This intimate journey to the heart of a Brazil continues, following the animal families as they face the formidable monsoon rains.
The giant otter babies must watch out for predatory jaguars and learn to swim before their river floods. The coatis must eat all they can before their world disappears underwater, and the youngest capuchin monkey has to learn some clever survival skills fast.
With their charismatic faces and extraordinary head-turning ability, owls are one of our best-loved birds. And yet it's rare to catch more than a glimpse of one in the wild. These mysterious birds haunt our night, floating through the darkness with an eerie silence. But how do they see in the dark? And how do they fly so silently?
Through the eyes of two special barn owl chicks, and with the help of leading scientists, Natural World reveals the magic behind owls' superpowers.
A group of friends from Brisbane, on a sailing holiday of a lifetime, encounter a broken-down fishing vessel filled with refugees in the Timor Sea. Their lives are about to change forever.
Following the loss of his daughter, Ismail reports the crime at sea to the Australian Federal Police. But has his grief blinded him to the identity of the true culprits?
A feature-length documentary about one of the most successful British bands in rock music, reuniting Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett to tell their story. The film recounts their extraordinary musical story, exploring the songwriting and the emotional highs and lows. It features previously unseen archive material and rare footage from across their entire career.
Gary Davies presents the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 19 February 1987. Featuring performances by Westworld, Carly Simon, Curiosity Killed the Cat, Man 2 Man Meets Man Parrish, Duran Duran, Simply Red, Mental as Anything, The Jets, Eric Clapton, Ben E King and Europe.
Janice Long and Gary Davies present the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 5 March 1987. Featuring performances by The Christians, a-ha, Erasure, Mel and Kim, Jackie Wilson, Freddie Mercury, Boy George, Al Jarreau, Ben E King and Percy Sledge.
Shavkat Jumanijozov has been working with wood for over 30 years. In his workshop in Khiva in Uzbekistan, he makes doors, chests and impressive wooden columns. Trained by the grandson of a famous 19th-century carver, Shavkat is a proud master of his craft and oversees a team of brothers, sons and nephews, passing on his expertise to the next generation.
In this beautifully filmed portrait of a traditional craftsman at work, we follow the painstaking carving of a wooden pillar, from the first cuts into the wood to its sanding, shaping and varnishing, each stage captured in absorbing detail.
SUNDAY 03 FEBRUARY 2019
SUN 19:00 Masters of the Pacific Coast: The Tribes of the American Northwest (b07m772h)
Arrival
Two-part documentary in which archaeologist Dr Jago Cooper explores the extraordinary and resilient culture of the American north west, revealing one the most inspiring stories in human history.
1,400 miles of rugged, windswept and rocky coastline in what is now the Alaskan panhandle, British Columbia and Washington state have been home to hundreds of distinct communities for over 10,000 years. Theirs is the longest continuing culture to be found anywhere in the Americas. They mastered a tough environment to create unique and complex communities that have redefined how human societies develop. They produced art infused with meaning that ranks alongside any other major civilisation on earth. And they were very nearly wiped out - by foreign disease, oppression and theft of their lands. But a deep connection to the environment lies at the heart of their endurance and, unlike many indigenous cultures annihilated following European contact, their culture sustains and has much to offer the rest of the world today.
Jago sees how a complex society developed without agriculture. The answer lies in the extraordinary way in which the people understood and mastered their environment, which in turn is reflected in their identity and social structures. He reveals the hidden significance in totem poles, canoes and intricate textiles, arguing that the peoples of the north west coast achieved the highest levels of cultural achievement.
SUN 20:00 A Slow Odyssey: The Great Wall of China (m0002dtj)
A spectacular aerial journey flying over the world’s longest man-made monument, the Great Wall of China. In classic slow-TV style - without commentary and using authentic location sound - fly 2,500 kilometres along the 2,300-year-old wall, from the Yellow Sea in the crowded east, near Beijing, to the remote Gobi Desert in the west.
This epic adventure explores 20 location highlights of the Unesco World Heritage Site, built by the Ming Dynasty between 1368 and 1644, starting at Old Dragon’s Head on the east coast and ending at the extraordinary Jaiyuguan Fortress - once the gateway into China from the ancient Silk Road trading route.
With the help of informative captions, witness the classic stone, crenellated walls, ramparts and watchtowers, which rise and fall over the high mountain ranges for the first 500 kilometres of the Great Wall, north of Beijing. Highlights include the famous tourist wall of Badaling, which has seen visits from 500 heads of state, including the Queen and US presidents Nixon and Obama. It was the first section of the Great Wall to open to tourists in 1957.
The middle section explores the rarely seen rammed-earth mud wall, built in provinces with few stone or brick resources, which is much more fragile. More than a third of the entire Great Wall has been destroyed by nature, war and progress over the last three centuries. There is a significant meeting of two Chinese icons as the Great Wall crosses the great Yellow River, known as the cradle of Chinese civilisation.
