flows smoothly around an incredibly complex network of fungal freeways. Scientists are trying to figure out the fungi’s secret, in the hope of one day inspiring more robust transport networks.
The western arc of the motorway crosses a watery world of rivers and canals. Helen dives into the serene spaces created in gaps between the motorway and the waterways. Local author JG Ballard was obsessed with the hidden spaces around our urban infrastructure, using them as settings for his dystopian novels. Where the M25 crosses the river Thames, Helen searches for plant life on the damp concrete beneath the motorway. Mosses are often overlooked, but Natural History Museum botanist Dr Silvia Pressel reveals that the drought-resistant properties of these primitive plants are key to how plants made their move from water to the uninhabitable rocky land. This huge leap 500 million years ago paved the way for all of today’s land plants and the mammals that rely on them.
The final watercourse Helen explores is the river Chess, one of only 200 chalk streams in the world, 85% of which are in southern England. This crystal-clear waterway passes right beneath the motorway through a tiny non-descript culvert. In early winter, female brown trout dig their nests right by the motorway in the gravel of the riverbed - a ritual unchanged for millions of years.
The motorway’s northern arc is defined by grasslands where Helen discovers foxes and kestrels in the verges beside the motorway. At Rothamsted Research Station, she discovers why this unfertilized environment is such a special place for wildlife, in contrast to the less diverse cropland beyond.
At Waltham Abbey in Essex, Helen reveals an incredible world lurking in the rubble of what was once Britain's largest gunpowder factory, where the wild has reclaimed the land. Just beyond this derelict landscape lies Epping Forest, home to 500 fallow deer. The motorway presents a huge potential hazard to the animals whilst they are distracted by the autumn rut. Luckily, the deer have worked out how to cross the motorway safely via a little-used farm bridge.
In the final eastern quarter, Helen finds industrial wastelands being reclaimed by nature. The co-ordinated acrobatic display of a flock of lapwing inspires Helen to meet a team of Cambridge University computer scientists. They are using animal swarm-inspired rules to programme fleets of robot cars, showing how, by co-operating with each other, they are able to avoid traffic jams. This semi-autonomous technology could soon be applied to our own road vehicles, allowing our motor cars to self-organise the solutions to potential snarl-ups. By borrowing simple principles from swarming animals, everyone will get home faster.
Helen concludes her lap of the M25 by approaching the giant QEII suspension bridge over the River Thames. Just upriver, Helen discovers the wonderfully wild Rainham Marshes. This former MOD firing range has been turned into a sanctuary for waders and wintering wildfowl. Rainham is a final example of how the brownfield sites encountered all along the motorway have an incredible capacity for wildlife. They are often already earmarked for development; in many cases we should be doing our best to protect them.
BBC Arts and The Lyric Theatre, with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, join forces to create short isolation dramas with some of Northern Ireland’s biggest names. This quick–turnaround project utilises our finest writers, actors and directors to produce unique takes on the Covid-19 lockdown situation, exploring both the positive and negative aspects of social isolation. The five-minute theatrical pieces have been created by top flight actors, directors and writers and are shot in accordance with social distancing guidelines.
When a lone wolf is sighted in a small, uninhabited archipelago just off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, local resident and renowned wildlife photographer Cheryl Alexander goes in for a closer look. What follows is a seven-year relationship that pushes the boundaries of our understanding of lone wolf behaviour.
Cheryl’s never-before-seen footage details where Takaya came from, how he got to the island and how he has adapted to his new landscape. Working with leading experts to help decipher his remarkable behaviour, Cheryl is determined to show what this majestic hunter can teach us all.
A year in the life of abstract artist Sean Scully, one of the world’s richest painters. Little known at home but a superstar abroad, Sean flies around the world to open 15 major museum exhibitions - a journey that also reveals his extraordinary life story.
Now, at the age of 73, Scully opens up about his unique experiences spanning 55 years in an often hostile art world - how he built a reputation from nothing, having grown up penniless on the streets of Dublin and London, often homeless as a child and running with street gangs as a teenager, to turn his striped paintings into the huge success they are today.
