Live coverage from the Track Cycling World Championships in Berlin of the men's and women's team sprint finals and the women's 10km scratch race.
Dr Aminul Hoque tells the story of the thousands of Bangladeshi families who settled in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. Their arrival brought new foods, traditions, and workers for British industry. But the families themselves faced hardships and racism while building a new life in Britain.
Using film archive and his own experiences of growing up in east London, Aminul meets and tells the stories of Bengalis who made their homes here over the course of two key decades. He also returns to Bangladesh with his own family, taking his children for their first visit to their grandparents' village to explore their roots in the region of Sylhet.
Robert Cecil is the son of Elizabeth I's original spymaster. He has been groomed since birth to inherit his father's network but when he finally steps into his father's shoes, the queen's enemies are stronger than ever and Cecil must also watch his back. The Earl of Essex has established a rival network and is trying to oust Cecil as Elizabeth's spymaster.
Essex is everything Cecil is not. Cecil is bent-backed and under five foot tall. Essex is an athlete and a war hero who flirts with the queen. But the two men have known each other since childhood. And now they are locked in a battle that is part court theatrical, but which is also a lethal spy war in which people die horrifically violent deaths. The stakes are huge. For the winner, untold power. For the loser a one-way trip to the scaffold.
Cecil is also aware that the sun is setting on the reign of Elizabeth, who is in her sixties. He and Essex are not just battling for control of the queen, but for control over who will be her successor. For the power to select the next king of England. Essex begins a spy war within the spy war by secretly approaching James VI of Scotland and striking a deal to put him on Elizabeth's throne when she has passed away. So Cecil must somehow oust Essex from Elizabeth's court without making an enemy of James, who Cecil also wants to inherit the throne.
This is a secret conflict, involving double agents, coded letters, treachery and treason. It is a world that Cecil proves to be an absolute master of. Cecil ruthlessly manoeuvres Essex to the execution block and becomes the man who puts James on the English throne.
In the first episode, Simon explores Spain's early years, its emergence as the battleground of empires and its golden age under the Cordoba Caliphate.
In the first episode Alastair Sooke explores the surprising roots of Greek art, beginning his journey in Crete at the palace of Knossos, legendary home of the Minotaur. He travels to Santorini to the 'Greek Pompeii', and finds gold in the fabled stronghold of Mycenae and dazzling remains from Greece's Dark Ages. Alastair discovers the beginnings of a defining spirit in Greek art, embracing mythology, a passion for symmetry, and an obsession with the human body.
In the final episode of this series, psychotherapist Philippa Perry time-travels back to the 1890s to explore how the late Victorian passion for science co-existed with a deeply held belief in the paranormal. Using a collection of rare and restored Victorian films from the BFI National Archive, she shows how the latest media innovations made use of contemporary ideas of ghosts and the afterlife – and how this ‘new media’ anticipated today’s networked world.
The final years of Queen Victoria’s reign were a moment when the old Victorian order rubbed shoulders with the beginnings of our modern world. It was a chaotic, febrile time of discovery and innovation in science and technology, entertainment and art, and the Victorians had to make sense of it all.
Philippa finds out how Marconi’s early experiments with wireless telegraphy encouraged speculation amongst the public and scientists that telepathy – communication between minds – would be the next scientific breakthrough. She also replicates eminent physicist Oliver Lodge’s pioneering experiment with radio waves and discovers his fascination for exploring the paranormal with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). This Victorian group of ghost hunters included William James, a pioneer of psychology, biologist Alfred Russel Wallace and even Prime Minister William Gladstone. Buried in the archives of the SPR in Cambridge University Library, Philippa finds an incredible Census of Hallucinations that contains 17,000 ghostly encounters sourced from the Victorian public.
Maybe it’s not surprising that people of the age saw so many ghosts because, in a sense, spirits did haunt the Victorian home. Every Victorian innovation - from photography to motion pictures, phonographs to fantasy books – had its own supernatural genre. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes, drew on his real-life experience as a ghostbuster to write his ghostly fiction. Philippa learns the art of spirit photography from Almudena Romero and poses for her own ghostly picture as well as exploring a rare private collection of phonographs, the recent craze that allowed Victorians to hear communications from the past and listen to their loved ones after their deaths for the first time.