In the final third of the journey, the wall stretches off across desolate floodplains as it starts to border the remote western Gobi Desert. Flying high above one of the last remaining ancient walled towns, its name becomes obvious - Yongtai or ‘Turtle Town’ – as its 17th-century walls and watchtowers resemble the shape of a turtle.
The final dramatic climax comes at the Qilian Gorge, 80 metres above a roaring river, with the snow-capped mountains of the Tibetan plateau in the distance. The end tower is just a few kilometres from the impressive double-walled Jaiyuguan Fortress, whose three gigantic temple towers dominate the landscape, brandishing the words: ‘The First and Greatest Pass under Heaven’. This was the intimidating welcome to all new arrivals entering China from the west along the Silk Road. A Slow Odyssey is a TV first, showing the Great Wall as it has never been seen before – entirely from the air.
SUN 21:30 The Greatest Tomb on Earth: Secrets of Ancient China (b080396k)
From the depths of the greatest tomb on earth comes an epic new story that could rewrite history, revealing for the first time the true origin of one of the world's most powerful nations: China.
In this landmark film, historian Dan Snow, physical anthropologist Professor Alice Roberts and scientist and explorer Dr Albert Lin investigate a series of earth-shattering discoveries at the mighty tomb guarded by the Terracotta Warriors, a site two hundred times bigger than Egypt's Valley of the Kings and the final resting place of China's first emperor.
Mobilising the latest technology, delving into some of the oldest texts, enlisting world experts and employing forensic science, together the three reveal an explosive secret from the foundations of the Chinese empire.
SUN 22:30 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 23:30 Gods and Monsters: Homer's Odyssey (b00vtwnz)
Virginia Woolf said that Homer's epic poem the Odyssey was 'alive to every tremor and gleam of existence'. Following the magical and strange adventures of warrior king Odysseus, inventor of the idea of the Trojan horse, the poem can claim to be the greatest story ever told. Now British poet Simon Armitage goes on his own Greek adventure, following in the footsteps of one of his own personal heroes. Yet Simon ponders the question of whether he even likes the guy.
SUN 00:30 This Green and Pleasant Land: The Story of British Landscape Painting (b01173pk)
400 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 filmmaker 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.
SUN 02:00 Our Classical Century (b0bs6xv8)
Series 1
1918 - 1936
Our Classical Century brings together the greatest moments in classical music in Britain over the last 100 years in a four-part series that celebrates moments of extraordinary music ambition and excellence, deep emotion and of great pleasure, and the artists who have brought audiences this music. Over the course of the series, viewers see and hear how, over the past one hundred years, classical music has shown dazzling virtuosity and innovation, and how music provided a unifying soundtrack to the times when national identity and destiny was at stake.
Presented by Suzy Klein and Sir Lenny Henry, this first programme captures the profound influence of the First World War on our classical music - how it affected a generation of musicians and composers and how the music they created became a crucial part of the nation’s sense of identity. From the martial might of Mars in Gustav Holst’s The Planets to the pastoral beauty of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ much-loved The Lark Ascending, this film tells the story of the music which brought together the United Kingdom.
Suzy and Lenny reveal the phenomenal popularity of the musical extravaganza Hiawatha by the now relatively unknown Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and examine the enduring impact of the American Jazz Age with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. They also look at how Hubert Parry’s wartime composition to William Blake’s poem Jerusalem became the anthem of the Suffragette movement and at how the opening of Glyndebourne saw the start of a new chapter for opera in Britain.
SUN 03:00 Masters of the Pacific Coast: The Tribes of the American Northwest (b07m772h)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:00 today]
MONDAY 04 FEBRUARY 2019
MON 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m0002dty)
Series 1
04/02/2019
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
MON 19:30 Handmade on the Silk Road (b07blsjw)
The Potter
The desert city of Meybod in southern Iran is famous for its ceramics and Abdol Reza Aghaei's family have been potters there for generations. This beautifully observed film follows Abdol and his father making a simple decorated water jug. Competing with cheap Chinese imports, they sometimes struggle to make a living, but share a dedication to keeping their traditions alive. And with Abdol's father teasing his son about who makes the best pots, the film also offers a touching, intimate portrait of two master craftsmen at work.
MON 20:00 Coast (b07x0772)
The Great Guide
Cornwall
Tessa Dunlop and Neil Oliver present the ultimate guide to the Cornish coast - from the River Tamar to Tintagel Castle - as they tell the stories that make this stretch so unique. As well as choosing the pick of Coast stories from the past ten years, Tessa hops on and off a variety of boats to delve into untold secrets from these shores. From line fishing with a local Looe fisherman, exploring serpentine rock on The Lizard with a leading geologist, to uncovering a story of tragedy at sea and finding out what it is like living the wild coastal dream in the storm-hit harbour of Porthleven.
