SATURDAY 27 JULY 2019

SAT 19:00 The Last Seabird Summer? (b072rpwn)
Living with the Birds

In episode one, Adam Nicolson follows the story of the seabirds on the Shiant Isles in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, one of the most important bird places of Europe. As the puffins, guillemots and razorbills arrive from far out in the north Atlantic, Adam traces our long history of dependence on seabirds - thousands of years of collecting eggs and hunting the birds for meat, oil and feathers.

But there is crisis in our seabird population - in the last 15 years in Scotland alone, 40 per cent have been lost. And although in Britain our relationship is now one of conservation, there are countries who still hunt the seabird. To understand how this tradition continues today, Adam travels to Iceland, home to over half the world's puffins, and meets those for whom the puffin hunt is still part of everyday life.


SAT 20:00 Madame Tussaud: A Legend in Wax (b08cgm56)
The remarkable true story of the woman behind the worldwide waxworks empire, Madame Tussaud.

In an astonishing life that spanned both the French and Industrial revolutions, this single mother and entrepreneur travelled across the Channel to England, where she overcame the odds to establish her remarkable and enduring brand. Determined to leave an account of who she was and the times she lived through, her memoirs, letters and papers offer a unique insight into the creation of the extraordinary empire which bears her name.


SAT 21:00 Inspector Montalbano (b0b60y1x)
Love

A former prostitute has disappeared. Her sister tells Montalbano that she had recently fallen in love, so the police start their investigation by speaking to her lover, a meek and gentle man who is puzzled about where his partner could have possibly gone.

In Italian with English subtitles.


SAT 22:50 Hello Quo (b03hy6vp)
You don't sell 128 million albums worldwide without putting in the graft and Status Quo are, quite possibly, the hardest-working band in Britain. Alan G Parker's documentary Hello Quo, specially re-edited for the BBC, recounts the band's epic story from the beginning - when south London schoolmates Francis Rossi and Alan Lancaster formed their first band with big ambitions of rock 'n' roll domination, quickly adding drummer John Coghlan and guitarist Rick Parfitt.

The film tells the story of Quo's hits from their unusually psychedelic early hit, Pictures of Matchstick Men, followed by a run through their classics from Down Down to Whatever You Want.

The band laughs off the constant ribbing about only using three chords and the film explores how Quo's heads-down boogie defined UK rock in the early 70s. Fender Stratocaster in hand, Quo have stood their ground and never shifted, but they have managed to adapt to scoring pop hits over five decades.

The original members of the 'frantic four' tell their story of a life in rock 'n' roll, alongside interviews from some prominent Quo fans, such as Paul Weller, whose first gig was the Quo at Guildford Civic Hall, to Brian May, who waxes lyrically about the opening riff to Pictures of Matchstick Men, while even Sir Cliff plays homage to the denim-clad rockers.


SAT 00:10 Sinatra: All or Nothing at All (b066d737)
Series 1

Episode 3

An up-close and personal examination of the life, music and career of the legendary entertainer. In 1971, Frank Sinatra sang his legendary 'retirement concert' in Los Angeles, featuring music which was said to reflect his own life. Told in his own words from hours of archived interviews, along with commentary from those closest to him, this definitive four-part series weaves the legendary songs he chose with comments from friends and family, as well as never-before-seen footage from home movies and concert performances.

An unprecedented tribute to the beloved showman, with the full participation of the Frank Sinatra Estate, the third episode sees Sinatra turn his career around, the birth of the Rat Pack, his connection with the mob and the unravelling of his high-profile relationship with the Kennedys.


SAT 01:10 Peaky Blinders (b09j0hxs)
Series 4

Dangerous

The Peaky Blinders are lured by the Italians into a cat-and-mouse chase on the streets of Birmingham, where it becomes clear that Tommy has met his match. Trapped in Small Heath, Tommy tries to console himself with a visit from an old flame but it soon becomes clear that he can't always get what he wants.

As his factory lies idle, Tommy confronts the possibility that the Communists might win and he will be deemed a traitor to his class. Meanwhile, Changretta prepares to spring another trap.


SAT 02:10 Peaky Blinders (b09jhn03)
Series 4

The Duel

Tommy finds himself engaged in bloody battle with Luca Changretta and his gang. The family gather to find out what happened, but Lizzie has even greater news to break.

Meanwhile, an army colonel has questions for Ada about her past as a communist, and Jessie Eden confirms just how far she is prepared to go in pursuit of her cause. And sensing an opportunity to capitalise on his situation, Luca Changretta makes his way to London to present a plan to Alfie Solomons.


SAT 03:10 Peaky Blinders (b09k8gjf)
Series 4

The Company

It is the night of the big fight - Bonnie Gold versus Goliath. But as the bell rings and the crowd goes wild, dangers lurk in the shadows for Tommy Shelby and his family.

When Changretta plays his final ace, he sets in motion a series of events that will change the Peaky Blinders forever.



SUNDAY 28 JULY 2019

SUN 19:00 BBC Proms (m000775q)
2019

Nicola Benedetti with the NYO

Join Tom Service and Jess Gillam for a dazzling display of Britain’s youngest talent, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Nicola Benedetti performs Tchaikovsky’s demanding Violin Concerto, alongside the London premiere of Icarus by Russian composer Lera Auerbach and the orchestral suite from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet.


