Katty Kay in Washington and Christian Fraser in London return to report on the events that are shaping the world.
Michael Portillo follows in the footsteps of Edwardian travellers to trace a route recommended in his Bradshaw's guide, journeying from the heart of France to the Mediterranean coast.
His journey begins in the capital of cuisine, Lyon, where he finds out about the early 20th-century Meres Lyonnaises, to whom the city owes its gastronomic reputation. Ever keen to try his hand, Michael takes instruction from a top chef on how to make an omelette, but his efforts fail to impress.
At the Palais de la Bourse, Michael hears how, at the time of his guide, the city was still reeling from the assassination of the country's president and how a shocked French nation rallied in support of the Third Republic.
Cycling in tandem with his guide, Michael discovers Lyon's role in the country's most famous sporting event, the Tour de France. Forsaking the saddle, Michael takes to the skies and pilots a light aircraft as he learns of one of France's pioneering aviators.
In Avignon, Michael savours the scent of Provence in the region's lavender fields before relaxing with a glass of the city's famous tipple, Chateauneuf-du-Pape.
Moving south to the city of Arles, he learns how its light and the famous mistral drew artists from all over Europe.
His journey ends at the gateway to the former French empire, Marseilles. In the vast port, Michael joins a pilot boat as it leads a supertanker to its berth.
Lucy Worsley travels to Russia to tell the extraordinary story of the dynasty that ruled the country for more than three centuries. It's an epic tale that includes giant figures such as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, the devastating struggle against Napoleon in 1812, and the political murders of Nicholas II and his family in 1918 which brought the dynasty to a brutal end.
In this first episode, Lucy investigates the beginning of the Romanovs' 300-year reign in Russia. In 1613, when Russia was leaderless, 16-year-old Mikhail Romanov was plucked from obscurity and offered the crown of Russia. Mikhail was granted absolute power and began the reign of the Romanovs as the most influential dynasty in modern European history.
Lucy also charts the story of Peter the Great, the ruthless and ambitious tsar who was determined to modernise Russia at the end of the 17th century. Lucy traces Peter's accession to the throne as a nine-year-old, when he witnessed a revolt led by royal guards and the slaughter of his uncles and close advisors. Sixteen years later, Peter would vengefully execute a thousand rebellious guards. Throughout his reign, Peter would demonstrate an unwavering commitment to establishing Russia as a naval power - Lucy explores the lengths to which Peter would go to ensure this became a reality, including the creation of a new maritime capital, St Petersburg.
Lucy shows how the Romanovs embraced and sponsored the arts on an astonishing scale - from building spectacular palaces to commissioning grand artworks - that all still dazzle today.
As well as studying this unique royal family, Lucy also considers the impact the Romanovs had on the lives of ordinary Russians, who were often little better than slaves to the elite.
Dr Zhivago is one of the best-known love stories of the 20th century, but the setting of the book also made it famous. It is a tale of passion and fear, set against a backdrop of revolution and violence. The film is what most people remember, but the story of the writing of the book has more twists, intrigue and bravery than many a Hollywood blockbuster.
In this documentary, Stephen Smith traces the revolutionary beginnings of this bestseller to it becoming a pawn of the CIA at the height of the Cold War. The writer of the novel, Boris Pasternak, in the words of his family, willingly committed acts of literary suicide in being true to the Russia he loved, but being honest about the Soviet regime he hated and despised. Under Stalin, writers and artists just disappeared if they did not support the party line. Many were murdered.
Writing his book for over 20 tumultuous years, Boris Pasternak knew it could result in his death. It did result in his mistress being sent to the gulag twice, but he had to have his say. This is the story of the writing of perhaps the bravest book ever published. It is the story before the film won Oscars and its author, the Nobel Prize. It is the untold story of the real Dr Zhivago - Boris Pasternak.
Former Scotland Yard commander Richard Cullen re-opens the murder case of Grigori Rasputin in St Petersburg in 1916. He uncovers new evidence linking the British secret service to the murder.
He said he was doing God's work on earth, but betrayed his colleagues to the KGB. Sentenced to 42 years in jail, George Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs five years later and fled to the Soviet Union. George Carey's film follows the strange life of this enigmatic traitor, tracking down people who knew him, and ending with an unexpected encounter in the woods outside Moscow.