MON 21:00 Don McCullin: Looking for England (m0002dv0)
Travelogue that follows photographer Don McCullin, now 83, documenting his country from inner cities to seaside towns, on a journey in search of his own nation. Sixty years after starting out as a photographer, McCullin returns to his old haunts in the East End of London, Bradford, Consett, Eastbourne and Scarborough. Along the way he encounters an array of English characters at the Glyndebourne Festival and Goodwood Revival and photographs a hunt and a group of saboteurs aiming to disrupt them. McCullin’s journey is punctuated by scenes in his darkroom, a place he is allowing cameras into for the first time.
MON 22:00 Walt Disney (b0872yqs)
Episode 2
The life and legacy of Walt Disney, featuring archival footage only recently released from the Disney vaults, alongside scenes from some of his greatest films and the sketches which created them. Those who helped turn his dreams into reality - his friends, family and his animators and designers - reveal the real man behind the legend. They disclose the previously unknown processes, single-mindedness and sometimes sheer unpleasantness and discrimination that lay behind his seemingly effortless masterpieces. Through bankruptcy, strikes, great risk and more, Disney's refusal to accept failure and his single-minded pursuit of his creative vision produced cartoons and movies that would define an entire industry. Both and inspiring story and a cautionary tale about the price of ambition, Walt Disney offers an unprecedented look at the man who created a world and built an empire.
Part two explores Disney's later years as he makes films such as Cinderella and Mary Poppins, and realises his dream project, Disneyland.
MON 23:00 Francesco's Venice (b0078sx5)
Death
Final episode of a documentary series telling the story of Venice, presented by Francesco da Mosto.
Venice may be sinking, it may even be in peril, but da Mosto is in no mood to throw in the towel. The fate of Venice still hangs in the balance, and he puts at least some of the blame at the door of the British. From the moment that Byron put Venice on the tourist map, the city has been caught up in a trail of events that has made life harder and harder for the Venetians.
But this episode is also Francesco's personal story, and he has pledged his belief in the future of Venice by continuing to live and bring up his children there, even though his life has been affected by the dangers the city faces. In the great flood of 1966 that threatened to wash the city away, he was a terrified child of five who watched the waters invade his home and wondered if life could ever continue. Francesco's father, Count da Mosto, reminisces about the 1966 floods with chilling immediacy, and Francesco swims the Grand Canal.
It has not just been the tourists or the rising waters of the lagoon that have threatened the city. Outrageous ideas to bring the city into the modern age have included bridges linking the city with mainland Italy, flattening old churches and even converting the Grand Canal into an eight-lane motorway.
MON 00:00 The Art That Made Mexico: Paradise, Power and Prayers (b09hm1y8)
Series 1
Paradise
Alinka Echeverria reveals the way in which Mexican artists shook off European artistic influence to find a distinctive voice, expressed through landscape painting, and reconnected with pre-Hispanic subject matter. The murals of Teotihuacan and illustrated Aztec codices show how nature was the reference point for their worldview, their power structures and their calendars. But following the conquest in the 16th century, the Spanish 're-educated' indigenous artists to aspire to European aesthetics, and for nearly 300 years after conquest, the art of what was called New Spain looked a lot like the art of old Spain.
A century after independence in 1810, artists began to depict Mexico's ancient foundation myths, including the symbolic volcanoes that dominate the Valley of Mexico. Indigenous people, their land and lives were no longer taboo. Following the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, landscape paintings established a new style that was resolutely Mexican and confirmed the re-established connections between Mexico's indigenous population and their land. Forces of nature and Mexico's landscape continue to be integral to the Mexican sense of artistic identity.
MON 01:00 Majesty and Mortar: Britain's Great Palaces (b046w5c1)
Towards an Architecture of Majesty
Royal palaces are the most magnificent buildings in our history. Often built to extraordinary levels of luxury and excess, they express the personalities of our kings and queens since 1066.
From the Tower of London to Hampton Court Palace, Dan Cruickshank reveals an extraordinary story of buildings, often fortified, that cemented the monarch's claim to the throne. Palaces reveal our monarchs like no other buildings - their taste for luxury, their fear of the mob, even their relationship with God. Palaces have been caught up in some of the most dramatic events in history - some survive in all their magnificence like Hampton Court while others have vanished from the surface of the earth as completely as if they'd never existed.
MON 02:00 The Lost Genius of British Art: William Dobson (b014vy94)
Has one of Britain's greatest artists been unfairly forgotten? Waldemar Januszczak thinks so. In this documentary, Januszczak argues that the little known 17th-century portrait painter William Dobson was the first English painter of genius.