SUN 21:05 Arena (m000775t)
Cindy Sherman #untitled

Cindy Sherman is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. She is also notoriously elusive. So, it is a coup for Arena to get this in-depth and revealing audio interview with her. An exuberant weave of art and archive gives us a rare insight into one of the most influential artists alive today.


SUN 22:05 Captain Jack and the Furious Few (b0bqs96t)
A hundred years ago, with German U-boats and battleships terrorising Allied shipping and zeppelins bombing Britain's towns and cities, Ulster-Scots teenager Jack McCleery was one of 12 young men tasked with a deadly mission on board the navy's 'mystery ship'. In Captain Jack and the Furious Few, David Hayman reveals the story of the test pilots of the world's first aircraft carrier, HMS Furious. The top guns of their day, their secret mission would revolutionise warfare.

A gifted pilot, Jack McCleery was head-hunted by the navy after just nine months of intensive flight training. He was posted to the newly commissioned HMS Furious in 1917, where he would serve for two years as part of an elite squadron of test pilots.

Their mission was to land a wheeled plane on the deck of a moving vessel in order to develop and test the techniques and technology that would convert the Furious into the world's first dedicated aircraft carrier, capable of launching a strategic air attack on Britain's enemies - but nothing like this had ever been attempted before.

Flying from the deck of HMS Furious, the bravery and sacrifice of those 12 Royal Navy test pilots would change the course of warfare forever. Jack McCleery's diaries, letters and personal archive of sketches and previously unseen photographs are a unique record of that extraordinary period in his own life, and in the history of aviation.


SUN 23:05 Schama on Rembrandt: Masterpieces of the Late Years (b04mhsn1)
Icarus-like, Rembrandt flew ever higher towards the sun - the most successful artist in the richest city on earth, 17th-century Amsterdam. He lived like a prince and he loved living like a prince. But when his fall came - deep into bankruptcy and scandal, poverty and unfashionability - far from destroying him, it took him to new creative heights and a sense of humanity and the human condition that speaks more directly to us today than Rembrandt in his heyday. Simon Schama celebrates the masterpieces of Rembrandt's last years.


SUN 00:05 Britain's Most Fragile Treasure (b0161dgq)
Historian Dr Janina Ramirez unlocks the secrets of a centuries-old masterpiece in glass. At 78 feet in height, the famous Great East Window at York Minster is the largest medieval stained-glass window in the country and the creative vision of a single artist, a mysterious master craftsman called John Thornton, one of the earliest named English artists.

The Great East Window has been called England's Sistine Chapel. Within its 311 stained-glass panels is the entire history of the world, from the first day to the Last Judgment, and yet it was made 100 years before Michelangelo's own masterpiece. The scale of Thornton's achievement is revealed as Dr Ramirez follows the work of a highly skilled conservation team at York Glaziers Trust. They dismantled the entire window as part of a five-year project to repair centuries of damage and restore it to its original glory.

It is a unique opportunity for Dr Ramirez to examine Thornton's greatest work at close quarters, to discover details that would normally be impossible to see and to reveal exactly how medieval artists made images of such delicacy and complexity using the simplest of tools.

The Great East Window of York Minster is far more than a work of artistic genius, it is a window into the medieval world and mind, telling us who we once were and who we still are, all preserved in the most fragile medium of all.


SUN 01:05 Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble (b08tb6d4)
Documentary telling the extraordinary story of the international musical collective created by legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma. This uplifting film follows this group of diverse instrumentalists, vocalists, composers, arrangers, visual artists and storytellers as they explore the power of music to preserve tradition, shape cultural evolution and inspire hope.

Named for the ancient trade route linking Asia, Africa and Europe, the Silk Road Ensemble is an international collective drawn from an ever-changing line-up of more than 50 performers. Blending performance footage, personal interviews and archival film, the film focuses on the journeys of a small group of Silk Road Ensemble mainstays to create a vivid portrait of a bold musical experiment and a global search for the ties that bind.


SUN 02:40 Arena (m000775t)
[Repeat of broadcast at 21:05 today]



MONDAY 29 JULY 2019

MON 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m000775n)
Series 1

29/07/2019

The latest news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.


MON 19:30 Venice 24/7 (b01d26ls)
Winter in Venice

With unprecedented access to Venice's emergency and public services this series goes behind the 15th-century facades to experience the real, living city. From daily emergencies to street sweeping, bridge maintenance to flood defence systems and a death-defying descent across St Mark's Square, this is Venice as you have never seen it before. This is Venice 24/7.

Venice is masked by sheets of snow. The emergency services negotiate choppy waters to deal with daily hazards as well as life-and-death emergencies. There is a sunken boat to save, an elderly lady with a suspected stroke and, in this city built on wood, the most dreaded call of all - fire. We see how Venice deals with thousands of tonnes of rubbish, turning it into power which is fed back into the city. Venice may be over 1,000 years old, but staying afloat requires 21st-century innovation.


MON 20:00 Life (b00nxks3)
Insects

There are 200 million insects for each of us. They are the most successful animal group ever. Their key is an armoured covering that takes on almost any shape.

Darwin's stag beetle fights in the tree tops with huge curved jaws. The camera flies with millions of monarch butterflies which migrate 2000 miles, navigating by the sun. Super-slow motion shows a bombardier beetle firing boiling liquid at enemies through a rotating nozzle. A honey bee army stings a raiding bear into submission. Grass cutter ants march like a Roman army, harvesting grass they cannot actually eat. They cultivate a fungus that breaks the grass down for them. Their giant colony is the closest thing in nature to the complexity of a human city.