Philippa also explores the impact of the arrival in 1896 of motion pictures, the decade’s greatest and most magical media innovation. BFI curator Bryony Dixon shows her restored Victorian trick films, from the funny and feminist to a disturbing fake execution. Philippa then creates her own homage to the Big Swallow trick film and eats the cameraman.
The boundary between fact and fantasy was often blurred, and sensationalism infused the new tabloid journalism. At Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy, Philippa learns about other forms of long-distance communication and the flurry of press interest in stories from Mars. Dr Joshua Nall reveals that some of the greatest public figures of the decade, from Nikola Tesla to Sir Francis Galton, were convinced that signalling with Martians was possible. HG Wells’s story The Crystal Egg takes up this theme and predicts future media developments and the power of communications. And even Queen Victoria herself took advantage of the globally networked world that was emerging to allow the film cameras in to capture her triumphant Diamond Jubilee procession for all her imperial subjects. The jubilee was the first global mass media event and the footage captures the essence of the 1890s: the old Victorian order with an empire and an empress, rubbing shoulders with a world we recognise - a modern one of film cameras and global communications. This was the decade the future landed.
Presented by Jim Moir, aka Vic Reeves, Bauhaus Rules brings the radical principles of the Bauhaus to a new generation, to discover if the school’s groundbreaking approach to training artists still holds its power 100 years on.
Over the course of a week, six Central St Martins graduates - across fine art, fashion, graphic design and architecture - are challenged each day to create a new work of art, design or performance, sticking strictly to rules inspired by the artists who taught at the Bauhaus.
THURSDAY 27 FEBRUARY 2020
THU 19:00 Cycling (m000frd6)
Track World Championships 2020
Day 2
Live coverage from the Track Cycling World Championships in Berlin of the men's team pursuit and keirin finals, and of the women's team pursuit final in which Great Britain is hoping for gold after finishing as runner-up in the previous two competitions.
THU 20:30 Handmade (b05tpv83)
Glass
The first episode in the Handmade series, part of BBC Four Goes Slow, is a filmed portrait of the making of a simple glass jug.
Filmed in real time and without voiceover or music, the focus is entirely on the craft process, an absorbing, repetitive process of blowing and rolling as glass designer Michael Ruh delicately teases and manipulates the molten glass into shape.
Ruh is a designer of contemporary glass objects, but the method by which he creates them is essentially ancient.
Glass is heated in a crucible until it becomes liquid. Ruh's task, shared with his assistant, is to keep the glass hot and in constant motion as he breathes into it and gradually shapes the expanding globe into the form of a jug.
THU 21:00 Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard (b072nxtm)
With unparalleled access to Pompeii and featuring cutting-edge modern technology, Mary Beard guides us through this amazing slice of the ancient world.
For the first time ever, CT scanning and x-ray equipment bring new light to the secrets of the victims of the 79 AD eruption. Mary unpacks the human stories behind the tragic figures - gladiators, slaves, businesswomen and children.
She goes behind the scenes of the Great Pompeii Project, where restoration teams have gradually removed the layers of time and deterioration from the frescoes and mosaics of houses closed to the public for decades. And with the help of point-cloud scanning technology, Pompeii is seen and explained like never before.
Mary has unprecedented access to hidden storerooms and archaeological labs packed to the hilt with items from daily life: plumbing fittings, pottery, paint pots, foodstuff and fishing nets. As she pieces it all together, Mary presents a film that is a celebratory and unique view of life in this extraordinary town.
THU 22:00 Elizabeth I's Secret Agents (b09fb54t)
Series 1
Episode 3
Elizabeth I is dead and King James of Scotland travels south to take the throne at the invitation of Robert Cecil. Meanwhile, John Gerard, a Catholic priest who has dedicated his life to the destruction of the Protestant state that developed in Elizabeth's England, has escaped and made contact with a splinter cell in the Catholic underground containing an extremist called Guy Fawkes, who has a plan to blow up parliament with the king inside.
