MONDAY 31 JANUARY 2022

MON 19:00 Canal Boat Diaries (m000bk6x)
Series 1

Shardlow to Stoke-on-Trent

Life on board a narrowboat with Robbie Cumming. Robbie tackles a propeller problem and tricky locks on the Trent and Mersey Canal in Derbyshire.


MON 19:30 Fred Dibnah's Building of Britain (b0074n9m)
The Age of the Carpenter

In his mission to uncover the craft and engineering skills that helped to build Britain, Fred looks to the Middle Ages and the transformation of an Englishman's castle into his home.

Carpenters were the great engineers of this time, and Fred visits Stokesey Castle, the oldest moated and fortified house in England, to scale the walls and examine the technique of 'jettying' - making the bedroom a bit bigger. Fred also discovers how massive arched timber roofs were constructed.

At Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire, Fred explores one of the finest examples of timber-framed architecture in England and demonstrates how carpenters of the 15th and 16th century actually constructed these chocolate-box buildings. Fred's journey ends at Harvington Hall near Kidderminster, home to some of finest priest holes in the country, devised by master carpenter Nicholas Owen during the reign of Elizabeth I.


MON 20:00 The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution (b0133hpx)
Painting the People

Waldemar Januszczak continues his investigation of the Impressionists, focusing this time on the people they painted and in particular the subjects of Degas, Caillebotte and the often forgotten Impressionist women artists. The Impressionists are famous for painting landscape but they were just as determined to paint people.

Looking closely at one of Impressionism's finest painters, Edgar Degas, Waldemar reveals how he consistently challenged traditions and strove to record real life as it appeared in the city, from sculpting the contorted movements of horses in motion at the Longchamp race course in Paris to encapsulating extravagant 3D viewpoints of the ballet dancers at the Paris Opera.

Waldemar also uncovers the intoxicating haziness the pastel produced in Degas' work when visiting his supplier Pastels de Roche. He also reveals the unusual viewpoints and dramatic perspectives of Caillebotte's paintings from the Place de L'Europe and the rebellious and revolutionary art of Morisot, Bracquemond and Cassatt, three impressive female artists who were eagerly embraced by the progressive movement of Impressionism.


MON 21:00 Eye of the Storm (m000tsfv)
Renowned landscape painter James Morrison faces his greatest challenge. His eyesight is fading fast, and he has one more painting to complete. From his studio just outside Montrose, Morrison can hear the crashing North Sea. On the wall is a drawing of Mickey Mouse that he completed when he was eight years old, at the outset of World War II.

‘My sight has deteriorated quite badly,’ Morrison admits. ‘And the very thought of coming in here and not being able to pick up a brush and do something with it really terrifies me.’ Nevertheless he has agreed to let film-maker Anthony Baxter follow him as he picks up the brushes again at the age of 85 after being sidelined by a series of operations. And while doing so, he reflects on an extraordinary artistic life.

Eye of the Storm is a fascinating exploration of what it means to be a landscape painter. It is also the poignant and universal story of a creative mind dealing with his own mortality, and the physical frailties that catch up with all of us. The film movingly intertwines Morrison’s struggle with old age, with his lively views as a much younger painter, captured in remarkable archive filmed more than 50 years ago. Pivotal moments in Morrison’s career are also brought vividly to life by Scottish animator Catriona Black. Indeed, her own journey to understand Morrison’s artistic genius, in order to do justice to it in the film, represents a story within a story in this multi-layered and visually stunning documentary.

As Morrison begins painting again, he is particularly troubled by the fact that – on doctor’s orders – he can’t paint outside. His lifelong compulsion to paint what he sees, en plein air, has taken him around the world – from Africa to Paris to Greenland.

Morrison explains that it all started in Glasgow. Son of a shipyard pipefitter, Morrison entered the famous Glasgow School of Art in 1950. While other students embraced the overtly political and abstract art then fashionable, Morrison was attracted to the landscape painters of a different era such as Claude Lorrain, Jean-François Millet and Scotland’s own Horatio McCulloch.

Morrison’s first major subjects were the crumbling Glasgow tenements, home to thousands of working-class families soon to be relocated to the outskirts of the city. Though painted without people, Morrison’s haunting paintings are memorials to a lost way of life, and would find their place in major museums. And his concern with documenting fleeting, disappearing worlds would become a recurring feature of his work.