WEDNESDAY 01 JULY 2020
WED 19:00 Books That Made Britain (m000kjnp)
Factories to Middle Earth
Could Birmingham really have been the inspiration for Middle Earth? Qasa Alom sets out to find out.
WED 19:30 The Joy of Painting (m000kjnr)
Series 2
Barn at Sunset
Bob Ross paints an expansive barn, half covered in a snowy setting of frostbitten foliage and sun-kissed sky.
WED 20:00 Genius of the Ancient World (b065gv2m)
Socrates
Historian Bettany Hughes is in Greece, on the trail of the hugely influential maverick thinker Socrates, who was executed for his beliefs.
WED 21:00 Ian Hislop's Stiff Upper Lip - An Emotional History of Britain (b01n7r80)
Emergence
Ian Hislop asks when and why we British have bottled up or let out our feelings and how this has affected our history.
Revealing as much about ourselves today as about our past, this is a narrative history of emotion and identity over the last three hundred years, packed with extraordinary characters, fascinating vignettes and much humour, illuminated through the lens of culture - novels, paintings, magazines, cartoons, film and television - from which Ian gives his personal take on our evolving national character.
Far from being part of our cultural DNA, emotional restraint was a relatively recent national trait. Foreigners in Tudor England couldn't believe how touchy-feely we could be - 'wherever you move there is nothing but kisses' wrote a shocked Erasmus. In this opening episode, Ian Hislop charts how and why the stiff upper lip emerged in the late 18th and early 19th century in a country till then often awash with sentiment.
In 18th-century British society, public emoting was a sign of refinement and there was a vogue for all things sentimental. It was very much the done thing for women and men to weep at Samuel Richardson's novels or have Johann Zoffany paint their portraits to highlight their tenderness and sensitivity. But Ian reveals that a new idea - politeness - paved the way for the emergence of the stiff upper lip by prizing consistency of behaviour over emotional honesty. To illustrate this he plunders the candid diary of James Boswell, an aspirational young Scot plagued with anxieties about how far he should show his feelings in fashionable London.
Ian also tells the story of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who famously argued that women's heads should rule their hearts, but failed to practise what she preached when she fell in love with a dashing but dastardly American.
Ian argues that, strange as it may seem, we have the French to thank for our stiff upper lip - the horrors of the French Revolution and the threat from Napoleon teaching the British ruling classes just where rampant emotional expression might lead. Instead, the new breed of British heroes became men with admirable self-control, like Jane Austen's Mr Knightley, who famously tells Emma 'If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.'
This was a time of profound transition for Britain - and how it expressed its feelings - which Ian encapsulates with the tale of two national heroes - Nelson and Wellington. Admiral Nelson was the last 18th-century buccaneering adventurer - flamboyant, philandering, a man whose shameless sentimentality bolstered his huge popularity. His death-bed plea for an embrace from his best friend was so shocking to the Victorians a generation later that they changed 'kiss me, Hardy' to 'kismet'. By contrast, the Iron Duke, Wellington, was the prototype for the cool, calm and collected Brit. And it was Wellington, not Nelson, who would become the pre-eminent role model for the Victorians.
As Ian tracks the emergence of the stiff upper lip, he finds himself playing cricket on the Champs Élysées and discovers some 200-year-old merchandising David Beckham would be proud of. Along the way AN Wilson, Thomas Dixon and John Mullan help Ian get the measure of how our upper lips stiffened.
WED 22:00 Storyville (m000kjnt)
Welcome to Chechnya: The Gay Purge
Welcome to Chechnya: The Gay Purge lays bare the Russian Federation republic's deadly war against its gay citizens. Countless victims have been killed and hundreds more are missing. With the LGBTQ community living in fear and secrecy, this brave and searing film follows the underground team fighting to rescue them - before it is too late.
Since 2017, Chechnya’s tyrannical leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has waged a depraved operation to ‘cleanse the blood’ of LGBTQ Chechens, overseeing a government-directed campaign to detain, torture and execute them. With no help from the Kremlin, and only faint global condemnation, activists have taken matters into their own hands. From a safe house in a secret location in Russia, they risk their own lives by running rescue missions into Chechnya and providing temporary shelter.