MON 21:00 The British Garden: Life and Death on Your Lawn (b08xyqcs)
The British back garden is a familiar setting, but underneath the peonies and petunias is a much wilder hidden world, a miniature Serengeti, with beauty and brutality in equal measure. In this documentary, Chris Packham and a team of wildlife experts spend an entire year exploring every inch of a series of interlinked back gardens in Welwyn Garden City. They want to answer a fundamental question: how much wildlife lives beyond our back doors? How good for wildlife is the great British garden?

Through all four seasons, Chris reveals a stranger side to some of our more familiar garden residents. In summer he meets a very modern family of foxes - with a single dad in charge - and finds that a single fox litter can have up to five different fathers. In winter he shows that a robin's red breast is actually war paint. And finally, in spring he finds a boiling ball of frisky frogs in a once-in-a-year mating frenzy.

The secret lives of the gardens' smallest residents are even weirder. The team finds male crickets that bribe females with food during sex, spiders that change colour to help catch prey, and life-and-death battles going on under our noses in the compost heap.

So how many different species call our gardens home? How well do our gardens support wildlife? By the end of the year, with the help of a crack team from London's Natural History Museum and some of the country's top naturalists, Chris will find out. He'll also discover which type of garden attracts the most wildlife. The results are not what you might expect... You'll never look at your garden in quite the same way again.


MON 22:30 The Joy of Winning (b0b9zsfb)
How to have a happier life and a better world all thanks to maths, in this witty, mind-expanding guide to the science of success with Hannah Fry.

Following in the footsteps of BBC Four's award-winning maths films The Joy of Stats and The Joy of Data, this latest gleefully nerdy adventure sees mathematician Dr Hannah Fry unlock the essential strategies you'll need to get what you want - to win - more of the time. From how to bag a bargain dinner to how best to stop the kids arguing on a long car journey, maths can give you a winning strategy. And the same rules apply to the world's biggest problems - whether it's avoiding nuclear annihilation or tackling climate change.

Deploying 'The Joys of...' films' trademark mix of playful animation alongside both oddball demos and contributions from the world's biggest brains, Fry shows how this field of maths - known as game theory - is the essential key to help you get your way. She reveals ways to analyse any situation, and methods of calculating the consequences of getting what you want. Expect tips on taking advantage of what your opponents do, but also pleasing proof that cooperation might get you further than conflict. Fry also hails the 20th-century scientists like John von Neumann and John Nash who worked out the science of success. They may not be household names, but they transformed economics, politics, psychology and evolutionary biology in the process - and their work, Hannah demonstrates, could even be shown to prove the existence and advantage of goodness.

Along the way the film reveals, amongst other things, what links the rapper Ludacris, a Kentucky sheriff, a Nobel Prize winner and doping in professional cycling. And there's an irresistible chance to revisit the most excruciatingly painful and the most genius scenes ever seen on a TV game show, as Hannah unpacks the maths behind the legendary show Golden Balls and hails Nick Corrigan, the contestant whose cunning gameplay managed to break the supposedly intractable 'Prisoner's Dilemma'.

Other contributors to The Joy of Winning include European number one professional female poker player Liv Boeree, Scottish ex-pro cyclist and anti-doping campaigner (banned for two years in 2004 for doping) David Millar, Israeli game theory expert Dr Haim Shapira - who shows why it is sometimes rational to be irrational - and top evolutionary game theorist Professor Karl Sigmund from the University of Vienna.


MON 23:30 Blackadder (b0078vmr)
Blackadder II

Bells

Classic historical comedy. The Blackadder genes resurface in Elizabethan England in the guise of Edmund, great-great-grandson of the repulsive original. Blackadder is struck by Cupid's arrow when he takes on a new servant - a girl named Bob.


MON 00:00 Blackadder (b015msyb)
Blackadder II

Head

When Edmund is appointed lord high executioner, he moves a beheading forward from Wednesday to Monday, so he and his staff can enjoy some time off. But he didn't take into account the queen's tendency to change her mind.


MON 00:30 Blackadder (b01nllvy)
Blackadder II

Potato

Historical sitcom set in Tudor England. To keep up with Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund announces he will navigate the treacherous waters of the Cape of Good Hope.


MON 01:00 The Ottomans: Europe's Muslim Emperors (b03fg1mj)
Episode 3

In the final episode, Rageh Omaar explains how the collapse of this Islamic superpower following the First World War has left problems for Europe and the Middle East that are still being felt today. Rageh also reveals how struggles at the heart of the Ottoman story have have recently been reignited on the streets they once ruled, from Syria to Turkey.

From its capital in Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire matched the glories of ancient Rome. Yet its achievements have been largely lost in the trauma of its last few years. Brutality, massacres and the carve-up of former Ottoman lands created a legacy of tension and conflict that continue to this day.

The heartland of the former empire - modern-day Turkey - turned its back on its Islamic, Ottoman past. It underwent a social revolution led by military commander and secular visionary Mustafa Kemal- Ataturk. So why is Ottomanism back on the political agenda? And why are many politicians in the west hoping that Turkey can provide a role model as a modern, Islamic democracy?


MON 02:00 Art of Spain (b008vsgz)
The Moorish South

Critic and art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon travels from southern to northern Spain to tell the story of some of Europe's most exciting and vital art. For 700 years, most of Spain was an Islamic state, and the south was its beating heart. Under the Moors, Spain became the most advanced, wealthy and populous country in Europe. Andrew travels to Cordoba, Seville and Granada, visiting beautiful Moorish palaces and mosques, telling the story of one of the most colourful and sophisticated cultures to ever appear in Europe.