Dobson's life and times are embedded in one of the most turbulent and significant epochs of British history - the English Civil War. As official court painter to Charles I, the tragic British king later beheaded by Parliament, Dobson had a ringside seat to an period of intense drama and conflict. Based in Oxford, where the court was transferred after Parliament took control of London, Dobson produced an astonishing number of high-quality portraits of royalist supporters, heroes and cavaliers which Januszczak believes are the first true examples of British art. As he puts it in the film: 'Dobson's face should be on our banknotes. His name should be on all our lips.'
The film investigates the few known facts about William Dobson and seeks out the personal stories he left behind as it follows him through his tragically short career. When he died in 1646 - penniless, unemployed and a drunk - Dobson was just 36.
Among the Dobson fans interviewed in the film is Earl Spencer, brother of Princess Diana, who agrees wholeheartedly that William Dobson was the first great British painter.
MON 03:00 Don McCullin: Looking for England (m0002dv0)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
TUESDAY 05 FEBRUARY 2019
TUE 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m0002dv7)
Series 1
05/02/2019
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
TUE 19:30 Pubs, Ponds and Power: The Story of the Village (b0bsrqky)
Series 1
East Midlands
The story of Cromford. A picturesque Derbyshire village at the heart of famous industrialist Sir Richard Arkwright's mechanised cotton mills and a textile revolution. Presenter and archaeologist Ben Robinson discovers it wasn't just an industrial revolution. Cromford became a new kind of village, built to service the enterprise of this powerful man.
TUE 20:00 The Incredible Human Journey (b00l7pmr)
The Americas
For Stone Age people, reaching North and South America seems impossible - on each side vast oceans, and to the north an impenetrable ice sheet that covered the whole of Canada. So how did the first Americans get there?
Dr Alice Roberts discovers evidence for an ancient corridor through the Canadian ice sheet that may have allowed those first people through. But there are problems - in particular some very ancient finds in southern Chile seem to suggest a very different way in to the Americas. Amazingly, an ancient human skull discovered in Brazil even points to an Australasian origin of the Americans. Could a route from Australia across the Pacific have been possible? A surprising answer to the problem eventually comes from a Canadian forensic scientist more used to solving murder cases.
TUE 21:00 Kate Humble: Living with Nomads (b05zqqbt)
Mongolia
In her final journey of the series, Kate Humble travels deep into the southern Gobi Desert in Mongolia to live with an extended family of cashmere goat and yak herders. Here in the seemingly barren wastes of Asia's largest desert, nomads have lived cheek by jowl with nature for centuries. Chimid, the 78-year-old mother of ten, welcomes Kate into her large family. With their herds of goats, sheep, horses and yaks, this family are successful nomads. They move four times a year with the seasons across the Gobi, to sheltered winter pastures and mountaintop summer grazing.
It's claimed that 30 per cent of Mongolia's population still live a nomadic existence. Nomadism was banned under a Communist regime, but when it collapsed in the 1990s thousands of nomads returned to the Gobi. They continue to battle the harsh weather and attacks from wild predators, wolves and snow leopards. But they are adapting to the 21st century, embracing its benefits like satellite dishes, mobile phones and 4x4s. And despite the modern-day threats of the burgeoning mining industry and the temptations of urban living, these Mongolian nomads seem to have found a balance between tradition and the modern world.
TUE 22:00 James May's Big Ideas (b00dtl3f)
Come Fly with Me
In the first of this series, James May travels the globe in search of his ultimate flying machine. He begins by heading into the frozen wastes of Russia to pilot one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War. He then heads to the US to fly the world's only surviving flying car.
After watching a man struggle with his tiny chopper in Japan, he gets back to the suburban gardens of Sussex to turn himself into a human rocket - all in pursuit of finding a better way to get from A to B.
Finally, in California, James encounters his ultimate dream - a flying car capable of vertical takeoff, and one so simple that anyone can pilot it, but is the world ready for a flying car?
TUE 23:00 Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities (b04fmg8j)
Paris 1928
Dr James Fox tells the story of Paris in 1928. It was a city that attracted people dreaming of a better world after World War I. This was the year when the surrealists Magritte, Dali and Bunuel brought their bizarre new vision to the people, and when emigre writers and musicians such as Ernest Hemingway and George Gershwin came looking for inspiration.
Paris in 1928 was where black musicians and dancers like Josephine Baker found adulation, where Cole Porter took time off from partying to write Let's Do It, and where radical architect Le Corbusier planned a modernist utopia that involved pulling down much of Paris itself.
TUE 00:00 The Brits Who Built the Modern World (b03vgz8d)
The Power of the Past
How an exceptional generation of British architects, led by Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, conquered the globe with their high-tech vision.
This episode focuses on the 1980s, when modern architecture was deeply unpopular and under attack from the Prince of Wales. The architects reveal the dramatic stories behind some of their most famous creations, including Rogers's Lloyd's of London building and Foster's Stansted Airport.