This film follows the extraordinary bravery of the activists and Chechens whose lives are being threatened. Deploying a groundbreaking, new digital ‘face-double’ technique that has never been used before in documentary film-making, the identities of those most at risk are protected. By the close of the film, 151 people have been located with the help of the LGBTQ pipeline. Yet 40,000 others remain in hiding, in need of protection.
WED 23:40 Storyville (b0bn6tr3)
Jailed in America
For director Roger Ross Williams, prison was not a distant possibility when he was growing up, but a daily threat. 'As a young black man in a chaotic environment, I always felt there was a chance that, whether or not I committed a crime, I could end up behind bars.' Determined to avoid this fate, Roger left his hometown of Easton, Pennsylvania as a teenager to pursue his dreams of being a film-maker. Overcoming the odds, he became the first black director to win an Academy Award. As his success grew, he thought about Easton less and less, until the day he heard about the suicide of his old friend Tommy Alvin.
Now, after 30 years, Roger returns home to pay his respects and reconnect with close childhood friends. He is shocked and distressed to learn virtually all of the men in the Alvin family are, have been, or currently are, in prison. Haunted by how easily this could have happened to him, Roger embarks on a deeply personal journey into the heart of the American prison system to try and understand how this is possible. He starts in his own hometown but soon finds himself navigating a Byzantine maze of powerful institutions: police precincts, courtrooms, local jails, maximum security prisons and corporate empires. As he begins to explore a massive and dysfunctional system, he encounters complicit politicians and prison profiteers, each with their own self-serving motivations to maintain the status quo.
Roger discovers prison administrators who recognise that most of their inmates should be free, yet are helpless to release them. He seeks counsel and knowledge from frustrated community leaders and activists, including the tireless Adam Foss. Foss's mission is to personally reeducate America's 31,000 prosecutors to 'cut off the supply' of people flowing into the system, and also try and save lives in his own neighbourhood, one young man at a time.
Roger comes face to face with the endless hoard of Americans trapped behind the walls of the prison industrial complex and the families struggling to survive on the outside. He searches for solutions within the tangled web of political, social, and economic forces that drive the biased system, which has ensnared so many of his friends.
The film is a reckoning with America's conscience and a rebuke, not just of power and greed, but of silence - the stain of comfort, wilful ignorance of real costs. Roger's pursuit of an answer propels the film to examine all strata of the American society - from the free market ideals that America is founded upon to the savage ways in which the country has manifested those ideals. In Roger's view, there is no single villain and no obvious solution. Real change requires a new philosophy across a spectrum of industries. Not just the reining in of corporate influence but reform in political, financial, legal, educational and mental health care spheres as well. What can Roger offer? To return home and take a long hard look at the human toll. Will viewers look away as he once did? At what price?
WED 00:40 Pride and Prejudice (b0074rph)
Episode 5
A dramatisation of Jane Austen's classic story of social mores. Darcy is pleased to introduce Elizabeth to his sister, Georgiana, and to welcome her and her aunt and uncle to Pemberley. In spite of Miss Bingley's best efforts, their relationship is growing warmer, until Elizabeth receives a piece of distressing news from Longbourn.
WED 01:30 The Joy of Painting (m000kjnr)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]
WED 02:00 Books That Made Britain (m000kjnp)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:00 today]
WED 02:30 Genius of the Ancient World (b065gv2m)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
THURSDAY 02 JULY 2020
THU 19:00 Books That Made Britain (m000kjmd)
North West England
Simon O'Brien goes on the trail of some of our best-loved children's authors and discovers the stunning north west landscape that inspired their tales of adventure.
THU 19:30 The Joy of Painting (m000kjmg)
Series 2
Mountain Glory
Layers and layers of mountains as far as the eye can see. American painter Bob Ross reveals the secret behind creating a larger-than-life landscape.