Cecil hears about the gunpowder plot, but is unaware of when and how they will strike, and his investigation is hampered as he's also trying to manage King James, who has a wildly ambitious idea of unifying Scotland and England in a new kingdom of Great Britain.
THU 23:00 How We Built Britain (b007w7by)
The North: Full Steam Ahead
David Dimbleby's architectural tour of Britain heads north to Newcastle, home of George and Robert Stephenson, and then west to Manchester, where Dimbleby finds warehouses based on Venetian palaces and a stunning town hall. He explores the sewers that changed the lives of the Victorian poor, the model village of Saltaire, and the grand merchant houses and shopping arcades of Leeds. He ends his journey in Blackpool, where Victorian engineering was put to the serious business of having fun.
THU 00:00 Timeshift (b0803m60)
Series 16
Bridging the Gap: How the Severn Bridge Was Built
2016 saw the 50th anniversary of the Severn Bridge, which completed the motorway link between England and Wales. Timeshift tells the inside story of the design and construction of 'the most perfect suspension bridge in the world', and how its unique slimline structure arose by accident.
THU 01:00 The Silk Road (p03qb3q4)
Episode 3
In the final episode of his series tracing the story of the most famous trade route in history, Dr Sam Willis continues his journey west in Iran. The first BBC documentary team to be granted entry for nearly a decade, Sam begins in the legendary city of Persepolis - heart of the first Persian Empire.
Following an ancient caravan route through Persia's deserts, he visits a Zoroastrian temple where a holy fire has burned for 1,500 years, and Esfahan, one of the Silk Road's architectural jewels and rival to Sam's next destination - Istanbul. In the ancient capital of Byzantium, Sam discovers how the eastern Roman Empire was ruled through silk and how Venetian merchants cashed in on the wealth and trade it generated.
Sam's last stop takes him full circle to Venice. Visiting Marco Polo's house, Sam reminds us how the great traveller's book was one of the first to link east to west and how the ideas and products that trickled down the Silk Road not only helped to trigger the Renaissance, but set Europe on a path of unstoppable change.
THU 02:00 Pappano's Greatest Arias (m0002w72)
Nothing pulls harder at the heartstrings than an opera aria – that key moment when the action stops and the character draws us right in to the heart of the drama, revealing his or her innermost feelings and thoughts. These are chances for the singers to really show off, to wow an audience with some of the most famous music in opera. In this film, charismatic conductor and music director of the Royal Opera House, Antonio Pappano, shares his personal selection of some of opera’s greatest arias. Pappano’s choices stretch across the full 400-year operatic canvas and feature some of the most ravishing and famous arias in the repertoire - from show-stopping Baroque to heart-stopping Mozart, the full-blooded Romantics to blood-curdling Verismo via Bel Canto pyrotechnics and new 20th-century techniques. Along the way he identifies the various functions that arias perform in opera – from entrance arias, soliloquies and arias born of crisis to breathless declarations of undying love. Combining hands-on workshops featuring today’s international stars - such as Joyce DiDonato, Lucy Crowe, Bryan Hymel and Lawrence Brownlee - along with glorious archive of operatic legends including Placido Domingo, Gundula Janowitz and Piero Cappuccilli, Pappano shines a fresh new light on the precise characteristics – vocal, musical, psychological and dramatic – that transform these great theatrical moments into timeless masterpieces.
THU 03:00 Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard (b072nxtm)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:00 today]
FRIDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2020
FRI 19:00 Cycling (m000frf7)
Track World Championships 2020
Day 3
Live coverage from the Track Cycling World Championships in Berlin, including the women's omnium final.
FRI 21:00 Top of the Pops (m000frf9)
Mark Goodier presents the pop chart programme, first broadcast on 13 April 1989 and featuring Cookie Crew with Edwin Starr, Ten City, T'Pau, INXS, Fine Young Cannibals, U2 and BB King, Paul Simpson ft Adeva, Bangles and Yello.
FRI 21:30 Eric Burdon: Rock ‘n’ Roll – Animal (m000frfc)
Born in 1941, Eric Burdon was – along with his band The Animals – one of the most important standard bearers of the British Invasion of America, right after The Beatles and ahead of The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks. Their 1964 interpretation of House of the Rising Sun was a global hit and inspired Bob Dylan (who recorded an acoustic version on his first album) to go electric and hit the stage from then on backed by a rock band.