MON 03:00 Africa: A Journey into Music (b0b54cmq)
Series 1

Nigeria

DJ and broadcaster Rita Ray travels to Nigeria, home of some of the most influential African music of the last 60 years. The country's extraordinary polyrhythms have powered highlife, funk and Afrobeat for decades, and can still be heard in modern pop music.

Travelling to Lagos and beyond, Rita traces the importance of rhythm in Nigeria's music and discovers the many different musical styles it has created, from Yoruba juju music, to acoustic singer-songwriters and world-class pop.



TUESDAY 30 JULY 2019

TUE 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m000775h)
Series 1

30/07/2019

The latest news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.


TUE 19:30 Venice 24/7 (b01dc66q)
Carnival

With unprecedented access to Venice's emergency and public services, this series goes behind the 15th-century facades to experience the real, living city. From daily emergencies to street sweeping, bridge maintenance to flood defence systems and a death-defying descent across St Mark's Square, this is Venice as you've never seen it before. This is Venice 24/7.

One of the most famous events in the Venetian calendar is Carnevale. This ancient tradition, meaning 'meat is allowed', celebrates all things decadent in the run-up to Lent. Kicking off celebrations is a 400-metre descent from St Mark's campanile by a young Venetian girl. There is a tourist who has had a suspected drug overdose, a beauty pageant, undercover police hot on the tail of thieves and a dead body found near St Mark's Square. In a season where anything goes, the emergency teams have their work cut out reining the city in.


TUE 20:00 SAS: Rogue Warriors (b08f00s0)
Series 1

Episode 1

The Special Air Service is the world's most famous combat unit, with the motto Who Dares Wins, but the story of how it came into existence has been, until now, a closely guarded secret.

For the first time, the SAS has agreed to open up its archive and allow Ben Macintyre to reveal the true story of their formation during the darkest days of World War Two.

With unprecedented access to the SAS secret files, unseen footage and exclusive interviews with its founder members, this series tells the remarkable story behind an extraordinary fighting force.

Episode one tells the story of the founding of the SAS in the heat of the north African desert in 1941. David Archibald Stirling is an aristocratic dreamer who had once held ambitions to be an artist or perhaps a famous mountaineer but now, with the war in the desert reaching its most desperate stage, Stirling has a vision for a new kind of war: attacking the enemy where they least expect it - from behind their own lines. But Stirling is up against the many in British High Command who do not want to see him succeed with his radical new way of warfare. Against the odds, Stirling wins through and helps the Allies towards victory in the desert. The cost is high. In combat, Stirling loses lieutenant Jock Lewes, his right-hand man. With his brilliant training methods and invention of a new weapon, Lewes has proved vital to making Stirling's dream of a crack fighting force a reality. Stirling must soldier on alone.


TUE 21:00 Revolutions: The Ideas that Changed the World (m000775k)
Series 1

The Car

'Like it or not, the car defines not just what we are able to do, but in many cases who we think we are.'

Jim Al-Khalili investigates how our innate drive to explore mobilised humanity and gave us the ultimate freedom machine, the car. Based on new research, he peers inside the original notebooks and sketches of the visionaries who, whether knowingly or not, risked death, poverty and ridicule to advance our species’ progression, bringing these stories to life using state of the art experiments, breathtaking drama and CGI.

It begins with a 9,000-year-old human settlement, 200 miles north of Siberia, where archaeologists have uncovered the earliest evidence of dogs. Those hunter-settlers had domesticated the European grey wolf in order to survive, breeding them to pull their sleds.

Dog sleds marked the beginning of powered transportation 6,000 years before the wheeled cart mobilised the rest of humankind, but that next step was not down to the invention of the wheel. We learn that it was to a revolution in metalwork and the introduction of the bronze chisel, which made the wheel and axle possible.

The car’s story is one of necessity, opportunity and survival. We experience biblical floods and the destruction of English mines. We recreate experiments that went horribly wrong. There are backfiring cannons and mutilated sailors. And there is the story of an obsessive Scottish genius who made the first precision man-made machine. All this leads us to the disastrous story of Carl Benz, regarded as the inventor of the motor car. Only, he could not sell a single one and plunged into depression. That is until his wife Bertha went on a secret expedition and transformed the motor car into something people wanted.


TUE 22:00 Art, Passion & Power: The Story of the Royal Collection (b09qrbvd)
Series 1

Modern Times

Andrew Graham-Dixon explores how royal collecting has changed since the days of Queen Victoria. This is a story of the British monarchy's remarkable survival, while elsewhere the crown heads of Europe crumbled in the face of world wars and revolutions. But it is also an age when women took charge of royal collecting; from Victoria to Elizabeth II, queens and queen consorts have used art to steady the ship of monarchy during this uncertain age.

It's one of the curiosities of the Royal Collection that as the monarchy's power diminished, so too did the objects they collected. Gone were epic canvases, instead came objects of exquisite, delicate and intimate beauty. Andrew marvels at a selection of the royal family's collection of Faberge jewellery - one of the greatest in the world - that includes the Mosaic Egg from 1914. So taken were Edward VII and his wife Queen Alexandria with the works of Peter Carl Faberge, that the jeweller opened a London shop to service the demands of royal clientele.