THU 20:00 Tess of the D'Urbervilles (b00drmr4)
Episode 3
Third in the four-part drama series based on the novel by Thomas Hardy.
Tess agrees to marry Angel, to his great joy. When he confesses to a dishonourable event in his own past, Tess feels that she can at last tell him about her relationship with Alec D'Urberville and its consequences.
THU 21:00 Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners (b062nqpd)
Profit and Loss
In 1834 Britain abolished slavery, a defining and celebrated moment in our national history. What has been largely forgotten is that abolition came at a price. The government of the day took the extraordinary step of compensating the slave owners for loss of their 'property', as Britain's slave owners were paid £17bn in today's money, whilst the slaves received nothing.
For nearly 200 years, the meticulous records that detail this story have lain in the archives virtually unexamined - until now. In an exclusive partnership with University College London, historian David Olusoga uncovers Britain's forgotten slave owners. Forensically examining the compensation records, he discovers the range of people who owned slaves and the scale of the slavery business.
What the records reveal is that the slave owners were not just the super-rich. They were widows, clergymen and shopkeepers - ordinary members of the middle-classes who exploited slave labour in distant lands. Yet many of them never looked a slave in the eye or experienced the brutal realities of plantation life.
In Barbados, David traces how Britain's slave economy emerged in the 17th century from just a few pioneering plantation owners. As David explores the systemic violence of slavery, in Jamaica he is introduced to some of the brutal tools used to terrorise the slaves and reads from the sadistic diaries of a notorious British slave owner. Elsewhere, on a visit to the spectacularly opulent Harewood House in Yorkshire, he glimpses how the slave owners' wealth seeped into every corner of Britain.
Finally, amongst the vast slave registers that record all 800,000 men, women and children in British hands at the point of abolition, David counts the tragic human cost of this chapter in our nation's history.
THU 22:00 Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners (b063jzdw)
The Price of Freedom
Historian David Olusoga continues his examination of Britain's forgotten slave owners. In this episode, David explores how in 1834 the government arrived at the extraordinary decision to compensate the slave owners with the equivalent of £17 billion in today's money. Tracing the bitter propaganda war waged between the pro-slavery lobby and the abolitionists, he reveals that paying off the slave owners for the loss of their human property was, ultimately, the only way to bring the system to an end.
Meticulously kept records held at the National Archives detail the names of the 46,000 slave owners from across the British empire who had a slice of this vast handout. Combined with new research, shared exclusively with the BBC by University College London, it reveals more about Britain's slave owners than we've ever known before.
Of the 46,000 names in the 1834 compensation records, 3,000 lived in Britain, yet they owned half of the slaves across the empire and pocketed half of the compensation money. These include members of the clergy and of the House of Lords. The records also show that at the point of abolition, more than 40 per cent of all the slave owners were women.
David goes on to investigate what happened to the wealth generated by the slave system and compensation pay out. He reveals aspects of Britain's spectacular industrialisation in the 19th century, the consolidation of the City of London as a world centre of finance, and a number of the country's most well-known institutions that all have links to slave-derived wealth.
Ultimately, David discovers that the country's debt to slavery is far greater than previously thought, shaping everything from the nation's property landscape to its ideas about race. A legacy that can still be felt today.
THU 23:00 Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain's Hidden Art History (b0bcy4kd)
Brenda Emmanus follows acclaimed artist Sonia Boyce as she leads a team preparing a new exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery highlighting artists of African and Asian descent who have helped to shape the history of British art.
Sonia and her team have spent the past three years scouring our public art archives to find out just how many works of art by artists of African and Asian descent the nation really owns. They have found nearly 2,000, but many of these pieces have rarely, if ever, been displayed before. We go into the stores to rediscover these works and, more importantly, meet the groundbreaking artists from the Windrush generation, the 60s counterculture revolution and the Black Art movement of the 80s.
Contributors include Rasheed Araeen, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare, the BLK Art Group and Althea McNish.