Eric Burdon is a street kid from Newcastle upon Tyne. He burnt the midnight oil in the nightclubs on the docks. Had music not intervened, he might well have slipped into a career as a petty criminal, the kind of English gangster so aptly parodied by Guy Ritchie in films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. But Burdon’s voice was his ticket to escape that bleak industrial destiny, and his We Gotta Get out of This Place went on to inspire Springsteen’s Born to Run.
Burdon was always an incurable hothead, prone to rages and no stranger to breaking contracts, a situation that would make him a lifelong underdog and impede his path to world stardom. By the end of the 70s he was so broke that he was living in a car on Sunset Strip.
Burdon regularly changed both his band and musical style. Alongside his passion for original American blues, he got together in the late 60s with black LA band War – itself a political statement in the Black Panther era – and, inspired by Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, expanded his musical spectrum with jazz and funk. Burdon was involved in discovering Jimi Hendrix in Greenwich Village and they remained friends right up to the literal end (the pair spent the night before Jimi’s death together).
Eric Burdon’s creative output has made an important and profoundly authentic contribution to popular culture. Together with Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones, he counts as one of that legendary generation’s last men standing. This film will convey the zeitgeist of the 60s and 70s, while revealing Eric Burdon’s personal vision and moving us all with his retrospective ruminations on triumph and failure.
FRI 22:30 Guitar, Drum and Bass (m0001y8k)
Series 1
On Drums... Stewart Copeland!
Stewart Copeland explores the drums as the founding instrument of popular modern music. Beats that travelled from Africa via New Orleans and across the world are the consistent force behind musical evolution.
Stewart plays with some of the most inspiring drummers of the last 50 years, including John Densmore of The Doors, Chad Smith of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Prince’s musical director Sheila E, New Order’s Stephen Morris and Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins. He goes dancing in New Orleans, builds his own bass drum pedal and checks out hot new bands on Santa Monica beach.
FRI 23:30 Burt Bacharach: A Life in Song (b06qnnbz)
A unique concert staged at the Royal Festival Hall celebrating the music of the legendary songwriter and performer Burt Bacharach.
Some of Burt's most famous songs are performed by a stellar line-up of artists including Alfie Boe, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Shaun Escoffery, Rebecca Ferguson, Justin Hayward, Michael Kiwanuka, Laura Mvula and Joss Stone. Burt himself also performs accompanied by his band. During the concert Burt chats to Michael Grade about the art of songwriting and shares the stories behind some of his best-loved hits.
FRI 01:00 Stunning Soloists at the BBC (b08kgqy0)
Solo show-stoppers from the world's greatest musicians in a journey through fifty years of BBC Music. From guitarist John Williams and cellist Jacqueline du Pre to trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and violinist Nigel Kennedy, this is a treasure trove of musical treats and dazzling virtuosity.
Whether it's James Galway's Flight of the Bumblebee performed at superhuman speed, Ravi Shankar's mesmerising Raag Bihag or Dudley Moore's brilliant Colonel Bogey March, every performance has its own star quality and unique appeal. Parkinson, Later with Jools Holland, The Les Dawson Show, Music at Night and Wogan are among the programmes featuring instruments ranging from marimba and kora to harp and flamenco guitar.
Sit back and enjoy.