Wildlife documentary featuring the fascinating lives of Britain's beautiful butterflies filmed in exquisite detail, and also a celebration of their enduring appeal to the British people. Butterfly-costumed carnival-goers dance at Notting Hill, street artist Nick Walker uses their image to brighten bare city walls, burlesque dancer Vicky Butterfly recreates butterfly dances, and women reveal their butterfly tattoos at Britain's biggest tattoo convention.
Britain's butterflies have never been so threatened, three-quarters are in decline - but do they still have a message for us? A search for butterflies leads to some of the most beautiful parts of Britain. It opens up the intriguing possibility that a passion for butterflies could help us preserve the landscapes that we love.
In the years preceding 1914, David Bomberg, Walter Sickert and Paul Nash set out to paint a new world, but, as the century unfolded, found themselves working in the rubble.
On 25th May 1917, war artist Paul Nash climbed out of his trench to sketch the battlefields of Flanders near Ypres. So focused was he on his work he tripped and fell back into the trench, breaking his ribs. Stretchered back to England, Nash missed his regiment going over the top at the Battle of Passchendaele. His regiment was wiped out.
Nash was scarred by the war and the ghosts of those experiences haunted his work throughout his life. A lover of nature, Nash became one of Britain's most original landscape artists, embracing modern Surrealism and ancient British history, though always tainted by his experiences during two world wars. A private yet charismatic man, he brought British landscape painting into the 20th century with his mixture of the personal and visionary, the beautiful and the shocking. An artist who saw the landscape as not just a world to paint, but a way into his heart and mind.
WEDNESDAY 08 NOVEMBER 2017
WED 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (b09d3nrg)
Series 1
08/11/2017
Katty Kay in Washington and Christian Fraser in London return to report on the events that are shaping the world.
WED 19:30 Great Continental Railway Journeys (b05qjxcy)
Series 3 - Reversions
Lyon to Marseille: Part 2
Michael Portillo follows in the footsteps of Edwardian travellers to trace a route recommended in his Bradshaw's guide, journeying from the heart of France to the Mediterranean coast.
His journey begins in the capital of cuisine, Lyon, where he finds out about the early 20th-century Meres Lyonnaises, to whom the city owes its gastronomic reputation. Ever keen to try his hand, Michael takes instruction from a top chef on how to make an omelette, but his efforts fail to impress.
At the Palais de la Bourse, Michael hears how, at the time of his guide, the city was still reeling from the assassination of the country's president and how a shocked French nation rallied in support of the Third Republic.
Cycling in tandem with his guide, Michael discovers Lyon's role in the country's most famous sporting event, the Tour de France. Forsaking the saddle, Michael takes to the skies and pilots a light aircraft as he learns of one of France's pioneering aviators.
In Avignon, Michael savours the scent of Provence in the region's lavender fields before relaxing with a glass of the city's famous tipple, Chateauneuf-du-Pape.
Moving south to the city of Arles, he learns how its light and the famous mistral drew artists from all over Europe.
His journey ends at the gateway to the former French empire, Marseilles. In the vast port, Michael joins a pilot boat as it leads a supertanker to its berth.
WED 20:00 Empire of the Tsars: Romanov Russia with Lucy Worsley (b06w0gn7)
Age of Extremes
Lucy Worsley continues her journey through Russia in the footsteps of the Romanovs, the most powerful royal dynasty in modern European history.
In this episode she examines the extraordinary reign of Catherine the Great, and the traumatic conflict with Napoleonic France that provides the setting for the novel War and Peace.
Lucy begins in the 18th century, when the great palaces of the Romanovs were built. But in Romanov Russia, blood was always intermingled with the gold - these splendid interiors were the backdrop to affairs, coups and murder.
At the magnificent palace of Peterhof near St Petersburg, Lucy charts the meteoric rise of Catherine the Great, who seized the Russian throne from her husband Peter III in 1762 and became the most powerful woman in the world. Catherine was a woman of huge passions - for art, for her adopted country (she was German by birth) and for her many lovers.
Lucy visits the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, once the home of Catherine's vast art collection. Here she explores how, once Catherine had taken the throne, she compensated for her foreign origins by taking careful control of her image, using her portraits and clothes to create a brand that looked authentically Russian yet also modern and sophisticated. Lucy tells how Catherine expanded her empire through military victories overseas, while at home she encouraged education and introduced smallpox inoculation to Russia. But Catherine struggled to introduce deeper reforms, and the institution of serfdom remained largely unchanged. Lucy explains how this injustice fuelled a violent rebellion.
