SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2019

SUN 19:00 Indian Hill Railways (b00qvk99)
The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway

From the Himalayas in the north to the Nilgiris in the south - for a hundred years these little trains have climbed through the clouds and into the wonderful world of Indian hill railways.

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway is a line so close to the people that it flows like a river through their lives. The relationship between the train and the people is changing, however, as a new generation of Gurkhas populates these hills, demanding an independent state and fighting for a new identity as they journey into the modern Indian world.


SUN 20:00 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.


SUN 21:00 The Eyes of Orson Welles (m000235q)
Granted exclusive access to hundreds of drawings and paintings by Orson Welles, film-maker Mark Cousins dives deep into the visual world of this legendary director and actor, to reveal a portrait of the artist as he’s never been seen before – through his own eyes, sketched by his own hand, painted with his own brush. Executive produced by Michael Moore, The Eyes of Orson Welles brings vividly to life the passions, politics and power of this 20th-century showman and explores how the genius of Welles still resonates today, more than 30 years after his death.

Welles was one of the great creative figures of the 20th century. But one aspect of his life and art has never been discussed. Like Akira Kurosawa and Sergei Eisenstein, Welles loved to draw and paint. As a child prodigy, he trained as an artist, before a drawing trip to Ireland in his teens led to his sensational stage debut at Dublin’s Gate Theatre. Welles continued to draw and paint throughout his life, and his groundbreaking film and theatre work was profoundly shaped by his graphic imagination.

When he died over 30 years ago, he left behind hundreds of character sketches, set designs, visualisations of unmade projects, illustrations to entertain his children and friends, images in the margins of personal letters, and portraits of the people and places that inspired him. They are a window on to the world of Welles, and a vivid illustration of his creativity and visual thinking. Most of these have never been made public. Now, for the first time, Welles’s daughter Beatrice has granted Mark Cousins access to this treasure trove of imagery, to make a film about what he finds there.

The Eyes of Orson Welles is a cinematic essay which avoids the techniques of conventional TV documentaries. It combines Cousins’s trademark commentary with new digital scans and specially made animations of the artworks, which bring vividly to life the magic of Welles’s graphic world. These are intercut with clips from Welles’s films, recordings of his radio performances and TV interviews, and encounters with Beatrice Welles, telling the personal stories of the images. An original score by young Northern Irish composer Matt Regan gives the film emotion and expressivity. The title music is Albinoni’s famous Adagio, a nod to the fact that Welles was the first film-maker to use this in a movie soundtrack, in his 1961 adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial.

The film is told in three central acts – Pawn, Knight and King – with an epilogue on the theme of Jester. The Pawn sequence looks at Welles’s politics, his sympathy with ordinary people, those images that deal with the modesty of human beings – children, decent people who are not in positions of power. The Knight section looks at Welles's obsession with love, his romances with the likes of Dolores del Rio and Rita Hayworth, and his quixotic attachment to what he himself saw as outmoded chivalric ideals. The King section looks at Welles’s fascination with power and its corruption, through illustrations that deal with figures such as Macbeth, Henry V, Kane and Welles himself – the epic mode of human beings, the lawmakers and abusers. The Jester epilogue explores the images that are about fun or mockery, with a surprising intervention by Welles himself.

Cousins also travels to key locations in Welles’s life – New York, Chicago, Kenosha, Arizona, Los Angeles, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Ireland – to capture beautiful images and locate the artworks, and serve to dramatise some of the defining moments in Welles’s career and personal life.

Mark shot the film with two handheld cameras, one a conventional HD camera and one a 4K camera which gives a new Steadicam style of tracking shot without the need for tracks and dolly. It’s the sort of technology that Welles would have loved and could only have dreamed of as he spent a lifetime wrestling with the creative and financial limitations of traditional film-making techniques. This shooting style reflects the immediacy of Welles’s sketches and paintings in their swift engagement with the visual world. These cameras are like Mark’s paintbrushes, giving him a direct, personal and tactile contact between his hand and the captured/created image, without the intermediation of cumbersome equipment and crews.