And then there's Queen Mary's Dolls' House - presented to George V's queen to thank her for her steadfastness during the first world war, the Dolls' House is an astonishing artistic collaboration by over 1,500 people and companies, replete with books containing new stories by authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, tiny champagne bottles filled with real champagne and even mini shotguns that can be broken, loaded and fired. More than just a dolls' house, this is a three-dimensional archive of a vanished artistic age.

The Collection reveals fresh insights into these remarkable women, in particular HM the Queen Mother, who loved art and collected with flair. At Clarence House, Andrew discovers a surprising collection of contemporary British art that she assembled in the 1930s and 1940s, including works by Walter Sickert, LS Lowry, Paul Nash and Augustus John. Andrew traces her greatest commission, a series of 26 paintings of Windsor Castle by John Piper, painted during the Second World War. With Windsor at risk of being bombed, Piper created an eerie dreamscape filled with black skies and foreboding.

Andrew also brings royal collecting up to date. From the outset Elizabeth II's priorities had been focused on preserving and displaying the Collection, and Andrew shows how one of the key events in its recent history - the Windsor Castle fire - was an unlikely catalyst in the reform of the Collection's care. Concluding his exploration, Andrew meets HRH the Prince of Wales to view two of his recent commissions, powerful portraits of veterans of the Battle of Britain and the D-Day landings, and to discuss the continued importance of this remarkable collection.


TUE 23:00 The Extraordinary Collector (b07gb0jg)
Anita - The Billionaire Art Collector

Anita Zabludowicz is a world-renowned billionaire collector of unusual and experimental contemporary art. As well as two rooms named after her at the Tate Modern, she has a large art gallery in London and other spaces in Finland and New York.

Art and furniture dealer Gordon Watson and Anita have known one another for 20 years but in all that time, he has never managed to sell anything to her. Gordon believes he's identified the very thing that cutting-edge Anita needs and goes on a quest to find furniture where design meets art for Anita to take a look at. Will Gordon's fortunes be turned around and will he manage to get his first ever sale with Anita?


TUE 23:30 The Extraordinary Collector (b07gthvk)
Interior Designs - High-end Homes

London has become a magnet for the super rich who buy homes in one of the world's most vibrant and dynamic cities. After spending millions on buying property, many employ interior designers to help furnish these homes.

Over the years, Gordon has realised that his business and that of the interior designers work well together and Gordon has become the go-to man when it comes to buying the right pieces of furniture, art and other objects to give that extra special touch to a mansion.

In this episode, Gordon takes a stand at PAD, a design fair held once a year at Berkley Square in London. With the well-heeled and affluent guests in attendance, Gordon is hoping to make sales totalling a quarter of a million pounds - but will his hand-picked pieces be enough to persuade the uber rich visiting his stand to part with their cash?


TUE 00:00 Blackadder (b0078vyl)
Blackadder II

Money

Sitcom set in Tudor England. Edmund is in trouble when he is visited by a debt-collecting bishop armed with a red-hot poker.


TUE 00:30 Blackadder (b0078w0y)
Blackadder II

Beer

Comedy series set in Tudor England. There are problems in the Blackadder household due to an embarrassing incident with a turnip, an ostrich feather and a puritanical fat aunt.


TUE 01:00 Blackadder (b01jhk72)
Blackadder II

Chains

Classic historical comedy. The evil Prince Ludwig kidnaps both Blackadder and Lord Melchett, and the Queen remembers Blackadder's earlier advice to have nothing to do with any ransom notes. Is our hero doomed, or does Baldrick have a cunning plan?


TUE 01:30 SAS: Rogue Warriors (b08f00s0)
[Repeat of broadcast at 20:00 today]


TUE 02:30 Revolutions: The Ideas that Changed the World (m000775k)
[Repeat of broadcast at 21:00 today]



WEDNESDAY 31 JULY 2019

WED 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m000776d)
Series 1

31/07/2019

The latest news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.


WED 19:30 Venice 24/7 (b01dpqtv)
City Fit for a Pope

With unprecedented access to Venice's emergency and public services, this series goes behind the 15th-century facades to experience the real, living city. From daily emergencies to street sweeping, bridge maintenance to flood defence systems and a death-defying descent across St Mark's Square, this is Venice as you've never seen it before. This is Venice 24/7.

The city is on lockdown, with the pope visiting for the first time in a quarter of a century. There's a fractious relationship between Venice and the Vatican and it's a risky occasion for all involved, so security is tight and the emergency teams are on high alert. There are the specially selected papal gondoliers carrying on the family tradition, vital underwater security sweeps and tension as police attempt to shut down Grand Canal.


WED 20:00 This World (b03q9r9n)
The Tea Trail with Simon Reeve

Adventurer and journalist Simon Reeve heads to east Africa to uncover the stories behind the nation's favourite drink. While we drink millions of cups of the stuff each day, how many of us know where our tea actually comes from? The surprising answer is that most of the leaves that go into our everyday teabags do not come from India or China but are bought from an auction in the coastal city of Mombasa in Kenya.

From here, Simon follows the tea trail through the epic landscapes of Kenya and Uganda and meets some of the millions of people who pick, pack and transport our tea. Drinking tea with everyone from Masai cattle herders to the descendants of the original white tea planters, Simon learns that the industry that supplies our everyday cuppa is not immune to the troubles of the continent - poverty, low wages and child labour.