Nevertheless, Catherine left Russia more powerful on the world stage than ever. But all she had achieved looked set to be undone when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. Lucy relives the pivotal battle of Borodino, when the Russian army finally confronted the French forces; the traumatic destruction of Moscow; and, under Catherine's grandson Alexander, the eventual victory over the French that provided the Romanov dynasty with its most glorious hour.
WED 21:00 Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race (b04lcxms)
When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969, America went down in popular history as the winner of the space race. However, the real pioneers of space exploration were the Soviet cosmonauts.
This remarkable feature-length documentary combines rare and unseen archive footage with interviews with the surviving cosmonauts to tell the fascinating and at times terrifying story of how the Russians led us into the space age. A particular highlight is Alexei Leonov, the man who performed the first spacewalk, explaining how he found himself trapped outside his spacecraft 500 miles above the Earth. Scary stuff.
WED 22:00 Detectorists (b09f2ndg)
Series 3
Episode 1
Lance's flat isn't his own any more and Andy's staying with the mother-in-law. But at least they have their old faithful permission to escape. Or do they? The dark cloud of a solar farm threatens the tranquillity.
WED 22:30 The League of Gentlemen (b0074513)
Series 1
Welcome to Royston Vasey
Outsider Benjamin arrives in town. Ben's friend Martin visits the Local Shop and the unfailingly strange Tubbs and Edward. Restart officer Pauline is angered that a job seeker has a job interview.
WED 23:00 Sleuths, Spies & Sorcerers: Andrew Marr's Paperback Heroes (p040pvpp)
Detectives
In the first episode of a series that explores the books we (really) read, Andrew Marr investigates the curious case of detective fiction. This is a genre that been producing best-sellers since the 19th century, and whose most famous heroes - Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Inspector Rebus - are now embedded in our collective psyche. But how does detective fiction work- and how do the best crime writers keep us compulsively turning the pages?
Andrew deconstructs detective stories by looking at their 'rules' - the conventions we expect to be present when we pick up a typical mystery. Because detective fiction is an interactive puzzle, these rules are the rules of a game - a fiendish battle of wits between the reader and the writer. What is remarkable is that instead of restricting novelists (as you might expect), these rules stimulate creativity, and Andrew reveals how clever writers like Agatha Christie have used them to create a seemingly infinite number of story-telling possibilities.
The fictional detective is a brilliant invention, a figure who takes us to (often dark) places that we wouldn't normally visit. While we are in their company, no section of society is off-limits or above suspicion, and Andrew shows how writers have used crime fiction not merely to entertain, but also to anatomise society's problems.
Andrew interviews modern-day crime writers including Ian Rankin, Sophie Hannah and Val McDermid, while profiling important pioneers such as Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett and Ruth Rendell. Along the way, he decodes various great set-pieces of the detective novel such as Hercule Poirot's drawing room denouements, and the 'locked room' mysteries of John Dickson Carr.
WED 00:00 Queen Victoria's Letters: A Monarch Unveiled (b04pl2mn)
Episode 2
AN Wilson discovers the real story behind the woman who supposedly spent the last half of her life in hiding, mourning the loss of her beloved Prince Albert. Alongside this well-known image of Victoria as the weeping widow, Wilson reveals that the years after Albert's death were actually a process of liberation and her most productive and exciting.
By examining her closest relationships in the four decades after Albert's death, Wilson tells the story of the Queen's gradual freedom from a life spent under the shadow of domineering men. Victoria's marriage had been a source of constraint as well as love, as Albert had used her pregnancies as a way to gain power and punished her for resenting it. But in her widowhood Queen Victoria, although bereft and deranged, was free to move in the world of politics and make deep friendships without concern.
From the controversial friendship with her highland servant John Brown to her most unconventional behaviour with her young Indian servant Abdul Karim, Wilson uncovers Victoria as a woman who was anything but 'Victorian'. Far from being prim and proper, she loved life in all its richness - she was blind to class and colour and, contrary to what we think, had a great sense of humour.
Queen Victoria's journals and letters are read by Anna Chancellor throughout.
WED 01:00 Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain's Holiest Places (b01rqbnm)
Islands
Presenter and Welsh poet Ifor ap Glyn explores the wealth of Britain's extraordinary holy places on a pilgrimage that spans almost 2,000 years of history. Travelling across the breadth of the UK, Ifor uncovers the stories and rich history behind many of our most famous sites, explaining the myths and legends of some of Britain's most sacred places.