Terry Farrell reveals how he was kept in the dark when he was designing the MI6 Headquarters, Michael Hopkins recalls the challenges of bringing ultra-modern architecture into the traditional world of Lord's Cricket Ground, and Nicholas Grimshaw follows in the footsteps of the great Victorian engineers with his Waterloo International station.
TUE 01:00 Majesty and Mortar: Britain's Great Palaces (b047pdzg)
Inventing a National Style
Dan Cruickshank charts the arrival of a new style of palace that borrowed from ancient Rome and beyond, as the kings and queens of Britain demanded that architecture proclaim their right to rule, and even their divinity. From London's Banqueting House to the birth of Buckingham Palace via Kensington, Kew and a new wing at Hampton Court, the palace became like a bejewelled casket to house the monarch. But disaster was around the corner and Britain learned that a palace could transform into a prison overnight.
TUE 02:00 The Incredible Human Journey (b00l7pmr)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
TUE 03:00 Kate Humble: Living with Nomads (b05zqqbt)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
WEDNESDAY 06 FEBRUARY 2019
WED 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m0002dwy)
Series 1
06/02/2019
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
WED 19:30 Pubs, Ponds and Power: The Story of the Village (b0bsrqj7)
Series 1
London
Archaeologist Ben Robinson explores London, the ultimate 'city of villages'. Despite many rural settlements like Hornsey and Dagenham being swallowed up by the expanding capital, Hampstead residents successfully fought to preserve their village heritage. And in recent years Londoners have created a new breed of urban villages like Crouch End and Walthamstow.
WED 20:00 Bullets, Boots and Bandages: How to Really Win at War (b01bs9gb)
Stealing a March
Historian Saul David explores how wars are really fought - in the backroom of military planning. He shows how generals have met the challenge of moving armies.
WED 21:00 Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain (b007nn9k)
Revolution
Andrew Marr revisits the Britain of Margaret Thatcher and comes to some surprising conclusions about the British national character.
Promising to restore order, confidence and national pride, Margaret Thatcher unleashed a dramatic and divisive transformation of British society. In a period of extreme ideological polarisation, British identity was redefined by the global market, and striking miners and sections of the Trade Union movement were demonised as the enemy within. Imperial visions stirred again as the fleet sailed for the Falklands. Having won power with the promise to restore traditional British values, the Thatcher government unleashed a whirlwind of privatisation and deregulation that amounted to a cultural, economic and political revolution. Heroic national rescue operation or final act of self-destruction?
This film explores the extent to which British people are all now the children of Margaret Thatcher.
WED 22:00 How We Built Britain (b007qmpw)
Scotland: Towering Ambitions
David Dimbleby travels Britain and through 1,000 years of history to discover the buildings that have made us who we are. In Scotland he visits Stirling Castle, dramatic symbol of the birth of a new country, and the fairytale tower house of Craigevar. He travels to the crofts of the Outer Hebrides, to the castle that inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula, to the sparkling granite city of Aberdeen and to the tenements of Glasgow - home of Scotland's greatest architect, Charles Rennie Macintosh.
WED 23:00 Castles: Britain's Fortified History (b04tt2f9)
Kingdom of Conquest
Sam Willis tells the story of the English ruler who left the most indelible mark on the castle - the great Plantagenet king, Edward I, who turned it into an instrument of colonisation. Edward spent vast sums to subdue Wales with a ring of iron comprised of some of the most fearsome fortresses ever built. Castles like Caernarfon and Beaumaris were used to impose England's will on the Welsh. But when Edward turned his attention to Scotland, laying siege to castles with great catapults, things didn't go so well for him.
WED 00:00 The Medici: Makers of Modern Art (b00fztl9)
Documentary in which Andrew Graham-Dixon reveals how the Medici family transformed Florence through sculpture, painting and architecture, and created a world where masterpieces fetch millions today.
Without the money and patronage of the Medici we might never have heard of artists such as Donatello, Michelangelo or Botticelli. Graham-Dixon examines how a family of shadowy, corrupt businessmen, driven by greed and ambition, became the financial engine behind the Italian Renaissance.
WED 01:00 Majesty and Mortar: Britain's Great Palaces (b0488trx)
Opening the Palace Doors
With the widowhood of Queen Victoria, the glorious life of palaces almost came to an abrupt end. There would be just one final flowering of palatial style just before the First World War, on an imperial scale - the redesign of Buckingham Palace and The Mall. The interwar period was a difficult time for many of Britain's best palaces, forced into a half-life of grace-and-favour accommodation for exiled royalty and aristocracy down on their luck. But more recent times would see restoration and conservation on a new scale and, with it, detective work to uncover palace secrets.
