Saturday 10th December 2011
Ponyo
Film 4, 6.55pm - 9.00pm
(2008) Studio Ghibli Season: Charming animated family fantasy-adventure about a five-year-old boy who befriends a small fish who wants to become human. But her wizard father is not so keen.
| The Story of Film: an Odyssey |
The final episode of the series looks at how movies became more serious after 9/11, the rise of Romanian films, the movies of David Lynch, and interviews Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov.
| Sunshine |
(2007) Danny Boyle's sci-fi epic imagines a future in which Earth suffers a perpetual winter and humanity's only hope is a spaceship that will kick-start the dying sun. Strong language.
White Noise
Film 4, 11.05pm - 12.55am
(2005) Michael Keaton is in deep mourning for his dead wife Anna (Chandra West) when medium Ian McNeice shockingly tells him that she is attempting to contact him. Supernatural horror.
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Sunday 11th December 2011
| Eragon |
(2006) Action-packed fantasy starring John Malkovich as the despotic ruler Galbatorix who thinks he has exterminated all the Dragon Riders, but one survives to challenge his reign.
| The Unforgetable ... Larry Grayson |
The story of the life and career of Larry Grayson, one of Britain's best-loved entertainers. The Generation Game star was hailed as an overnight success at the age of 51, but the programme shows that his life before fame was far from ordinary. Featuring contributions from Bernard Manning, Terry Wogan and Liz Dawn as well as interviews with Grayson's friends and family, home movie footage and rarely seen archive performances, the show reveals the amazing and previously untold life story of a TV legend.
| The party's over: How the West went bust |
In the teeth of the worst financial crisis in living memory, BBC Business Editor Robert Peston examines how the world got to this point and how the collossal imbalances in the global ecoonomy have left the UK in need of a radical economic overhaul.
In the second of two programmes Peston asks how Britain can compete in the new world economic order. After years of living beyond our means the country surely needs to wean itself off the consumer society, but doing so threatens our retail dependent economy. In Germany the model of thrift and investment, far from the quick buck mentality of the City of London, has produced a powerful manufacturing and exporting economy that Britain, once so proud of its modern finance based approach, is desperate to imitate.
It is a long road to rebalancing the British model and with the Eurozone crisis still threatening further financial armageddon, Peston asks whether we are in for decades, rather than years, of sluggish growth. Featuring interviews with senior economists, bankers and politicians, as well as the ordinary people in several countries, whose livelihoods depend on the outcome of this vast economic reordering of the world.
| Japan tsunami: caught on camera |
Documentary capturing the impact of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan earlier this year, using amateur footage filmed by those caught up in the disaster.
| White Noise 2: The Light |
(2007) Nathan Fillion tries to kill himself after witnessing his wife and child's murder but, brought back to life, he finds he can see the auras of those about to die. Supernatural horror.
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Monday 12th December 2011
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The arrival of Universal Penny Postage in 1840 marked the beginning of the post office as a genuine public service. Introduced by the social reformer, Rowland Hill, he argued that lowering the cost of postage would mean more people would send more letters leading to wider social benefits and increased profits. As secretary of the post office, Hill oversaw the implementation of the world's first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black.
As Royal Mail faces an uncertain future, Dominic Sandbrook charts the development of the post office and examines it's impact on literacy, free speech, commerce and communication. The Post Office has become a cherished social institution, linking people together and extending their vision outward into the wider world.
It's called Royal Mail but it should be known as the People's Post.
| When the Levee breaks |
Mark Lamarr looks at the little-known story of Memphis Minnie, known for her guitar skills, her rowdy ways and the song 'When the Levee Breaks' a musical celebration of a key moment in Blues history.
'Levee', later made famous by Led Zeppelin and Dylan, was released in 1929, long before guitars found amplification, in reference (like many blues songs of the time), to the great Mississippi flood of 1927.
The flood was a huge factor in the Migration of African Americans into what would become the great RnB and Blues towns of Detroit, Memphis & Chicago. When the Levee Breaks is its most famous telling.
Neither born in Memphis nor called Minnie, the musician who wrote and recorded it travelled that now well worn blues journey both physically and musically in the first wave of blues musicians emerging from the Delta in the late 20s.
When the Levee Breaks was one of over two hundred songs written by Minnie during her lifetime, many are blues classics. Though her story has been largely ignored when compared to Robert Johnson, Leadbelly and other Blues artists of the time.
In a journey that starts along the banks of the Mississippi in a post Katrina New Orleans and ends in the promised land of the Blues, Chicago, Mark Lamarr explores her story, the flood itself and the development of the Blues that emerged around the Great Migration.
| How to survive the meltdown: Panorama |
The world economy appears to be in meltdown, the euro is in turmoil and the economic future looks bleak. But does it have to be this bad? Panorama investigates how Britain plc could survive the crisis. Reporter Adam Shaw explores the potential for growth away from Europe in the fast-growing economies of places like Brazil, China and India. He also asks what our government needs to do to chart a path to a brighter future.
| Hot Fuzz |
High-octane homage to the cop movie genre. A talented London sergeant is transferred to a sleepy village where his over-enthusiastic partner badgers him with queries about car chases and gun fights. As the sergeant insists that real city policing is not as exciting as the movies, he begins to notice that the village's low crime rate is offset by a suspiciously high accident rate. The pair's investigation reveals the horrible truth about their tranquil rural idyll.
| Games Britannia |
Three-part series presented by historian Benjamin Woolley about popular games in Britain from the Iron Age to the Information Age, in which he unravels how an apparently trivial pursuit is a rich and entertaining source of cultural and social history.