WED 21:00 The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain (p01wq65t)
Episode 1

In 1714, to prevent the crown falling into the hands of a Catholic, Britain shipped in a ready-made royal family from the small German state of Hanover. To understand this risky experiment, presenter Dr Lucy Worsley has been given access to treasures from the Royal Collection as they are prepared for a new exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace - providing a rare and personal insight into George I and his feuding dynasty.

The Hanoverians arrived at a moment when Britain was changing fast. Satirists were free to mock the powerful, including the new royals. The Hanoverians themselves were busy early adopters of Neo-Palladian architecture, defining the whole look of the Georgian era. When the French philosopher Voltaire visited, he found a 'land of liberty' unlike anything in Europe - Britain was embracing freedom of speech and modern cabinet government.


WED 22:00 Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit (b079v9nr)
Episode 2

In the second episode, Mary Beard explores the physical world of the Roman Empire, and finds surprising parallels with our own world. Setting out in the footsteps of the emperor Hadrian, she discovers a vast empire bound together by a common material culture, and a globalised economy of such scale that evidence of its side-effects can still be seen today, thousands of miles away from Rome. Mary unpicks the threads of a huge commercial and cultural network, taking in the vital supply of olive oil to Rome and her armies, the slave trade, and the all-important silver mines of Spain.

Following the famous Roman road network, and the shipping routes connecting the empire's thriving ports, Mary reveals another side to the Roman Empire, one where builders and traders eclipse soldiers, and starring slaves, not senators, making the most of a hugely connected new world.


WED 23:00 Size Matters (b0bbyjv0)
Series 1

Big Trouble

This two-part special presented by Hannah Fry shows that when it comes to the universe, size really does matter. Hannah takes the audience into a thought experiment where the size of everything can be changed to reveal why things are the size they are.

Hannah starts her journey by asking whether everything could be bigger, finding out what life would be like on a bigger planet. As the Earth grows to outlandish proportions, gravity is the biggest challenge, and lying down becomes the new standing up. Flying in a Typhoon fighter jet with RAF flight lieutenant Mark Long, the programme discovers how higher G-force affects the human body, and how people could adapt to a high G-force world. But by the time Earth gets to the size of Jupiter, it's all over, as the moon would impact the planet and end life as we know it.

Next, Hannah tries to make living things bigger. The programme examines the gigantopithecus, the biggest ape to ever exist, creates a dog the size of a dinosaur and meets Sultan Kosen, the world's tallest man. Humans are then super-sized with the help of Professor Dean Falk to see what a human body would look like if we were 15m tall.

The sun gets expanded, and Professor Volker Bromm looks back in time to find the largest stars that ever existed, before the sun explodes in perhaps the biggest explosion since the big bang.


WED 00:00 Tomorrow's Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction (p026c7n7)
Robots

Dominic Sandbrook continues his exploration of the most innovative and imaginative of all genres and gets to science fiction's obsession with robots.

The idea of playing God and creating artificial life has fascinated us since the earliest days of science fiction - but what if our creations turn against us?

Dominic, leading writers and film-makers follow our hopes and fears from the first halting steps of Frankenstein's monster, via the threats of Doctor Who's Cybermen and The Terminator, the provocative ideas of Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica, to the worlds of cyberspace and the Matrix, where humanity and technology merge.

Among the interviewees are Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner), actor Peter Weller (RoboCop), producer Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator), Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker (Star Wars), actor Edward James Olmos (Battlestar Galactica) and novelist William Gibson.


WED 01:00 The Many Primes of Muriel Spark (b09qlx14)
Kirsty Wark celebrates the life and work of Dame Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and one of the 20th century's most enigmatic cultural figures, on the one-hundredth anniversary of her birth.

Born in Edinburgh, Muriel's extraordinary life took her to colonial Africa, wartime London, literary New York and vibrant 1960s Rome. Her most famous novel - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - immortalised the city of her childhood but with an added darkness and acerbic wit that became her trademark style.

Kirsty retraces Muriel's footsteps from the cobbled streets of Edinburgh to the sublime beauty of Victoria Falls. Contributions from writers AL Kennedy, Janice Galloway, Ali Smith, William Boyd and Val McDermid tell of Muriel Spark's unique literary style and a life full of reinvention.

Kirsty meets with the journalist Alan Taylor, who has recently published his memoir of Muriel, and she travels to Italy for the first television interview with Penelope Jardine, Muriel's close friend of 40 years.


WED 02:00 This World (b03q9r9n)
[Repeat of broadcast at 20:00 today]


WED 03:00 The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain (p01wq65t)
[Repeat of broadcast at 21:00 today]



THURSDAY 01 AUGUST 2019

THU 19:00 Beyond 100 Days (m000776g)
Series 1

01/08/2019

The latest news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.


THU 19:30 Top of the Pops (m000776j)
Steve Wright and Bruno Brookes present the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 14 April 1988 and featuring Bananarama, Natalie Cole, Climie Fisher, Def Leppard, S'Express, T'Pau, Jermaine Stewart, Jellybean ft. Adele Bertei, Pebbles, Pet Shop Boys and Bros.


THU 20:00 Skies Above Britain (b07pmx1q)
Flying into Danger

In the first episode, Skies Above Britain explores how our skies are safeguarded - air traffic controllers deal with an unidentified aircraft flying across Gatwick's flight path, and the RAF scramble a typhoon jet to intercept an unresponsive plane.