THU 00:00 Art of Persia (m000kjj2)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 on Monday]
THU 01:00 The Joy of Painting (m000kjmg)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]
THU 01:30 Books That Made Britain (m000kjmd)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:00 today]
THU 02:00 What Do Artists Do All Day? (b07l57yy)
Shirley Hughes
For over five decades, Shirley Hughes has been entertaining young children with her lovingly illustrated picture books. From the adventures of Alfie to the stories of Dave and his favourite toy Dogger, Shirley has created some of our most popular children's books. In 2007, Dogger was voted the nation's all-time favourite illustrated children's book and, aged 89, Shirley shows no signs of slowing down.
This programme sees Shirley working on the final page of her latest Alfie book, discussing her love of illustrating, the challenges of coming up with new ideas, and why she has no plans to retire.
THU 02:30 Ian Hislop's Stiff Upper Lip - An Emotional History of Britain (b01n7r80)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 on Wednesday]
FRIDAY 03 JULY 2020
FRI 19:00 Opera Italia (b00spgk8)
The Triumph of Puccini
Three-part series tracing the history of Italian opera presented by Antonio Pappano, conductor and music director at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The series features sumptuous music, stunning Italian locations and some of the biggest names in opera as contributors.
The final episode is devoted to Puccini, the worthy successor to Verdi. Puccini's operas are cinematic in their scale with ravishing, passionate and clever music, as he took Italian opera into the 20th century.
Pappano looks at five of Puccini's most popular operas - La Boheme, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, Gianni Schicchi and Turandot. He travels to Rome to meet stage director Franco Zeffirelli and talk about Puccini and Zeffirelli's famous production of Turandot.
Pappano also talks to one of the great Puccini interpreters, the soprano Renata Scotto, about the composer, Madame Butterfly and the role of Mimi in La Boheme. Also featured are soprano Angela Gheorghiu, tenors Jonas Kaufmann and Roberto Alagna and baritone Sir Thomas Allen.
FRI 20:00 Top of the Pops (m000kjmk)
Simon Mayo presents the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 16 November 1989 and featuring 808 State, Lisa Stansfield and Inner City.
FRI 20:30 Top of the Pops (m000kjmm)
Jakki Brambles and Jenny Powell present the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 23 November 1989 and featuring Big Fun, Fine Young Cannibals and The Stone Roses.
FRI 21:00 TOTP2 (b00qvm8x)
Goes Latin
Compilation of memorable Top of the Pops performances from some of the biggest names in Latin music, including Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Santana, Gloria Estefan and Lou Bega.
FRI 21:30 Huey Morgan's Latin Music Adventure (m000kjmp)
Series 1
Brazil
BBC Radio 6 Music DJ Huey Morgan begins his Latin music adventure in Rio de Janeiro with a visit to Mangueira Samba School as they prepare for carnival. It is an important time. Joining rehearsals, Huey learns that the country’s government has come out against carnival’s hedonistic atmosphere. This samba group are just one of many planning a protest, and Huey realises that the revolutionary spirit isn’t just in Brazilian music, it is out on the streets.
Huey then hits the beach but discovers that Brazilian music in the 1960s wasn’t confined to the slick bossa nova swing of the Girl from Ipanema. Released in 1964, this song provided the soundtrack for cocktail parties around the world, but in Brazil that same year a military dictatorship had taken control of the country and civil unrest was brewing.
Huey meets up with Gilberto Gil, who pioneered a new, politically conscious sound to push back against the authoritarian government. Fusing bossa nova with psychedelic rock, avant-garde musique concrete, samba, funk and soul, Tropicália was so radical, and its social implications so politically profound, that Gil and fellow musician Caetano Veloso were arrested, imprisoned and finally exiled in 1969. Tropicália burned brightly for only a few short years, but its impact still resonates today.