Ifor sets out to understand the appeal of islands as holy retreats. It may seem obvious that we would feel closer to the divine when surrounded by the stunning natural beauty of an island, but Ifor soon discovers there is a far deeper reason they became such a major aspect of religion.
His journey takes him from the Lake District to the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral, from our most famous holy island at Lindisfarne to the Western Isles in Scotland where an ancient Christian holy island has been reborn as a Buddhist monastery. He visits the island where the Welsh version of St Valentine lived and finally heads out west to the barren island of Bardsey, at the very furthest tip of Wales. This is known as the Island of 20,000 Saints, a place that exists halfway between this world and the next.
WED 01:30 British Art at War: Bomberg, Sickert and Nash (b04hk9n8)
Walter Sickert and the Theatre of War
In the years preceding 1914, David Bomberg, Walter Sickert and Paul Nash set out to paint a new world, but, as the century unfolded, found themselves working in the rubble.
Walter Sickert's early career as an actor is long forgotten and he's now remembered for his art. But he never left the stage behind. Always shape-shifting between roles, Sickert's appearance never stayed still. And his art, too, was in perpetual transformation. Dazzlingly original, deeply unsettling, poised on the brink of violence. For most, proof that Sickert is the godfather of modern British art, but for a few at the fringes, evidence he's Jack the Ripper.
But Sickert was no perpetrator, just an unflinching witness, notably, to the cataclysm of World War One. Too old to fight in Flanders, Sickert painted edgy, compelling, subtle pictures of those who'd been left behind. He painted people trying to get on with lives that were being shattered by the conflict. Almost alone of his generation, Sickert truly understood that the theatre of war was not confined to the trenches.
WED 02:30 Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race (b04lcxms)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
THURSDAY 09 NOVEMBER 2017
THU 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (b09d3ntr)
Series 1
09/11/2017
Katty Kay in Washington and Christian Fraser in London return to report on the events that are shaping the world.
THU 19:30 Top of the Pops (b09dx3lx)
John Peel and Tommy Vance present the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 22 November 1984. Featuring Nick Heyward, The Human League, Billy Ocean, Murray Head, Shakin' Stevens and Chaka Khan.
THU 20:00 Empire of the Tsars: Romanov Russia with Lucy Worsley (b06wrgzw)
The Road to Revolution
Lucy Worsley concludes her history of the Romanov dynasty, investigating how the family's grip on Russia unravelled in their final century. She shows how the years 1825-1918 were bloody and traumatic, a period when four tsars tried - and failed - to deal with the growing pressure for constitutional reform and revolution.
Lucy finds out how the Romanovs tried to change the system themselves - in 1861, millions of enslaved serfs were freed by the Tsar-Liberator, Alexander II. But Alexander paid the ultimate penalty for opening the Pandora's box of reform when he was later blown up by terrorists on the streets of St Petersburg.
Elsewhere, there was repression, denial, war and - in the case of the last tsar, Nicholas II - a fatalistic belief in the power of God, with Nicholas's faith in the notorious holy man Rasputin being a major part in his undoing. Lucy also details the chilling murder of Nicholas and his family in 1918, and asks whether all of this horror have been avoided.
Lucy also shows how there was a growing movement among the people of Russia to determine their own fate. She traces the growth of the intelligentsia, writers and thinkers who sought to have a voice about Russia. Speaking out came with a risk - after Ivan Turgenev wrote about the appalling life of the serfs in 1852, he was sentenced to house arrest by tsar Nicholas I. Lucy also shows how anger against the Romanov regime created a later generation of radicals committed to overturning the status quo. Some would turn to terrorism and, finally, revolution.
As well as political upheaval there is private drama, and Lucy explains how Nicholas II's family life played into his family's downfall. His son and heir Alexei suffered from haemophilia - the secrecy the family placed around the condition led them into seclusion, further distancing them from the Russian people. It also led them to the influence of man who seemed to have the power to heal their son, and who was seen as a malign influence on Nicholas - Rasputin.
THU 21:00 Russia's Lost Princesses (b04fljyk)
The Gilded Cage
Interviews with leading historians, archive footage and dramatic reconstruction reveal the childhoods of Tsar Nicholas II's four daughters - Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia - and the truth behind the fairy-tale images. The sisters were the most photographed princesses of their day, attracting the same frenzied press attention as Princess Diana later would, but their public profile masked the reality of their strange and very isolated upbringing.