We follow the RAF pilots training to fly Britain's front-line combat aircraft - the Typhoon. The supersonic jet flies at twice the speed of sound and becoming a Typhoon pilot is the pinnacle of the RAF. Trainees face a gruelling series of mental and physical tests, including being subject to high gravitational forces in a centrifuge and experiencing rapid air decompression and training for emergency scenarios, like ejecting over water.

In Humberside, the helicopter crews of HM Search and Rescue are often the only aircraft that fly when the skies are treacherous. We follow the crew on a dangerous mountain rescue, flying through thick fog, just feet away from a mountain's rock face to reach an injured hiker. When fog descends over London's airports, NATS must rapidly cut the number of planes allowed to enter British airspace.

Elsewhere, two vintage plane enthusiasts - brothers Nick and Giles English - explore their continued passion for flight, despite having faced personal tragedy in the air.


THU 21:00 The Secret Life of Rockpools (b01rtdr4)
Paleontologist Professor Richard Fortey embarks on a quest to discover the extraordinary lives of rock pool creatures. To help explore this unusual environment he is joined by some of the UK's leading marine biologists in a dedicated laboratory at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth. Here and on the beach in various locations around the UK, startling behaviour is revealed and new insights are given into how these animals cope with intertidal life. Many popular rock pool species have survived hundreds of millions of years of Earth's history, but humans may be their biggest challenge yet.


THU 22:00 Woolly Mammoth: Secrets from the Ice (b01fkcdr)
Professor Alice Roberts reveals the natural history of the most famous of ice age animals - the woolly mammoth. Mammoths have transfixed humans since the depths of the last ice age, when their herds roamed across what is now Europe and Asia. Although these curious members of the elephant family have been extinct for thousands of years, scientists can now paint an incredibly detailed picture of their lives thanks to whole carcasses that have been beautifully preserved in the Siberian permafrost.

Alice meets the scientists who are using the latest genetic, chemical and molecular tests to reveal the adaptations that allowed mammoths to evolve from their origins in the tropics to surviving the extremes of Siberia. And in a dramatic end to the film, she helps unveil a brand new woolly mammoth carcass that may shed new light on our own ancestors' role in their extinction.


THU 23:00 Size Matters (b0bcv22w)
Series 1

That Shrinking Feeling

This two-part special presented by Hannah Fry shows that when it comes to the universe, size really does matter. Hannah takes the audience into a thought experiment where the size of everything can be changed to reveal why things are the size they are.

Having discovered in the first episode that making things bigger ends in disaster, in episode two, Hannah is going the other way by asking whether everything could, in fact, be smaller. But going smaller turns out not to be much safer...

First, we shrink the Earth to half its size - it starts well with lower gravity enabling us to do incredible acrobatics, but things gradually turn nasty as everyone gets altitude sickness - even at sea level. Then we visit Professor Daniel Lathrop's incredible laboratory, where he has built a model Earth that allows us to investigate the other effects of shrinking the planet to half size. The results aren't good - with a weaker magnetic field we would lose our atmosphere and eventually become a barren, lifeless rock like Mars.

In our next thought experiment, we shrink people to find out what life is like if you are just 5mm tall. We find out why small creatures have superpowers that seem to defy the laws of physics, meet Jyoti Amge, the world's smallest woman, and with the help of Dr Diana Van Heemst and thousands of baseball players reveal why short people have longer lives.

Lastly, the Sun gets as small as a sun can be. We visit the fusion reactor at the Joint European Torus to find out why stars have to be a minimum size or fusion won't happen. And if our Sun were that small? Plants would turn from green to black, and Earth would probably resemble a giant, frozen eyeball.

Which all goes to show that size really does matter.


THU 00:00 Top of the Pops (m000776j)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:30 today]


THU 00:30 The Secret History of My Family (b07569s6)
The Salford Scuttlers

Press hysteria and public panic gripped 1890s Salford as it erupted into postcode violence. Rival gangs of youths, known as scuttlers, clashed in pitched street battles. Magistrate Joseph Makinson attempted to stamp out the epidemic of gang warfare by giving the scuttlers a taste of their own medicine.

More than a century later, descendants of the rival gang leaders and descendants of the judge who tried to stop them tell their family stories, and ask whether violence is still part of life in working-class Salford.


THU 01:30 The Genius of Marie Curie - The Woman Who Lit up the World (b01s954d)
Over 80 years after her death, Marie Curie remains by far the best-known female scientist. In her lifetime, she became that rare thing - a celebrity scientist, attracting the attention of the news cameras and tabloid gossip. They were fascinated because she was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and is still the only person to have won two Nobels in two different sciences. But while the bare bones of her scientific life, the obstacles she had to overcome, the years of painstaking research and the penalty she ultimately paid for her discovery of radium have become one of the iconic stories of scientific heroism, there is another side to Marie Curie - her human story.

This multi-layered film reveals the real Marie Curie, an extraordinary woman who fell in love three times, had to survive the pain of loss, and the public humiliation of a doomed love affair. It is a riveting portrait of a tenacious mother and scientist, who opened the door on a whole new realm of physics, which she discovered and named - radioactivity.


THU 02:30 The Secret Life of Rockpools (b01rtdr4)
[Repeat of broadcast at 21:00 today]



FRIDAY 02 AUGUST 2019

FRI 19:00 World News Today (m0007774)
The latest news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.