FRI 02:00 Eric Burdon: Rock ‘n’ Roll – Animal (m000frfc)
[Repeat of broadcast at
21:30 today]
FRI 03:00 Guitar, Drum and Bass (m0001y8k)
[Repeat of broadcast at
22:30 today]
LIST OF THIS WEEK'S PROGRAMMES
(Note: the times link back to the details; the pids link to the BBC page, including iPlayer)
A Very British History
21:00 WED (m000f4xy)
A Very British History
03:00 WED (m000f4xy)
Armada: 12 Days to Save England
23:00 TUE (p02pkxkm)
Art of France
23:30 MON (b08cgjv7)
Art on the BBC
21:00 SUN (m000frc5)
Art on the BBC
03:00 SUN (m000frc5)
Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild
20:00 SUN (p00zsrz4)
Bauhaus Rules with Vic Reeves
02:00 WED (m0007tqs)
Beyond 100 Days
19:00 MON (m000frcj)
Beyond 100 Days
19:00 TUE (m000frdy)
Blood and Gold: The Making of Spain with Simon Sebag Montefiore
23:00 WED (b06rwgp7)
Britain's Lost Masterpieces
22:00 SUN (b07xt8ww)
Britain's Outlaws: Highwaymen, Pirates and Rogues
23:00 SUN (b06qgh3w)
Burt Bacharach: A Life in Song
23:30 FRI (b06qnnbz)
Clive James
22:00 SAT (m000frcd)
Cycling
19:00 WED (m000frc8)
Cycling
19:00 THU (m000frd6)
Cycling
19:00 FRI (m000frf7)
Elizabeth I's Secret Agents
22:00 TUE (b09c6q44)
Elizabeth I's Secret Agents
22:00 WED (b09dcjgk)
Elizabeth I's Secret Agents
22:00 THU (b09fb54t)
Eric Burdon: Rock ‘n’ Roll – Animal
21:30 FRI (m000frfc)
Eric Burdon: Rock ‘n’ Roll – Animal
02:00 FRI (m000frfc)
Francesco's Mediterranean Voyage
19:30 MON (b00cp4k0)
Genius of the Ancient World
02:00 TUE (b064jf28)
Guitar, Drum and Bass
22:30 FRI (m0001y8k)
Guitar, Drum and Bass
03:00 FRI (m0001y8k)
Handmade
19:30 TUE (b05tpx1l)
Handmade
20:30 THU (b05tpv83)
Hidden
21:00 SAT (m000fmjb)
How We Built Britain
23:00 THU (b007w7by)
Hunting the Nazi Gold Train
21:00 MON (b07yc9zf)
Inside the Medieval Mind
00:00 TUE (b009wzw3)
Iolo's Snowdonia
19:30 SUN (b09sbs00)
King Alfred and the Anglo Saxons
20:00 TUE (b038dbd5)
Mackintosh: Glasgow’s Neglected Genius
00:00 SUN (b0b5ydcz)
New Zealand: Earth's Mythical Islands
20:00 MON (b07mh601)
New Zealand: Earth's Mythical Islands
02:35 MON (b07mh601)
Pappano's Greatest Arias
02:00 THU (m0002w72)
Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard
21:00 THU (b072nxtm)
Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard
03:00 THU (b072nxtm)
Raiders of the Lost Past with Janina Ramirez
02:00 SUN (m0008k83)
Rick Stein's Long Weekends
19:00 SAT (b07bpc4c)
Rick Stein's Long Weekends
03:00 SAT (b07bpc4c)
Royal History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley
21:00 TUE (m000frf0)
Royal History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley
03:00 TUE (m000frf0)
Rude Britannia
01:35 MON (b00srf2d)
Saints and Sinners: Britain's Millennium of Monasteries
01:00 SUN (b052zxhm)
Saints and Sinners: Britain's Millennium of Monasteries
00:35 MON (b053pzv1)
Saints and Sinners: Britain's Millennium of Monasteries
01:00 TUE (b054fmzl)
South Pacific
20:00 SAT (b00kmv11)
Storyville
22:00 MON (m000frcl)
Stunning Soloists at the BBC
01:00 FRI (b08kgqy0)
Tap America: How a Nation Found Its Feet
01:40 SAT (b0b396jx)
The Midwife
22:45 SAT (m000frcg)
The Silk Road
01:00 THU (p03qb3q4)
The Women's Football Show
19:00 SUN (m000frc3)
Timeshift
00:00 THU (b0803m60)
Top of the Pops
00:40 SAT (m000fjbr)
Top of the Pops
01:10 SAT (m000fjbt)
Top of the Pops
21:00 FRI (m000frf9)
Treasures of Ancient Greece
00:00 WED (b05ql1sf)
Victorian Sensations
01:00 WED (m0005pr9)