Saturday 9th June 2012
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Sunday 10th June 2012
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Monday 11th June 2012
| The Digital Human (7/7) |
Aleks Krotoski explores the digital world.
| Murdoch, Cameron and the £8 Billion Deal |
Channel 4 Dispatches: As David Cameron prepares to take the stand at the Leveson Inquiry, Peter Oborne examines how close the Prime Minister got to the Murdoch empire.
| Britain in a Day |
On Saturday 12 November 2011 an eclectic range of British people turned the camera on themselves, capturing the entertaining and mundane, the exciting and unusual, the poignant and the everyday. The result, Britain in a Day tells the fascinating story of the British public in their own words.
Following on from the feature film Life in a Day, this 90-minute film directed by BAFTA winner Morgan Matthews offers an extraordinarily candid look at 21st century life across the UK, crafted from over 750 hours of footage, including 11,526 clips submitted to YouTube. The documentary offers remarkable insight into the lives, loves, fears and hopes of people living in Britain today. This captivating self-portrait of Britain forms part of the BBC's Cultural Olympiad.
After Britain In A Day premieres on BBC Two an immersive online archive will be launched to showcase the full-length submissions the film is comprised of. The archive will be available online.
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Tuesday 12th June 2012
| Cerys Matthews's Blue Horizon |
Among Cerys Matthews' landmark musical memories is a very sunny summer Sunday afternoon in 2009. It was the day that, browsing albums in Portobello Market, she parted with £70 and took home a rare copy of Fleetwood Mac's Sweet Pious Bird of Youth. She played it over and over again. She was hooked.
Since that day Cerys has fed her addiction to Blue Horizon records and has sought out and amassed a valuable collection of her own. She is passionately enthusiastic about these gems of recordings that are almost too precious to play.
The Blue Horizon record label linked the roots of the blues in the US with the UK blues scene of the 60s. It was the home of American blues artists Champion Jack Dupree, Bukka White, Mississippi Joe Callicot and Furry Lewis, Eddie Boyd, Otis Spann, Ainsley Dunbar, Elmore James but also of the British blues artists Chickenshack and Fleetwood Mac.
Label founder Mike Vernon also invented the blues sound we still hear today. In 1966, he produced the Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton, considered one of the most influential British blues recordings. It was notable for its driving rhythms and Clapton's rapid blues licks with a full distorted sound derived from a Gibson Les Paul and a Marshall amp. This became something of a classic combination for British blues guitarists.
In the programme, Cerys talks to Mike Vernon about his passion for the blues and how he left the old-school Decca Record company to strike out on his own. Artists from Blue Horizon's roster, including former members of The Yardbirds, Fleetwood Mac and Chickenshack reflect on the part Blue Horizon played in their careers and establishing the credibility of Britain as a home for the blues.
| Law in Action (2/4) |
A major confrontation between the courts and the government in the United States is set to ignite with the autumn election campaign about to start.
On health care and immigration - issues of direct concern to tens of millions of voters - the judges of the US Supreme Court will rule on laws that are championed by the leaders of both political parties. These decisions loom just as tensions between elected politicians and appointed judges are mounting in the UK, too, over issues as varied as voting rights for prisoners and the deportation of alleged terrorists.
Joshua Rozenberg discovers why these disagreements are becoming more heated now and how they are being tackled in the two countries.
He considers, in particular, what lessons Britain could learn from the American experience. Should we empower our courts to strike down laws passed by the democratically-elected parliament? If not, what real check exists against the arbitrary use of power by government? Or is tension between different parts of government unavoidable - and perhaps even a good thing?
| Jimmy and the Giant Supermarket (3/3) |
Jimmy Doherty tries to make free range chicken Kievs for Tesco, but will Tesco's customer tasters like it? Jimmy also campaigns against the slaughter of thousands of male dairy calves.
| All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry (2/3) |
Grayson Perry explores British tastes, using his discoveries as inspiration for works of art. In this episode he meets the middle class in and around Tunbridge Wells.
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Wednesday 13th June 2012
| The Secret History of Our Streets (2/6) |
In 1886 Charles Booth embarked on an ambitious plan to visit every one of London's streets to record the social conditions of residents. His project took him 17 years.