The sisters' lives changed forever after the birth of their little brother Alexei, whose life-threatening haemophilia meant that he became the main focus of their mother Alexandra's love and attention. Alexandra was obsessed with keeping Alexei's illness an absolute secret, so the family lived in a gilded cage - the girls seldom left the confines of their palace, had few friends and knew almost nothing of the outside world. One of the few outsiders to whom the four sisters became genuinely close was their parents' controversial spiritual advisor Rasputin, the only person who seemed able to alleviate Alexei's suffering.
As adolescents, the girls grew even closer to Rasputin. Because their mother was often unwell, frequently locked herself away and refused to see her daughters, they turned instead to Rasputin for advice on all their teenage problems. Rasputin was notorious for his debauchery, so his relationship with Alexandra and the sisters was cause for mounting concern amongst the extended Romanov family, and it wasn't long before shocking rumours started to circulate about what exactly was going on amidst the seclusion of the Alexander Palace.
THU 22:00 Russia's Lost Princesses (b04g6rhb)
The World Turned Upside Down
The story of the final four years in the lives of Tsar Nicholas II's four daughters - Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia - concluding with their brutal murders in the bloody climax to the Russian revolution. Interviews with leading historians, archive footage and dramatic reconstruction reveal the real women behind the familiar images of beautiful girls in white dresses.
In 1914 Olga and Tatiana were 18 and 16 and old enough to be married off to eligible princes, but any prospect of escaping their strange and very isolated life in the Alexander Palace was thwarted by the outbreak of the First World War. The war destroyed all trace of the life the sisters had known, but when Olga and Tatiana volunteered as Red Cross nurses they did enjoy a brief taste of the real world beyond the palace gates. The sisters became very close to some of the dashing young officers they nursed and Olga's touching diary entries reveal how she fell passionately in love with one particular Georgian officer, Dmitri Shakh-Bagov.
March 1917 brought a dramatic end to over three centuries of Romanov rule and following their father's abdication the girls were forced to adjust to a world turned upside down. After five months under house arrest at the Alexander Palace the girls, along with the rest of their family, were sent into exile in Siberia. The sisters' letters from Siberia bring the boredom, frustration and uncertainty of their captivity powerfully to life. For much of their tragically short lives the girls had been as much prisoners as princesses and in their final weeks in exile in Siberia that imprisonment was absolute - the whitewashed windows of the house where they were held denied them even a glimpse of the outside world.
THU 23:00 Russia 1917: Countdown to Revolution (b098pgf1)
The Russian Revolution of 1917 is one of the most controversial events of the 20th century. Three men - Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin - emerged from obscurity to forge an entirely new political system. In the space of six months, they turned the largest country on earth into the first Communist state. Was this a triumph of people power or a political coup d'etat that led to blood-soaked totalitarianism? A hundred years later, the Revolution still sparks ferocious debate. This film dramatizes the 245 days that brought these men to supreme power. As the history unfolds, a stellar cast of writers and historians, including Martin Amis, Orlando Figes, Helen Rappaport, Simon Sebag-Montefiore and China Mieville, battle over the meaning of the Russian Revolution and explore how it shaped the world we live in today.
THU 00:00 Top of the Pops (b09dx3lx)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]
THU 00:40 Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World (b00qbvqw)
Series 1
The Golden Ocean
Historian and sailor Dan Snow presents the second episode in this four-part series examining the remarkable story of how the country's greatest institution - her navy - has shaped her history. In The Golden Ocean, Snow charts the period from 1690 to 1759 and reveals how England - soon to be Britain - and her navy rose from the depths of military and economic disaster to achieve global supremacy.
In 1690, France ruled the waves and the Royal Navy was in tatters. King William III had taken England into a disastrous war against the most powerful country in Europe. If England was to survive, it needed a new navy, one capable of carrying the fight to its enemies anywhere in the world.
To achieve this would require a national effort unlike anything that had been seen before. King William III's determination to achieve mastery of the seas unleashed a chain reaction of revolutions in finance, industry and agriculture which reshaped the landscape and created the country's first great credit boom. Fifty years before the Industrial Revolution, the Royal Navy became the engine of global change, propelling Britain into the modern world.
It had the desired effect at sea. By 1759, French forces around the world were capitulating to Britain's superior Navy. For the first time in her history, Britannia really did rule the waves.