WED 02:00 Pubs, Ponds and Power: The Story of the Village (b0bsrqky)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 on Tuesday]
WED 02:30 Pubs, Ponds and Power: The Story of the Village (b0bsrqj7)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]
WED 03:00 Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain (b007nn9k)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
THURSDAY 07 FEBRUARY 2019
THU 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m0002dx3)
Series 1
07/02/2019
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
THU 19:30 Top of the Pops (m0002dx5)
Simon Bates and Peter Powell present the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 19 March 1987, featuring Boy George, Erasure, Genesis and The Mission.
THU 20:00 Wonders of Life (b01r1znn)
Original Series
Home
As far as we know, there is only one place in the universe on which life has taken hold - earth - but for how much longer will this distinction remain? Astronomers are on the brink of finding other worlds the same size as earth and the same distance from their star. Professor Brian Cox considers what it is about our world that has made it a home and asks what ingredients are necessary to turn a tiny spec of rock in space into a living, vibrant planet.
To find out, Brian has come to one of earth's richest and most bio-diverse territories, Mexico. He begins by diving in search of our most essential ingredient in a beautiful azure sink hole or cenote, a characteristic feature and primary water source in southern Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. He then travels aboard the spectacular Copper Canyon Railway to measure the impact that the sun has on our planet, discovering how early life had to learn to survive under its glare in ways that still survive in us all today.
At the end of the train journey, he arrives in Mexico's beautiful mountain interior, where he uncovers how the relationship life has with the sun has led to one on the most astonishing of all life's inventions: photosynthesis. By turning sunlight into energy, life has tapped a seemingly endless energy source and introduces a vital ingredient to the planet's atmosphere - oxygen.
Finally, Brian visits a remote enclave high up in the pine forests of central Mexico to witness one of nature's greatest sights, the arrival of the monarch butterflies. Each year they make one of the longest migrations of all the butterfly species, over 4,000 kilometres from northern Canada to Mexico, by tapping into one the most elusive, intangible and perhaps rarest planetary ingredients of them all.
THU 21:00 Our Classical Century (m0002dx7)
Series 1
1936 - 1953
Suzy Klein and John Simpson explore the power of classical music between the coronations of George VI and Elizabeth II, through WWII and into peacetime, to console, unite and inspire the nation.
Our Classical Century brings together the greatest moments in classical music in Britain over the last 100 years in a four-part series celebrating extraordinary pieces of music and performance, revealing how music has provided a unifying soundtrack when national identity and destiny are at stake.
In this episode presenter Suzy Klein is joined by music lover and BBC world affairs editor John Simpson to explore how classical music underscored the coronations of George VI and Elizabeth II, how it provided succour and inspiration during WWII and how it responded to social change as we emerged into peace. They explain how William Walton, creator of the radical, witty piece Facade with Edith Sitwell in the 1920s, composed Crown Imperial for George VI’s coronation, full of Elgarian pomp and circumstance. With the outbreak of war, Suzy investigates the remarkable legacy of pianist Myra Hess, her signature tune, Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, and how Kenneth Clark encouraged her to create a series of morale-boosting lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery in the heart of war-torn London. An audience member remembers the moving and inspiring impact of Myra’s music on those enduring the Blitz. From the tragic destruction of Queen’s Hall, traditional home to the Proms, the episode charts the triumph of the first Prom in its new home, the Royal Albert Hall. John talks about the remarkable reception that greeted one of the pieces played at the prom, the first performance of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, the Leningrad. Written under siege, the piece only arrived in Britain after the score was elaborately smuggled on film out of Russia via Iran to London. Paul Patrick, the BBC Philharmonic’s principal percussionist, tells how he prepares for the demanding task of recreating the sound of war in the symphony.
The war over, our presenters chart the emergence of our love of classical music in peacetime, with the unexpected success of young composer Benjamin Britten’s complex opera Peter Grimes and its hugely popular performance at Sadler's Wells. Tenor Stuart Skelton performs excerpts and reflects on why it struck such a chord. A new Labour government believed music should be part of everyone’s experience and the 1944 Butler Education Act helped put music on the school curriculum for the very first time. Our presenters explore the creation of Britten’s classic The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra in 1945, and Malcolm Sargent’s film of it, unforgettably introducing classical music to generations of children. Through the Festival of Britain, which brought music to the heart of the nation, this episode arrives at the 1953 Coronation. By then two and a half million homes had TVs and, with an audience of 20 million, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II became a showcase of our best classical music for its biggest audience ever: Elgar, Holst, Vaughn Williams, Purcell, Handel’s Zadok the Priest, and the whole event crowned by William Walton’s Orb and Sceptre, a fresh youthful-sounding coronation march for a young queen.
Between the coronations of Elizabeth II and her father, the nation had undergone immense trauma, social and political change. This programme charts the role classical music played in sustaining our cultural life and responding to the challenges of a new era.