Landing in Salvador, Huey is straight into the heat and the chaos of Brazil in the run-up to carnival. Everywhere you turn there are Afro blocs rehearsing, enormous drum ensembles beating out samba rhythms. Salvador is the ancient capital of Brazil, and it was here that millions of slaves were shipped to from Africa by the Portuguese conquistadors - more than anywhere else in the Americas. Salvador is said to be the largest African city outside of Africa, and the revolutionary sound of Brazil has its foundations here. These Afro blocs are more than just music ensembles - they also play a crucial political role in the communities that host them. Huey meets with Carlinhos Brown, percussionist and Salvador native, to experience the rhythms of an Afro bloc up close and to talk about how Afro-positive music has shaped the sound of Brazil. Huey also joins BaianaSystem to learn the secrets of the Bahian guitar - a revolutionary electric instrument invented in Salvador in the 1940s and performed on floats called trios electricos that traverse the city during carnival.
Leaving Salvador, Huey heads to São Paulo, the centre of the Brazilian music scene today, to meet up with his good friend Supla. Taking a tour of the punk and metal scene, Huey discovers that Brazil is still using music to protest against the authoritarian government currently in power and heads to the studio to meet Karol Conka, a rapper and outspoken feminist who is making party anthems with a purpose.
FRI 22:30 Latin Music: A Session with (m000kjmt)
Series 1
Bossacucanova and Roberto Menescal
Pioneer of Brazilian bossa nova Roberto Menescal joins his son’s band Bossacucanova in their Rio studio for a re-interpretation of classic bossa hits.
FRI 23:00 Marc Bolan: Cosmic Dancer (b094mcwl)
This intimate biography, narrated in Marc Bolan's own words, traces his remarkable journey from Hackney's 'king of the mods' to Tyrannosaurus Rex, as he evolved into the artist known as 'the hippie with a knife up his sleeve'.
With the dawn of the 1970s and the breakup of The Beatles, Bolan became the gender-bending glam rocker whose band T. Rex revitalised the British music scene. But director Jeremy Marre - incorporating unseen movies shot by record producer Tony Visconti and Marc Bolan himself - reveals a far more complex and driven figure whose life was tragically cut short, aged 29.
Featuring those who were closest to Marc, his friends, colleagues, family, partner Gloria Jones and producer Tony Visconti.
FRI 00:00 The Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World (b08tr64x)
Series 1
Episode 2
The second episode explores how the Summer of Love of 1967 set in motion an era of social upheaval that pitted America's youth against its elders and how the American government responded with a series of brutal crackdowns. The hippies failed politically, but their cultural influence changed the world. Everything from the environmental movement to the explosion in alternative health practices to the birth of feminism all grew out of this moment. And most surprising of all, we trace how hippie ideas first imagined on LSD went on to shape the information age itself.
FRI 01:00 Country Music by Ken Burns (m000c5yf)
Series 1
Music Will Get Through (1973-1983)
Though no longer heard on country radio for much of the 1970s and early 1980s, bluegrass still had a strong core of avid fans. Marty Stuart toured with Lester Flatt and sometimes with the ‘father of bluegrass’, Bill Monroe.
Back in his home state of Texas, Willie Nelson discovered a new music scene in Austin, where a mixture of hippies and rednecks seemed to get along and welcomed offbeat artists like Nelson, whose music became a hit.
Ricky Skaggs had deep bluegrass credentials, but his time with Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band inspired him to experiment with a sound combining the acoustic instruments of a string band with something more electric. Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings launched the ‘Outlaw’ movement, and Emmylou Harris bridged folk and rock with country music in a way that influenced a new generation of artists.