Once he had finished he had constructed a groundbreaking series of maps which recorded the social class and standing of inhabitants. These maps transformed the way Victorians felt about their capital city.
This series takes six archetypal London streets as they are now, discovering how they have fared since Booth's day.
Booth colour coded each street, from yellow for the 'servant keeping classes', down to black for the 'vicious and semi-criminal'. With the aid of maps the series explores why certain streets have been transformed from desperate slums to become some of the most desirable and valuable property in the UK, whilst others have barely changed.
This landmark series features residents past and present, exploring how what happened on the street in the last 125 years continues to shape the lives of those who live there now.
Today, Camberwell Grove is an elegant oddity - a broad, leafy street of fine Georgian houses set in the seething inner city.
The street has come full circle, from middle-class prosperity to tight-knit working-class community and back to middle-class affluence again. Through the lively, often passionate accounts of residents past and present the film tells the story of the changing faces of this remarkable street and the people who have lived in and loved its beautiful houses. These stories also reveal how the fate of the Grove was intimately bound up with the monstrous growth of the Victorian city of London and the birth of the modern conservation movement.
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Thursday 14th June 2012
| The House the 50s Built (2/4) |
Brendan Walker explores how the technological advances of the 1950s changed our living rooms, from wonder material foam to affordable bright paints, and how these changes affected society.
| The Men Who Made Us Fat (1/3) |
Around the world, obesity levels are rising. More people are now overweight than undernourished. Two thirds of British adults are overweight and one in four of us is classified as obese. In the first of this three-part series, Jacques Peretti traces those responsible for revolutionising our eating habits, to find out how decisions made in America 40 years ago influence the way we eat now.
Peretti travels to America to investigate the story of high-fructose corn syrup. The sweetener was championed in the US in the 1970s by Richard Nixon's agriculture secretary Earl Butz to make use of the excess corn grown by farmers. Cheaper and sweeter than sugar, it soon found its way into almost all processed foods and soft drinks. HFCS is not only sweeter than sugar, it also interferes with leptin, the hormone that controls appetite, so once you start eating or drinking it, you don't know when to stop.
Endocrinologist Robert Lustig was one of the first to recognise the dangers of HFCS but his findings were discredited at the time. Meanwhile a US Congress report blamed fat, not sugar, for the disturbing rise in cardio-vascular disease and the food industry responded with ranges of 'low fat', 'heart healthy' products in which the fat was removed - but the substitute was yet more sugar.
Meanwhile, in 1970s Britain, food manufacturers used advertising campaigns to promote the idea of snacking between meals. Outside the home, fast food chains offered clean, bright premises with tempting burgers cooked and served with a very un-British zeal and efficiency. Twenty years after the arrival of McDonalds, the number of fast food outlets in Britain had quadrupled.
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Friday 15th June 2012
| Punk Britannia (3/3) |
Punk had shown what it was against- now what was it for? In the wake of the Pistols' demise a new generation of musicians would re-imagine the world they lived in through the music they made. Freed up by punk's DIY ethos, a kaleidoscope of musical influences broke three chord conformity.
Public Image Limited allowed Johnny Rotten to become John Lydon the artist. In Manchester, Magazine would be first to record in the wake of the Pistols' split, Mark E Smith made street poetry while Ian Curtis turned punk's external rage into an existential drama. A raft of left-wing art school intellectuals like Gang of Four and Wire imbued post-punk with a sense of radical politics and conceptualism while the Pop Group infused funk with anti-capitalist sentiment in the early days of Thatcher. Flirting with fascism and violence, the working class Oi! movement tried to drag punk from the Kings Road into the heart of the East End whilst Anarcho punks Crass embarked on the most radical vision of any.
In a time beset by dread and tension perhaps the biggest paranoia was Mutually Assured Destruction essayed perfectly by Young Marble Giants' Final Day. Released in the height of Thatcherism, Ghost Town by The Specials marked a parting of the post-punk waves. Some would remain avowedly uncommercial whilst others would explore pop as a new avenue in the new decade. The song that perhaps summed up post-punk's journey was Orange Juice's Rip It Up and Start Again.
With John Lydon, Howard Devoto, Mark E Smith, Peter Hook, Jerry Dammers, The Raincoats, Wire, Jah Wobble, Mark Stewart, Edwyn Collins, Young Marble Giants and many more.
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