MONDAY 14 MARCH 2022

MON 19:00 Fred Dibnah's World of Steam, Steel and Stone (b00792fx)
Men of Steel

Fred's heroes were the great engineers of the Victorian age. In this programme, we show Fred's great interest in their work and his belief in the values of hard work and enterprise that drove them on and led us to a greater appreciation of their significance and achievements.


MON 19:30 Canal Boat Diaries (m0015f6v)
Series 3

Wigan to Burnley

Narrowboater Robbie Cumming begins his 170-mile journey across the north of England and soon runs into difficulty when he encounters a problem with his craft's propeller in Wigan and runs aground in Blackburn. Nevertheless, he pushes on to navigate a true wonder of the waterways, the Burnley Embankment.


MON 20:00 Britain's Lost Masterpieces (m000rxmx)
Series 5

Brighton

Bendor Grosvenor and Emma Dabiri visit Brighton Museum to investigate who painted two neglected pictures of religious subjects.

Bendor believes a grubby image of Mary Magdalene repenting her sins may be by a forgotten master of the Roman baroque, Francesco Trevisani. Emma visits the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to hear how a medieval pope confused the biblical accounts and gave Mary a completely invented personality.

Bendor then travels to Rome to search for traces of Trevisani, while Emma investigates how Brighton’s lavishly decorated Royal Pavilion ended up an empty shell, ransacked and sold to the local council. The second picture is a sympathetic portrayal of Balthazar, a prince and one of the wise men from the Christmas story, which Bendor thinks may be by 16th-century Antwerp master Joos van Cleve. Examination reveals that it was once the left-hand door of a folding altarpiece. Bendor goes on to Edinburgh to see a similar altar, the finest work by van Cleve in Britain. Emma meets Rev Richard Coles to find out how, despite the lack of any description in the Bible, it became traditional to portray Balthazar as a black African.


MON 21:00 The Golden Age of Canals (b01173hf)
Most people thought that when the working traffic on canals faded away after the war, it would be the end of their story. But they were wrong. A few diehard enthusiasts and boat owners campaigned, lobbied and dug, sometimes with their bare hands, to keep the network of narrow canals open.

Some of these enthusiasts filmed their campaigns and their home movies tell the story of how, in the teeth of much political opposition, they saved the inland waterways for the nation and, more than 200 years after they were first built, created a second golden age of the canals.

Stan Offley, an IWA activist from Ellesmere Port, filmed his boating trips around the wide canals in the 40s, 50s and 60s in 16mm colour. But equally charming is the film made by Ed Frangleton, with help from Harry Arnold, of a hostel boat holiday on the Llangollen Canal in 1961. There are the films shot by ex-working boatman Ike Argent from his home in Nottinghamshire and looked after by his son Barry.

There is astonishing film of the last days of working boats, some shot by John Pyper when he spent time with the Beecheys in the 60s, film taken by Keith Christie of the last days of the cut around the BCN, and the films made by Keith and his mate Tony Gregory of their attempts to keep working the canals through their carrying company, Midland Canal Transport.

There is film of key restorations, the Stourbridge 16 being talked about with great wit and affection by one of the leading activists in that watershed of restorations in the mid-60s, David Tomlinson, and John Maynard's beautiful films of the restoration of the Huddersfield, 'the impossible restoration', shot over two decades.

All these and more are in the programme alongside the people who made the films and some of the stars of them. Together they tell the story of how, in the years after 1945, a few people fought the government like David fought Goliath to keep canals open and restore ones that had become defunct, and won against all the odds.


MON 22:00 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.


MON 23:00 imagine... (b008bypx)
Autumn 2007

Louise Bourgeois: Spiderwoman

Alan Yentob presents a profile of the provocative French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois, who was still producing cutting edge work at the age of 95.

Memories of a disturbed childhood have produced fantastic and disturbing sculptures of giant spiders and poured-plastic body parts. As a girl she restored old tapestries, worked with Leger and knew surrealists like Breton and Duchamp. In New York she emerged as an artist in her own right, bringing dread, desire, sex and the psyche into her work.

Yentob goes to a Sunday salon at her New York home where young artists queue up to get her often fiery reactions to their work. He talks with Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Stella Vine and others who have been inspired by this strange and mischievous artist.


MON 23:50 James May's Cars of the People (b0467lbp)
Series 1

Episode 1

In his quest to discover how we, the people, got our wheels, James travels to Germany, Italy and Russia to reveal the extraordinary story of how dictators kick-started the mobilisation of the masses.

It is a tale of design brilliance, abject failure, war, fraud and double dealing, featuring some of the best (and worst) cars and characters of the 20th century. James discovers how the British motor industry blew a gift-wrapped chance to rule the world and he gets his own back with a stunt that means bad news for one of the planet's most hated cars.


MON 00:50 Canal Boat Diaries (m0015f6v)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:30 today]


MON 01:20 Fred Dibnah's World of Steam, Steel and Stone (b00792fx)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 today]


MON 01:50 The Golden Age of Canals (b01173hf)
[Repeat of broadcast at 21:00 today]


MON 02:50 Ian Hislop's Stiff Upper Lip - An Emotional History of Britain (b01n7r80)
[Repeat of broadcast at 22:00 today]