THU 01:40 British Art at War: Bomberg, Sickert and Nash (b04jvlk2)
David Bomberg: Prophet in No Man's Land
In the years preceding 1914, David Bomberg, Walter Sickert and Paul Nash set out to paint a new world, but, as the century unfolded, found themselves working in the rubble.
David Bomberg is now recognised as the most startlingly original British painter of his generation, but died in obscurity more than half a century ago.
A Jewish immigrant from London's east end, his early modernist works pushed art to its limits. Fighting at the Somme, David Bomberg watched the world splinter and fall apart just like the works of art he had created. Bomberg spent the rest of his life searching for order in an increasingly disordered world, and his wanderings took him as far as Palestine, before he settled at the end of his life in Ronda, Spain.
When he died in 1957, embattled and in poverty, he seemed to be no more than a footnote in the history of British art. However, the works that survive David Bomberg tell their own story. Combative and iconoclastic, he remains the most elusively original British painter of the 20th century.
THU 02:40 Beautiful Thing: A Passion for Porcelain (p0192fqp)
Documentary in which Ros Savill, former director and curator at the Wallace Collection, tells the story of some incredible and misunderstood objects - the opulent, intricate, gold-crested and often much-maligned Sevres porcelain of the 18th century.
Ros brings us up close to a personal choice of Sevres masterpieces in the Wallace Collection, viewing them in intricate and intimate detail. She engages us with the beauty and brilliance in the designs, revelling in what is now often viewed as unfashionably pretty or ostentatious. These objects represent the unbelievable skills of 18th-century France, as well as the desires and demands of an autocratic regime that was heading for revolution.
As valuable now as they were when first produced, Sevres' intricacies and opulence speak of wealth, sophistication and prestige and have always been sought after by collectors eager to associate themselves with Sevres' power. Often the whims and capricious demands of monumentally rich patrons were the catalysts for these beautiful and incredible artistic innovations.
The film explores the stories of some of history's most outrageous patrons - Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, as well as their foreign counterparts like Catherine the Great, who willingly copied the French court's capricious ways. Ros tells how the French Revolutionaries actually preserved and adapted the Sevres tradition to their new order, and how the English aristocracy collected these huge dinner services out of nostalgia for the ancient regime. In fact, they are still used by the British royal family today.
Like the iPads of their day, these objects, ostentatious to modernist eyes, were the product of art and science coming together and creating something beautiful yet functional. Ros reconnects us with the fascinating lives and stories of the artists, artisans, painters and sculptors whose ingenuity, innovation and creativity went into making some of the most incredible and incredibly expensive ice cream coolers, vases and teapots of their day. We also see inside the factory, still open today, and witness the alchemic creation process for ourselves.
Taking us behind the museum glass and into some incredible private collections, the film reveals stories that are as louche, extravagant and over the top as some of the objects themselves. They might be unfashionable or even unpalatable to minimalist modernist tastes right now, but in this documentary we are taken back to a time when these objects were universally loved and adored, when they were the newest and most incredible things that had ever been created.
FRIDAY 10 NOVEMBER 2017
FRI 19:00 World News Today (b09d3nv0)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
FRI 19:30 The Good Old Days (b09f4bdp)
Leonard Sachs chairs the old-time music hall programme, first broadcast on 2 January 1980. Featuring John Inman, Gemma Craven, David Kernan, Bernard Spear, Gino Donati and Michel Arene and the Lido Can Can Dancers.
FRI 20:20 Top of the Pops (b09dx48t)
Peter Powell and Janice Long present the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 29 November 1984. Featuring Nik Kershaw, The Eurythmics, Slade, Tina Turner, Kool & The Gang, Madonna, Alvin Stardust and Jim Diamond.
FRI 21:00 Top of the Pops (b09dx3lx)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 on Thursday]
FRI 21:30 Storyville (b00ml582)
How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin
Documentary which tells the extraordinary unknown story of how The Beatles helped to destroy the USSR.
In August 1962, director Leslie Woodhead made a two-minute film in Liverpool's Cavern Club with a raw and unrecorded group of rockers called The Beatles. He arranged their first live TV appearances on a local show in Manchester and watched as the Fab Four phenomenon swept the world.
Twenty-five years later while making films in Russia, Woodhead became aware of how, even though they were never able to play in the Soviet Union, The Beatles' legend had soaked into the lives of a generation of kids. This film meets the Soviet Beatles generation and hears their stories about how the Fab Four changed their lives, including Putin's deputy premier Sergei Ivanov, who explains how The Beatles helped him learn English and showed him another life.