THU 22:00 Britain's Treasure Islands (b078lw8y)
Outposts of Empire
The final part of Stewart McPherson's epic journey to visit all of the UK's Overseas Territories takes him to islands that could not be more different, yet are all united by being important military or trading bases, both historically and, in some cases, still today.
This journey begins in the Caribbean, where amongst sunbathing tourists, he finds some unexpected wildlife and an active volcano. In the centre of the Atlantic, the pinprick of Ascension Island, an extinct volcano, looks like somewhere on Mars rather than a part of Britain, yet it too has rich wildlife.
St Helena is so remote it was seen as a safe prison for Napoleon Bonaparte after his defeat at Waterloo. And finally, Stewart visits the newest of the Overseas Territories, the Sovereign Base Areas on Cyprus, along with Gibraltar, the last home of the Neanderthals and the present home of Barbary macaques, Europe's only wild colony of monkeys.
THU 23:00 Bill Bailey's Jungle Hero (p0160p2p)
Wallace in the Spice Islands
Comedian Bill Bailey ventures to Indonesia's remote Spice Islands, in the footsteps of his hero - Victorian naturalist Alfred Wallace. Wallace was a bug collector who survived pirate attacks, boating disasters and malarial fevers to change the way we see life on earth. Independently of Charles Darwin, he came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection. But he has since been forgotten.
In the second of this two-part series, Bill encounters boggle-eyed tarsiers, monkeys with mohicans and spectacular birds of paradise on his mission to understand how Wallace cracked evolution. Ultimately Bill achieves his goal of getting Wallace the recognition he rightly deserves.
THU 00:00 Top of the Pops (m0002dx5)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]
THU 00:30 One-Hit Wonders at the BBC (b05r7nxx)
Compilation of some indelible hits by artists we hardly heard from again, at least in a chart sense. Featuring Peter Sarstedt's Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? - a number one in 1969 and a hit he never really matched, Trio's 1982 smash Da Da Da, Phyllis Nelson's 1985 lovers rock-style classic Move Closer, and The New Radicals' 1999 hit You Get What You Give.
We travel through the years selecting some of your favourite number ones and a few others that came close, revealing what's happened to the one-off hitmakers since and exploring the unwritten laws that help make sense of the one-hit wonder phenomenon.
THU 01:30 Wonders of Life (b01r1znn)
[Repeat of broadcast at
20:00 today]
THU 02:30 Our Classical Century (m0002dx7)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
THU 03:30 Handmade on the Silk Road (b07blsjw)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 on Monday]
FRIDAY 08 FEBRUARY 2019
FRI 19:00 World News Today (m0002dx9)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.
FRI 19:30 Top of the Pops (m0002dxc)
Gary Davies and Janice Long present the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 2 April 1987, featuring Madonna, Curiosity Killed the Cat and The Pogues & The Dubliners.
FRI 20:00 A Blackpool Big Band Boogie: Jools Holland and His Rhythm & Blues Orchestra (b0645530)
Concert specially recorded for BBC Four on 24 June 2015 at the Empress Ballroom Blackpool, where Jools Holland and his band were joined by special guests Rumer, Marc Almond and Ruby Turner.
More than 14,000 people applied for tickets and a lucky 800 were in the audience, and by the end of the concert Jools and his orchestra had almost every one of them on their feet.
The concert celebrates the golden age of big band music from the 1930s to the 1950s and Jools presents his interpretations of standards from the greats such as Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and Woody Herman. Jools's orchestra includes some of the best musicians in the business and the concert combines the incomparable power and sophistication of the big band sound with brilliant individual performances.
Highlights include Rumer's joyful Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive, Marc Almond's stunning rendition of Edith Piaf's Hymn Le Amour and singer Ruby Turner's extraordinary vocals.
FRI 21:00 Top of the Pops (b06vkg5r)
1981 - Big Hits
A bumper crop of hits from the Top of the Pops archive showcasing an exciting year on the pop charts. 1981 embraced disco and ska, new wave punk, the burgeoning New Romantic scene and the rise of synthpop, with some prog quirkiness and good old rock 'n' roll thrown in.
Performances from big-hitter soloists Phil Collins, Shakin' Stevens and Kim Wilde are featured alongside the exuberant chaos of groups like Tenpole Tudor, Adam and the Ants and The Teardrop Explodes. It's party time as Odyssey fill the dancefloor with the infectious Going Back to My Roots and Clare Grogan adopts some unorthodox shapes for Altered Images' Happy Birthday. And The Specials' 2 Tone social-commentary classic Ghost Town vies with Ultravox's Vienna and The Human League's Don't You Want Me for song of the year.