FRI 01:55 Huey Morgan's Latin Music Adventure (m000kjmp)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:30 today]
FRI 02:55 Latin Music: A Session with (m000kjmt)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:30 today]
LIST OF THIS WEEK'S PROGRAMMES
(Note: the times link back to the details; the pids link to the BBC page, including iPlayer)
Alan Bennett's Diaries
23:40 MON (b086kc2c)
Art of Persia
21:00 MON (m000kjj2)
Art of Persia
02:40 MON (m000kjj2)
Art of Persia
00:00 THU (m000kjj2)
BBC Arts NI presents
22:30 TUE (m000kd8b)
Black and British: A Forgotten History
20:00 MON (b083rb2v)
Books That Made Britain
19:00 MON (b0801nzg)
Books That Made Britain
02:10 MON (b0801nzg)
Books That Made Britain
19:00 TUE (b0801p9h)
Books That Made Britain
02:00 TUE (b0801p9h)
Books That Made Britain
19:00 WED (m000kjnp)
Books That Made Britain
02:00 WED (m000kjnp)
Books That Made Britain
19:00 THU (m000kjmd)
Books That Made Britain
01:30 THU (m000kjmd)
Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners
21:00 THU (b062nqpd)
Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners
22:00 THU (b063jzdw)
Country Music by Ken Burns
01:00 FRI (m000c5yf)
EastEnders 2009
01:35 SUN (b009s6wv)
EastEnders 2009
02:05 SUN (b009s7m8)
EastEnders 2009
02:35 SUN (b009s8fg)
EastEnders 2009
03:05 SUN (b009s8zg)
Genius of the Ancient World
20:00 WED (b065gv2m)
Genius of the Ancient World
02:30 WED (b065gv2m)
Glastonbury
19:00 SAT (m000kjjy)
Glastonbury
19:30 SAT (b00syzjc)
Glastonbury
22:20 SAT (m000kjk1)
Glastonbury
23:10 SAT (m000kjk3)
Glastonbury
20:00 SUN (m000kjjr)
Glastonbury
21:00 SUN (m000kjjt)
Glastonbury
21:30 SUN (m000kjjw)
Glastonbury
22:30 SUN (b012gn88)
Hidden Killers
20:00 TUE (b07chyly)
Highlands - Scotland's Wild Heart
02:40 SAT (p03q49v7)
Huey Morgan's Latin Music Adventure
21:30 FRI (m000kjmp)
Huey Morgan's Latin Music Adventure
01:55 FRI (m000kjmp)
Ian Hislop's Stiff Upper Lip - An Emotional History of Britain
21:00 WED (b01n7r80)
Ian Hislop's Stiff Upper Lip - An Emotional History of Britain
02:30 THU (b01n7r80)
K-Pop Idols: Inside the Hit Factory
01:40 SAT (m0009m8g)
Latin Music: A Session with
22:30 FRI (m000kjmt)
Latin Music: A Session with
02:55 FRI (m000kjmt)
Marc Bolan: Cosmic Dancer
23:00 FRI (b094mcwl)
Natural World
19:00 SUN (b07vxlk1)
Natural World
00:35 SUN (b07vxlk1)
Opera Italia
19:00 FRI (b00spgk8)
Pride and Prejudice
00:40 WED (b0074rph)
Seven Ages of Britain
00:40 MON (b00rfqpk)
Storyville
22:00 WED (m000kjnt)
Storyville
23:40 WED (b0bn6tr3)
TOTP2
21:00 FRI (b00qvm8x)
Takaya: Lone Wolf
23:05 TUE (m000byp7)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
20:00 THU (b00drmr4)
The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway
21:00 TUE (m000kjm9)
The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway
02:30 TUE (m000kjm9)
The Joy of Painting
19:30 MON (m000kjj0)
The Joy of Painting
01:40 MON (m000kjj0)
The Joy of Painting
19:30 TUE (m000kjm7)
The Joy of Painting
01:30 TUE (m000kjm7)
The Joy of Painting
19:30 WED (m000kjnr)
The Joy of Painting
01:30 WED (m000kjnr)
The Joy of Painting
19:30 THU (m000kjmg)
The Joy of Painting
01:00 THU (m000kjmg)
The Lady in the Van
22:00 MON (b06wcqyr)
The Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World
00:00 FRI (b08tr64x)
The Young Montalbano
20:30 SAT (b03c67d4)
Top of the Pops
01:10 SAT (m000kbp4)
Top of the Pops
20:00 FRI (m000kjmk)
Top of the Pops
20:30 FRI (m000kjmm)
Unstoppable: Sean Scully and the Art of Everything
00:05 TUE (m00041pb)
What Do Artists Do All Day?
02:00 THU (b07l57yy)
Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain's Hidden Art History
23:00 THU (b0bcy4kd)