Saturday 7th January 2012
| What Makes a Masterpiece (1/3) |
With science now claiming to have discovered why we like the art we like, this series explores how the human brain processes art. The first episode looks at stories and film.
| Big Hits: TOTP 1964 to 1975 |
1964 saw the birth of a very British institution. Spanning over four decades, Top of the Pops has produced many classic moments in pop culture.
Digging deep within the darkest depths of the BBC's archive, this compilation offers some memorable performances from 1964 through to 1975 from the likes of the Rolling Stones, Tom Jones, Status Quo, Procol Harum, Stevie Wonder, Queen and the Kinks, and opening the vintage vaults to rare performances from Stealers Wheel, Julie Driscoll, Peter Sarstedt and the Seekers.
So sit back and witness once again where music met television.
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Sunday 8th January 2012
| The Story of Musicals (1/3) |
Three-part series which tells how the British musical became a driving force behind musical theatre around the world - a tale of titanic shows, phenomenal daring, epic rivalries, prodigious talent and gargantuan fortunes, all set in just a single square mile.
The first episode looks at how, from unpromising beginnings in the period after the Second World War, British musicals went on to reclaim the West End from American domination. Highlights include the quintessentially British show The Boyfriend and its failure to conquer Broadway, the riches to rags story of Lionel Bart and his masterpiece Oliver, and the extraordinary partnership of Sir Tim Rice and Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber from the moment they burst onto the scene with Jesus Christ Superstar until their final collaboration of the 1970s, Evita.
Featuring first-hand accounts from the great and the good of musical theatre including Lord Lloyd Webber, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, Sir Tim Rice, Elaine Paige, Ron Moody, Bill Kenwright, Sheila Hancock, Harold Prince, Robert Stigwood, Tommy Steele, Paul Nicholas and Willy Russell.
| Kiss Me Kate |
Musical comedy. Singer Fred Graham is to play the lead in a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. However, in casting both his ex-wife and his girlfriend in the other leading roles he makes the production a battlefield on-stage and off.
Songs include Wunderbar, From This Moment On, So in Love and Kiss Me Kate.
BBC4, 10.00pm - 11.00pm
Presenting the best and most eclectic performances on the BBC from the world's best known artists performing their interpretations of classic tracks from The Great American Songbook.
In chronological order this programme takes us through a myriad of BBC studio performances from Dame Shirley Bassey in 1966 performing The Lady is A Tramp to Bryan Ferry in 1974 on Twiggy's BBC primetime show performing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes to Captain Sensible on Top of the Pops in 1982 with his number 1 hit version of Happy Talk through to Kirsty MacColl singing Miss Otis Regrets in 1994 to Jamie Cullum with his version of I Get a Kick Out Of You on Parkinson in 2004 and bang up to date with Brit winner Florence from Florence and the Machine performing My Baby Just Cares for Me with Jools Holland on his Annual Hootenanny at the end of 2009.
The Great American Songbook can best be described as the music and popular songs of the famous and prolific American composers of the 1920s and onwards. Composers such as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Hoagy Carmichael to name but a few... songwriters who wrote the tunes of Broadway theatre and Hollywood musicals that earned enduring popularity before the dawning of rock n roll.
These famous songwriters have penned songs which have entered the general consciousness and which are now best described as standards - tunes which every musician and singer aspires to include in their repertoire.
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Monday 9th January 2012
Songs include Wunderbar, From This Moment On, So in Love and Kiss Me Kate.
| ... Sings the American Songbook |
Presenting the best and most eclectic performances on the BBC from the world's best known artists performing their interpretations of classic tracks from The Great American Songbook.
In chronological order this programme takes us through a myriad of BBC studio performances from Dame Shirley Bassey in 1966 performing The Lady is A Tramp to Bryan Ferry in 1974 on Twiggy's BBC primetime show performing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes to Captain Sensible on Top of the Pops in 1982 with his number 1 hit version of Happy Talk through to Kirsty MacColl singing Miss Otis Regrets in 1994 to Jamie Cullum with his version of I Get a Kick Out Of You on Parkinson in 2004 and bang up to date with Brit winner Florence from Florence and the Machine performing My Baby Just Cares for Me with Jools Holland on his Annual Hootenanny at the end of 2009.
The Great American Songbook can best be described as the music and popular songs of the famous and prolific American composers of the 1920s and onwards. Composers such as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Hoagy Carmichael to name but a few... songwriters who wrote the tunes of Broadway theatre and Hollywood musicals that earned enduring popularity before the dawning of rock n roll.
These famous songwriters have penned songs which have entered the general consciousness and which are now best described as standards - tunes which every musician and singer aspires to include in their repertoire.