FRI 22:00 The Defiant Ones (m0002fyf)
Series 1
Episode 1
Years before they brokered one of the biggest deals in music history – the 2015 sale of Beats Electronics to Apple for $3 billion – Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine navigated very different environments towards destinies that would, ultimately and improbably, bring them together.
In this first episode, their stories are explored. Dr Dre’s began in Compton, where his fascination with dance music, DJ innovations and sound brought him into contact with Eazy-E, Ice Cube, DJ Yella and MC Ren. Together, they would become the core of the 1980s gangsta-rap supergroup NWA.
A native of Red Hook, Brooklyn, Jimmy Iovine talks about gravitating to music following an indifferent academic career, always determined to avoid continuing in the family business as a longshoreman. Jimmy discusses getting a job answering phones in recording studios, and through a combination of hard work and old-fashioned luck, connecting with artists like John Lennon, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen.
FRI 22:40 The Defiant Ones (m0002fyj)
Series 1
Episode 2
In this second episode, Jimmy Lovine’s reputation as a fearless, talented and indefatigable producer is explored, along with how he reached the West Coast following a successful collaboration with Patti Smith.
He describes moving to Los Angeles to produce with Tom Petty and his secret relationship with Stevie Nicks.
Dr Dre talks about provocative songs, such as Straight Outta Compton, which were shaped by the bitter race relations in Los Angeles. NWA evolved into a force to be reckoned with, in LA and beyond. But a devastating personal loss for Dr Dre overshadowed the success.
FRI 23:25 Hits, Hype & Hustle: An Insider's Guide to the Music Business (b09mbfjx)
Series 1
Making a Star
In the first programme of the series, music agent Emma Banks looks at how the music business finds talent and creates superstars.
Over 25 years as one of the top agents in the business, Emma has worked with some of the world's most famous artists, including Katy Perry, Kanye West and Red Hot Chili Peppers. She's seen first-hand the fine line between success and failure, following the careers of hundreds of acts - from geniuses who never quite made it to megastars who conquered the world.
The secret to success and stardom is an elusive formula of luck, timing and of course talent. But as Emma explores in this film, it's also about the team behind the talent - the record execs, label bosses and A&R gurus who find, develop and make a star. From Motown's musical finishing school to Damon Dash's dogged promotion of Jay-Z, the missed potential of sixties group The Zombies to Blur's record label steering their career from one-hit wonders towards chart domination, this film offers an entertaining behind-the-scenes peek into the peaks and pitfalls of making a musical superstar.
Contributors include Motown's Martha Reeves, Blur's Alex James, record producing legend Clive Davis, Jane's Addiction's Perry Farrell and Labelle's Nona Hendryx. And we follow Emma as she works with new grime star Lady Leshurr to take her career to the next level.
FRI 00:25 Top of the Pops (m0002dxc)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:30 today]
FRI 00:55 Popular Voices at the BBC (b09gvqjc)
Series 1
Truth Tellers at the BBC
This compilation is a companion piece to the Truth Tellers episode of Gregory Porter's Popular Voices. Join us for a nostalgic look back at some of the most outspoken, thought-provoking and lyrically gifted songsters to have visited the BBC studios. From socially discerning troubadours like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, to modern-day poets Patti Smith and Gil Scott-Heron, and rap disrupters like KRS-One (performing with Boogie Down Productions), as well as more recent social observers Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave and George the Poet.
Featuring clips from The Old Grey Whistle Test, Top of the Pops, Later with Jools Holland and Britpop Now, these performers show us that you don't need fancy vocal acrobatics or sensuous murmurings if your message is powerful.
FRI 01:55 Top of the Pops (b06vkg5r)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
FRI 02:55 Wild Boys: The Story of Duran Duran (b007bqdj)
Duran Duran came out of Birmingham and conquered the world during the 1980s. Originally a New Romantic band in full make-up and cossack pants, they rapidly became bedroom pin-ups for a generation of teenage girls.
Led by Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and John Taylor, Duran Duran dominated the British and American charts in the mid-1980s with classic singles such as Rio, Save a Prayer and Wild Boys. Pioneers of the MTV-style promo video - from the X-rated Girls on Film to Raiders of the Lost Ark spoof Hungry Like the Wolf - Duran Duran were the 80s equivalent of The Beatles in America and outsold Spandau Ballet and Wham! in their pomp.
Sixty million records later, Le Bon and Rhodes are seen touring America with their Pop Trash project from the early 2000s. The documentary reflects on the heady heights of Duran Duran's career, the cracks in their make-up plus the effects of sex, drugs and fame on ordinary boys from working-class backgrounds.
Apart from the key Durannies - Le Bon, Rhodes and John Taylor - the programme also features celebrity interviews with Debbie Harry, Yasmin Le Bon, Duran Duran managers Paul and Michael Berrow, Claudia Schiffer, Nile Rodgers and Lou Reed.