The Soviet authorities were alarmed by the seditious potential of rock 'n' roll, with The Beatles a special target and denounced as 'bugs' in official papers. Their smuggled records were destroyed and their music was banned, but the myth blossomed as bootlegs and photos were covertly traded and even rented amongst fans.
Soon there were thousands of rock bands across the USSR trying to make music with crude homemade guitars. Speakers on lampposts installed to broadcast propaganda were grabbed by rock hopefuls, while reports that an electric pickup could be cannibalised from a telephone led to phone boxes being raided and disabled.
Millions of young people fell in love with The Beatles and the culture of the Cold War enemy, and defected emotionally from the Soviet system. The Beatles prepared the cultural way for the fall of the Berlin Wall and ultimately helped to wash away the foundations of that system.
FRI 22:30 Sgt Pepper's Musical Revolution with Howard Goodall (b08tb97f)
50 years ago this week, on 1 June, 1967, an album was released that changed music history - The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In this film, composer Howard Goodall explores just why this album is still seen as so innovative, so revolutionary and so influential. With the help of outtakes and studio conversations between the band, never heard before outside of Abbey Road, Howard gets under the bonnet of Sgt Pepper. He takes the music apart and reassembles it, to show us how it works - and makes surprising connections with the music of the last 1,000 years to do so.
Sgt Pepper came about as a result of a watershed in The Beatles' career. In August 1966, sick of the screaming mayhem of live shows, they'd taken what was then seen as the career-ending decision to stop touring altogether. Instead, beginning that December, they immersed themselves in Abbey Road with their creative partner, producer George Martin, for an unprecedented five months. What they produced didn't need to be recreated live on stage. The Beatles took full advantage of this freedom, turning the studio from a place where a band went to capture its live sound, as quickly as possible, into an audio laboratory, a creative launch pad. As Howard shows, they and George Martin and his team constructed the album sound by sound, layer by layer - a formula that became the norm for just about every rock act who followed.
In June 1967, after what amounted to a press blackout about what they'd been up to, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released. It was a sensation, immediately becoming the soundtrack to the Summer of Love - and one of the best-selling, most critically lauded albums of all time. It confirmed that a 'pop music' album could be an art form, not just a collection of three-minute singles. It's regularly been voted one of the most important and influential records ever released.
In this film, Howard Goodall shows that it is the sheer ambition of Sgt Pepper - in its conception, composition, arrangements and innovative recording techniques - that sets it apart.
Made with unprecedented access to The Beatles' pictorial archive, this is an in-depth exploration, in sound and vision, of one of the most important and far-reaching moments in recent music history.
FRI 23:30 Arena (b01nd5qd)
The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour
Magical Mystery Tour Revisited
Arena presents the greatest Beatles story never told - the making of Magical Mystery Tour - full of fabulous Beatles archive material never shown before anywhere in the world.
Songs you will never forget, the film you have never seen and a story that has never been heard. In 1967, in the wake of the extraordinary impact of Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles made a film - a dreamlike story of a coach daytrip, a magical mystery tour. It was seen by a third of the nation, at
8.35pm on BBC1 on Boxing Day - an expectant public, hoping for some light entertainment for a family audience.
However, Magical Mystery Tour was greeted with outrage and derision by middle England and the establishment media.
'How dare they', they cried. 'They're not film directors. Who do they think they are?' they howled. Where were the four lovable moptops of Help! and A Hard Day's Night?
What propelled The Beatles to make this surreal, startling and - at the time - utterly misunderstood film?
Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour!
FRI 00:30 Top of the Pops (b09dx48t)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:20 today]
FRI 01:10 ... Sings The Beatles (b00ml7p5)
Recorded for the fortieth anniversary of Abbey Road, The Beatles' final album, a journey through the classic and curious covers in the BBC archives.
Featuring Sandie Shaw singing a sassy Day Tripper, Shirley Bassey belting out Something, a close-harmony Carpenters cover of Help!, Joe Cocker's chart-topping With a Little Help from My Friends, Oasis reinventing the Walrus and a little Lady Madonna from Macca himself.
Plus a few 'magical' moments from Candy Flip, The Korean Kittens and Su Pollard.
FRI 02:10 Storyville (b00ml582)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:30 today]