Morrison’s work then underwent a dramatic shift when he moved to the tiny fishing village Catterline in north east Scotland in 1959. Here, Morrison effectively established what would become a famed artists’ colony, along with painter Joan Eardley. As he views archive from the time, which he has not seen in half a century, Morrison relives his artistic and personal friendship with the woman who some consider the greatest Scottish artist of the 20th century. While Eardley became beloved for her portraits of children, Morrison never painted the human figure. Instead, he focused on the skies and landscape of Angus and the Mearns that would become a distinctive feature of his work. Morrison’s quest for meaning in the landscape took him, ultimately, to the least populated part of the planet – the high arctic reaches of Canada and Greenland.

‘I had no idea what I was getting into,’ Morrison says wryly, settling into an extraordinary tale, which includes hair-raising flights over glaciers and arctic bison, and a confrontation with a polar bear, all the result of his determination to paint the vanishing arctic wilderness.

As Morrison returns to his studio to paint, there is a sense of time running out. His memory is now failing as well, and he needs to refer to a piece of paper in his pocket to remember the director’s name.

A new solo exhibition of his work in Edinburgh – his twenty-fifth – is soon to be mounted at The Scottish Gallery. Despite his worsening sight, Morrison has promised the organisers one last work.

As he shuffles through half a dozen different pairs of glasses, he expresses his frustration at not being able to focus his eyes on the canvas properly. But as he begins painting on a pristine white board, he miraculously summons up the energy of the brash young painter he once was, his brush flashing across the canvas, leaving behind great waves of lapis lazuli.

As the film – and Morrison’s own artistic journey – draws to a close, there is a final moment of poignant triumph in Edinburgh. The first case of Covid in the UK is still a few weeks away. As the artist arrives at what will be his last solo exhibition, his wheelchair guided by his daughter Judith, as he greets his great grandson and a host of admirers, Morrison learns that one of his final paintings – Dark Landscape – has already sold. James Morrison would die, a few months later, at the age of 88.


MON 22:20 Arena (b0080tp3)
Desert Island Discs

First transmitted in 1982, Arena celebrates Roy Plomley's Desert Island Discs with the help of many celebrity castaways, including Frankie Howerd, Russell Harty, Trevor Brooking, the Lord Mayor of London, Professor JK Galbraith and Arthur Askey. The special guest for the 40th anniversary programme was Paul McCartney who was also a fan of the show: 'I love its homeliness. It conjures up the best in traditional British pleasure, like the great British breakfast. It's an honour to be asked'.


MON 23:10 This Green and Pleasant Land: The Story of British Landscape Painting (b01173pk)
Four hundred years of art history in 90 minutes? This film takes an eclectic group of people from all walks of life, including artists, critics and academics, out into the countryside to take a look at how we have depicted our landscape in art, discovering how the genre carried British painting to its highest eminence and won a place in the nation's heart.

From Flemish beginnings in the court of Charles I to the digital thumbstrokes of David Hockney's iPad, the paintings reveal as much about the nation's past as they do the patrons and artists who created them. Famous names sit alongside lesser-known works, covering everything from the refined sensibilities of 18th-century classicism to the abstract forms of the war-torn 20th century with a bit of love, loss, rivalry and rioting thrown in.

Contributions come from a cast as diverse as the works themselves, including film-maker Nic Roeg, historian Dan Snow and novelist Will Self, who offer a refreshingly wide range of perspectives on a genre of art which we have made very much our own.


MON 00:40 Canal Boat Diaries (m000bk6x)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 today]


MON 01:10 Fred Dibnah's Building of Britain (b0074n9m)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:30 today]


MON 01:40 The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution (b0133hpx)
[Repeat of broadcast at 20:00 today]


MON 02:40 India: Nature's Wonderland (b06b3klq)
Episode 2

The hidden wonders of India's spectacular natural world are revealed by wildlife expert Liz Bonnin, actress Freida Pinto and mountaineer Jon Gupta.

Experience a village of birds, masks that come alive, the world's greatest mountain range and baby turtles erupting out of the sand.

This is truly a land like no other.