In part one, Woolley investigates how the instinct to play games is both as universal and elemental as language itself and takes us from 1st-century Britain to the Victorian era.
Ancient and medieval games weren't just fun, they were fundamental, and often imbued with prophetic significance. By the late Middle Ages this spiritual element in games began to be lost as gaming became increasingly associated with gambling. Dice and card games abounded, but a moral backlash in Victorian times transformed games into moral educational tools.
This was also the era in which Britain established the world's first commercial games industry, with such classics as the Staunton Chess Set, Ludo and Snakes and Ladders leading the way, all adaptations of original games from other countries.
In the case of Snakes and Ladders, what once represented a Hindu journey to enlightenment was transformed into a popular but banal family favourite, and Woolley sees this as the perfect analogy for how the sacred energy which once imbued games had become gradually drained away by commercialisation.
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Tuesday 13th December 2011
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The post office played a vital role in the spread of mass consumerism.
Thanks to cheap postage, businesses could advertise and interact with people in their own homes. When it took over the Parcel Post in 1883 the Post Office offered the first genuinely joined up postal service, leading to a boom in mail order catalogues.
| Money (3/3) |
The last episode in Vanessa Engle's series about our personal attitudes to money.
Forty grand is, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the average British income for a household where two adults are working. This film features a set of households who all live on this same net amount of money annually. Some consider forty grand to be a large amount of money, whilst others struggle to get by. The film compares the way the various households spend their identical budgets, revealing a wide range of priorities and values, as well as big differences in their life situations
| Imagine - Books: the last chapter? |
With the rise of electronic books, is the final chapter about to be written in the long love story between books and their readers? Will the app take the place of the traditional book?
Alan Yentob discusses the subject with writers Alan Bennett, Douglas Coupland, Ewan Morrison and Gary Shteyngart, publisher Gail Rebuck, agent Ed Victor and librarian Rachael Morrison. They also smell books, making precise notes about the distinctive aroma of each.
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Wednesday 14th December 2011
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Universal penny postage meant people from all backgrounds could afford to sustain long distance relationships. But it also led to increased pressure: lovers were expected to write two or three times a week, even if they lived in the same town. Sales of letter-writing manuals rocketed, allowing people to copy model examples of the perfect love letter.
| Steve Jobs: Billion dollar hippy |
Broadly considered a brand that inspires fervour and defines cool consumerism, Apple has become one of the biggest corporations in the world, fuelled by game-changing products that tap into modern desires. Its leader, Steve Jobs, was a long-haired college dropout with infinite ambition, and an inspirational perfectionist with a bully's temper. A man of contradictions, he fused a Californian counterculture attitude and a mastery of the art of hype with explosive advances in computer technology.
Insiders including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, the chairman who ousted Jobs from the company he founded, and Jobs' chief of software, tell extraordinary stories of the rise, fall and rise again of Apple with Steve Jobs at its helm.
With Stephen Fry, world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and branding guru Rita Clifton, Evan Davis decodes the formula that took Apple from suburban garage to global supremacy.
| John Arlott in conversation with Mike Brearley |
An edited version of a landmark series first broadcast in 1984. The distinguished BBC commentator John Arlott talks to former England cricket captain Brearley about growing up between the wars, his career as a helper in a mental hospital, a policeman, a poet, a wine and football correspondent, and a cricket writer and commentator. The interview provides a fascinating insight into the life experience and attitudes of a liberal thinker born almost a hundred years ago and who died in 1991.
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Thursday 15th December 2011
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During the nineteenth century the post office became a central pillar in the community; a symbol of order, stability and public service. As well as stamps and stationary, sub-postmasters supplied news, advice and local gossip. From 1862 the Post Office Savings Bank offered savings accounts to poorer people for the first time.
As Royal Mail faces an uncertain future, Dominic Sandbrook charts the development of the post office and examines it's impact on literacy, free speech, commerce and communication.
| Up in flames: Mr Reeves and the riots |
When the riots struck in August there was no-one more taken by surprise than Maurice Reeves, 80-year-old owner of Croydon's Reeves Furniture store, who had to watch his 144-year-old family business go up in flames.
This film follows him in the aftermath of that night, trying to work out how the town he had always thought so safe could descend into arson and looting, and whether he should ever open up shop again in the midst of a community that could spiral out of control so drastically.
In the weeks that follow he meets other victims of the riots, comes face to face with disaffected Croydon young people, and takes on local politicIans - becoming more and more Churchillian by the week, a steadfast octogenarian rebuttal to riot and violence.
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Friday 16th December 2011
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By 1890 Britain had a state of the art postal service with six daily deliveries in Britain's towns. To achieve this service, delivery staff often worked six day weeks with shifts split over a twelve or fourteen hour day. In sorting offices, postal staff complained of leaky roofs and inadequate toilets. Worse still, postmen weren't permitted their own independent union, and in 1890 frustration turned to industrial action.
As Royal Mail faces an uncertain future, Dominic Sandbrook charts the development of the post office and examines it's impact on literacy, free speech, commerce and communication.
| The swing thing |
Documentary telling the story of swing, an obscure form of jazz that became the first worldwide pop phenomenon, inspired the first ever youth culture revolution and became a byword for sexual liberation and teenage excess well before the Swinging Sixties.
In the process, swing threw up some of the greatest names in 20th century music, from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra. The film uses archive and contemporary accounts to shed light on why it endures today.