FRI 19:30 BBC Proms (m0007776)
2019

Britten and Mahler

Katie Derham introduces two pieces originally premiered by Proms founder Sir Henry Wood. Leif Ove Andsnes performs Britten’s Piano Concerto while Claudia Mahnke and Stuart Skelton sing Mahler’s poignant Das Lied von der Erde. Edward Gardner conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra.


FRI 21:30 Top of the Pops (m0007778)
Peter Powell and Simon Bates present the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 21 April 1988 and featuring S'Express, George Michael, Danny Wilson, Pat and Mick, Will Downing, James Brown, Patrick Swayze and Wendy Frazer, Jermaine Stewart, Pet, Hazell Dean, Pet Shop Boys, Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five.


FRI 22:00 Ibiza: The Silent Movie (m000777b)
A 90-minute feature film that drills into the soul of this extraordinary, magical Island and releases the story of 3,000 years of Ibizan history. Julien Temple’s iconic trademark style sends its audience on the ultimate, emotionally exhilarating and groundbreaking time-travel ride through the psyche of this jewel of the Mediterranean.

This is a story of extremes and the fight for the very soul of the White Island. A story of sensuality, hedonism, spirituality, ancient ways of life and new ways of living. An island, despite wave after wave of brutal occupation, whose free spirit of tolerance and acceptance of others has somehow managed to survive, absorbing, welcoming and sheltering people and cultures from around the Mediterranean and the world beyond. Ibiza’s bohemian heart now faces its strongest challenge yet: to continue to beat strongly in the face of the ever-growing annual invasion of wealthy socialites and the gentrification of the island in the name of progress.

The film re-enacts, with cameo Hollywood performances, forgotten epic moments in the history of the island. From irresistible sirens who seduced and shipwrecked Odysseus with their honeyed songs to the Carthaginians, Romans, Vikings and Moors; from the refugees of Franco's civil war to the McCarthy blacklists of Hollywood; from the early hippy beat paradise of the 1950s to the pan-European free zone that is Ibiza today; from the sexual rites of the Phoenician love goddess Tanit to disco sunrises at super-clubs like Pacha, Space, Amnesia and DC-10, Ibiza has always been out there on the frontier of human experience. This island has seen it all and so will our audience.

Adopted home of Orson Welles, Errol Flynn, Denholm Elliott, Sid Vicious, Joni Mitchell, Robert Plant, Terry-Thomas, master forger Elmyr de Hory, convicted fraudster Clifford Irving and, of course Elle, Naomi and Kate, Ibiza has always proved irresistible to celebrities on the run from themselves. Today’s residents including Jade Jagger and Guy Laliberte (founder and owner of Cirque du Soleil), and regular visitors to the island that include Madonna and Leonardo Di Caprio, all play a part in maintaining the continued fascination of this magical isle.

To match the unique nature of the island itself, the film breaks new ground by delivering the first culture movie for audiences to dance to. The visual feast of original footage and archive, delivered silently with animation, graphics and text to enhance the narrative, combines with a pulsating non-stop soundtrack mixed by some of the world’s top DJs, enabling audiences to immerse themselves both physically and emotionally in the experience.


FRI 23:35 Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (m000777d)
Acid house is often portrayed as a movement that came out of the blue, inspired by little more than a handful of London-based DJs discovering ecstasy on a 1987 holiday to Ibiza. In truth, the explosion of acid house and rave in the UK was a reaction to a much wider and deeper set of fault lines in British culture, stretching from the heart of the city to the furthest reaches of the countryside, cutting across previously impregnable boundaries of class, identity and geography.

With Everybody in the Place, the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller upturns popular notions of rave and acid house, situating them at the very centre of the seismic social changes that reshaped 1980s Britain. Rare and unseen archive materials map the journey from protest movements to abandoned warehouse raves, the white heat of industry bleeding into the chaotic release of the dancefloor.

We join an A-level politics class as they discover these stories for the first time, viewing the story of acid house from the perspective of a generation for whom it is already ancient history. We see how rave culture owes as much to the Battle of Orgreave and the underground gay clubs of Chicago as it does to shifts in musical style: not merely a cultural gesture, but the fulcrum for a generational shift in British identity, linking industrial histories and radical action to the wider expanses of a post-industrial future.


FRI 00:35 Can You Feel It - How Dance Music Conquered the World (b0bkz064)
Series 1

The Beat

House music is now one of the most popular music genres on the planet. The charts are packed with 4/4 tunes made or remixed by superstar DJs. The irresistible and relentless groove of the dance floor fills clubs and stadiums, themes the biggest TV shows and is the soundtrack to mega advertising. You can't escape the beat. But how did we get here?

In the first episode we follow the 4/4 beat from its disco origins through remix culture to house, techno, acid house and the current EDM explosion.

With contributions from disco legends Nicky Siano and Tom Moulton, house pioneers like Marshall Jefferson, Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk and Steve 'Silk' Hurley, Detroit techno inventors Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May and modern DJ superstars such as Pete Tong and David Guetta.


FRI 01:35 Top of the Pops (m0007778)
[Repeat of broadcast at 21:30 today]


FRI 02:05 Rollermania: Britain's Biggest Boy Band (b06bbct4)
In 1975, The Bay City Rollers were on the brink of global superstardom. The most successful chart act in the UK with a unique look and sound were about to become the biggest thing since the Beatles. Featuring interviews with Les McKeown and other members of the classic Bay City Roller line-up, and using previously unseen footage shot by members of the band and its entourage, this is the tale of five lads from Edinburgh who became the world's first international teen idols and turned the whole world tartan.