MONDAY 22 APRIL 2013

MON 19:00 World News Today (b01s2cql)
The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.


MON 19:30 Great British Railway Journeys (b00qbnbw)
Series 1

Swindon to Bristol

Michael Portillo takes to the tracks with a copy of George Bradshaw's Victorian Railway Guidebook. In a series of four epic journeys, he travels the length and breadth of the country to see how the railways changed us, and what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.

Michael's journey takes him along the Brunel's Great Western Railway from Swindon to Penzance. He finds out about free holiday trains for the GWR workers in Swindon, samples the spa in Bath and tries his hand at glass blowing in Bristol.


MON 20:00 Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails (b00drtpj)
Ian Hislop brings his customary humour, analysis and wit to the notorious Beeching Report of 1963, which led to the closure of a third of the nation's railway lines and stations and forced tens of thousands of people into the car and onto the road.

Was author Dr Richard Beeching little more than Genghis Khan with a slide rule, ruthlessly hacking away at Britain's rail network in a misguided quest for profitability, or was he the fall guy for short-sighted government policies that favoured the car over the train?

Ian also investigates the fallout of Beeching's plan, discovering what was lost to the British landscape, communities and ways of life when the railway map shrank, and recalls the halcyon days of train travel, celebrated by John Betjeman.

Ian travels from Cornwall to the Scottish borders, meeting those responsible and those affected and questioning whether such brutal measures could be justified. Knowing what we know now, with trains far more energy efficient and environmentally sound than cars, perhaps Beeching's plan was the biggest folly of the 1960s?


MON 21:00 Revolutionary Road (b019767t)
Celebrated Sam Mendes film adapted from Richard Yates's acclaimed novel, reuniting the Titanic stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

April and Frank Wheeler are a young, thriving couple living with their two children in a Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. Their self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job, and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career.

Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France, where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. But as their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfilment are thrown into jeopardy.


MON 22:50 North Korea: Crossing the Line (b0074tl7)
In 1962, a US soldier sent to guard the peace in South Korea deserted his unit, walked across a fortified area and defected to the Cold War enemy, the communist state of North Korea.

He became a coveted star of the propaganda machine, but then disappeared from the face of the known world. He later found fame acting in North Korean films, typecast as an evil American. He has now lived in North Korea twice as long as he has in America, uses Korean as his daily language and has three sons from two wives.

At one time, there were four Americans living in North Korea. Today, just one remains. Now after 45 years, the story of Comrade Joe, the last American defector in North Korea is told for the first time.


MON 00:20 Brushing up on... (b01s1c4y)
Series 1

British Tunnels

Danny Baker considers some tunnel-based archive footage and endeavours to give a quick brush up on these mysterious, subterranean realms.


MON 00:50 Catholics (b01d27lc)
Women

In the third of three films exploring Catholic identity, award-winning documentary filmmaker Richard Alwyn talks to Catholic women about how Catholicism has shaped their lives.

With remarkable behind-the-scenes access to Westminster Cathedral, this is a moving and intimate film in which Alwyn meets the female staff, volunteers and congregation of the cathedral. Set against the rhythm of cathedral life, Alwyn's meetings are brief but intense encounters that describe what it is to be a Catholic woman in Britain today.

Rose is second-in-charge of the cathedral's sacristy, preparing the altar for six daily masses and making sure the priests have all they need. It's like running a busy train station. A convert, Rose is the consummate 'handmaid of the Lord' for whom Catholicism is an anchor in life.

Jennie, on the other hand, is a cradle Catholic who feels her education by nuns was repressive, with an unspoken emphasis on sex - and especially abstaining from it. She feels her Catholic 'indoctrination' was a cross for her generation to bear. Despite that she staffs the cathedral's information desk once a week and feels her Catholicism is a valued part of her identity, having developed over the years into an appreciation of the spirit of faith more than the letter of the Church.

Elsewhere, Alwyn meets a retired doctor who feels alienated by the Catholic Church's teachings on Aids and contraception and its recent history of child abuse. No longer practising, she nonetheless feels her Catholic identity has provided her with an important moral compass for the chaos of life.

These and other encounters form the backbone of Alwyn's moving film. What emerges is a portrait of Catholicism as an identity that, whether positive or corrosive, is always tenacious and hard to leave behind. Once a Catholic...


MON 01:50 Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails (b00drtpj)
[Repeat of broadcast at 20:00 today]


MON 02:50 Timeshift (b00dwflh)
Series 8

Between the Lines - Railways in Fiction and Film

Novelist Andrew Martin presents a documentary examining how the train and the railways came to shape the work of writers and film-makers.

Lovers parting at the station, runaway carriages and secret assignations in confined compartments - railways have long been a staple of romance, mystery and period drama. But at the beginning of the railway age, locomotives were seen as frightening and unnatural. Wordsworth decried the destruction of the countryside, while Dickens wrote about locomotives as murderous brutes, bent on the destruction of mere humans. Hardly surprising, as he had been involved in a horrific railway accident himself.

Martin traces how trains gradually began to be accepted - Holmes and Watson were frequent passengers - until by the time of The Railway Children they were something to be loved, a symbol of innocence and Englishness. He shows how trains made for unforgettable cinema in The 39 Steps and Brief Encounter, and how when the railways fell out of favour after the 1950s, their plight was highlighted in the films of John Betjeman.

Finally, Martin asks whether, in the 21st century, Britain's railways can still stir and inspire artists.