In the end, this essay film is about much more than the drawings and paintings. Just as Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks show his passions, his changes of mind, his trains of thought and visual thinking, so this film is an almost mythic encounter with the imagination of this great artist, who extended cinema, was profoundly political, engaged with questions about power, existentialism, memory, destiny, psychology, space and light. These ingredients make The Eyes of Orson Welles not only a portrait of a great man, but an account of the 20th century and a meditation on the continuing relevance of his genius in what Mark describes as these Wellesian times.


SUN 22:40 The Sky at Night (m00023bc)
Beyond Pluto

On 1 January 2019, Nasa's New Horizons probe notched up another historic first: the first ever Kuiper belt fly-by. Its target was 2014 MU69, a chunk of ice and rock about four billion miles (approximately 6.4 billion kilometres) from Earth, dubbed Ultima Thule, a Latin phrase meaning a distant, unknown region. It is the most distant fly-by in history, and it is believed the data New Horizons gathers will shed new light on the solar system's early days. Chris Lintott reports from the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to bring the latest news and pictures from this extraordinary mission.


SUN 23:10 The Bridge: Fifty Years Across the Forth (b04g80p8)
A unique amateur film provides the centrepiece of a documentary celebrating the 50th anniversary of one of Scotland's great landmarks, the Forth Road Bridge. The documentary traces the memories of the people who built the bridge, the biggest of its kind in Europe at the time, as well as those who ran the Forth ferries that stopped running when it opened in 1964.


SUN 00:10 Treasures of the Indus (b069g53h)
The Other Side of the Taj Mahal

This is the story of the Indian subcontinent told through the treasures of three very different people, places and dynasties that have shaped the modern Indian world.

The Mughals created the most famous and dazzling empire that India has ever seen, from the Taj Mahal to fabulously intricate miniatures of court life.

But in the process, did they bring civilisation to India or tear it apart?

From the moment the first Mughal emperor Babur arrived from Afghanistan the debate began - were the Mughals imposing their own religion of Islam on a Hindu country, or were they open to the religion and art of the country they were conquering?

The artworks the Mughals left behind over their 200-year empire - even the very buildings which have traces of Hindu architecture as well as Muslim - clearly show how this debate played out, and Sona Datta traces how this most spectacular of all Indian civilisations also sowed the seeds of discord.


SUN 01:10 Going Going Gone: Nick Broomfield's Disappearing Britain (b07chym0)
Two iconic British buildings are threatened with demolition and the intrepid Nick Broomfield is on the case. In a pair of documentaries, Broomfield profiles the Wellington Rooms in Liverpool and the Coal Exchange in Cardiff.

The Wellington Rooms, built in 1815 by Edmund Aikin, was originally the social hub for the super-rich, slave traders, businessmen and the elite. The prime minister William Gladstone's family, themselves wealthy slave owners, invested heavily in this magnificent building with the most intricate detailing and proportions. A Wedgwood ceiling and sprung dance floor, with classical columns, create a building of love and light.

Despite the depression in Liverpool's fortunes, it's a building that has brought enormous happiness to many different people over a couple of centuries. Countless people seem to have fallen in love and met their future partners in the assembly room. Now in a rundown state of faded glory, the question is - what to do with the Wellington Rooms?

The Coal Exchange in Cardiff, built in 1883 by Edward Seward, is a magnificent celebration of the industry of coal and its immense wealth. A glass-ceilinged exchange room with galleries on three floors and a unique lowered floor are a remarkable monument to this time.

Now in serious neglect, the whole building, the size of a city block, faces demolition. It signifies the serious lack of resourcefulness on the part of Cardiff Council to celebrate and regenerate not only this building but the whole area. The once great Butetown Docks and the magnificent buildings surrounding the Coal Exchange have also been allowed to crumble and disintegrate. Rather than redevelop the docks in a way that they have been so wonderfully done in Liverpool, the docks in Cardiff have been filled in. Magnificent warehouses have been torn down, and the whole history of coal and the uniqueness of this area have been almost obliterated.


SUN 02:10 Indian Hill Railways (b00qvk99)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 today]