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Monday 9th January 2012
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Tuesday 10th January 2012
| The Story of Musicals (2/3) |
This episode charts how British musical talent in the 1980s stormed the West End with hits like Cats, Les Miserables, Blood Brothers and Phantom of the Opera. There are first-hand accounts from the extraordinary individuals whose tenacity and creativity ensured these shows became mega-hits despite often precarious beginnings. And it reveals how the titantic shows of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh became global phenomena, securing Britain's reputation as the powerhouse of musical theatre.
With contributions from Lord Lloyd Webber, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, Sir Tim Rice, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Stephen Fry, Trevor Nunn, Sir Cliff Richard, Elaine Paige, Gillian Lyne, Paul Nicholas, Bonnie Langford, Richard Stilgoe, John Caird, John Napier, Bill Kenwright, Willy Russell, Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg, Anthony Pye-Jeary, Arlene Phillips, Charles Hart, Don Black, Harold Prince and Michael Ball.
| Arena: Dickens on Film |
From the magical films of the silent era to the celebrated work of director David Lean and high definition television, this documentary revisits films and interviews from the archive to answer the question of why Dickens's novels have inspired so many hundreds of adaptations on screen.
This co-production with Dickens 2012 not only encapsulates the history of Dickens's time, but also of the 100 years in which his work has survived most acutely on screen. It is not only the stories, themes and characters of Dickens's writing that translate so well onto screen - Sergei Eisenstein argued that there is something essentially filmic in his unique prose style; that Dickens's rapid 'cutting' within scenes and from scene to scene coupled with his seamless mixture of the bizarrely comic with the terrifyingly profound was itself proto-cinematic.
Dickens wrote the way a camera saw before film had been invented and he remains to this day the most cinematic of writers.
| The Grudge |
Horror. An American student living in Tokyo finds work as a carer for an elderly patient with sleeping difficulties, unaware that the woman's house is cursed by the evil spirit of a murderer. Remake of the Japanese chiller Ju-on. With Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, Bill Pullman, William Mapother, and Clea DuVall.(2004)
| Human Traffic |
Adult drama starring John Simm and Lorraine Pilkington. Six youths try to escape their pointless, humdrum lives with weekends of drugs and debauchery.
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Wednesday 11th January 2012
| The Unforgettable ... Leslie Crowther |
A tribute to Leslie Crowther - best known as the presenter of hit shows Crackerjack and The Price Is Right and a household name for most of his life. He was also a gifted musician and a devoted family man. His wife and five children remember a lot of laughter and jokes at home and an obsession with cricket. With contributions from Michael Grade and Tim Rice among others, plus rare home footage of the Crowthers at home and on holiday.
| Payback |
Tough action thriller in which a man is persuaded by an old friend to take part in a heist of laundered Triad drug money. But the friend and the man's wife have carefully planned the whole caper in order to double-cross him, and leave him for dead. However, he survives and when he realises what they have done, he sets out to exact his revenge.
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Thursday 12th January 2012
| Payback Time: Tonight |
As the level of household debt rises to over five billion pounds this year, the programme looks at how people are being forced to borrow money simply to fund their ordinary day-to-day expenses. With the cost of living and the level of unemployment also increasing, getting into debt is now an even bigger problem that it used to be.
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Friday 13th January 2012
| The Lark Ascending |
Dame Diana Rigg explores the enduring popularity of The Lark Ascending by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, which was recently voted Britain's favourite piece of classical music by listeners to Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4.
Composed at a key turning point in world history, The Lark Ascending represents music for all occasions. It is used in rites of passage such as births, deaths and marriages, and is a favourite for filmmakers looking to create that quintessential English pastoral feel. Fans of the work include actor Peter Sallis, who wants a copy of The Lark Ascending to be buried with him; top violinist Tamsin Little, who has played the piece as part of the BBC Proms; and music critic Michael Kennedy, who was a personal friend of Vaughan Williams.
The programme includes a beautiful new performance of the work in the same village hall where it was heard for the first time in December 1920. The Lark Ascending is performed by 15-year-old violin prodigy Julia Hwang and pianist Charles Matthews using the original arrangement for violin and piano.
| The Passions of Vaughan Williams |
Fifty years after his death, this musical and psychological portrait of Ralph Vaughan Williams explores the passions that drove a giant of 20th century English music. It explores the enormous musical range of an energetic, red-blooded composer whose output extends well beyond the delicate pastoralism of his perhaps most famous piece, The Lark Ascending.
The film tells the story of his long marriage to his increasingly disabled wife Adeline and his long affair with the woman who eventually became his second wife, Ursula. The effect of these complicated relationships on his music is demonstrated in performances of orchestral and choral works, specially filmed at Cadogan Hall, London by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Richard Hickox and by the singers of Schola Cantorum of Oxford.
Among the contributors is the late Ursula Vaughan Williams, who was interviewed shortly before she died at the age of 96.
| REM at the BBC |
In September 2011 R.E.M., the rock band from Athens, Georgia, decided to call it a day after 31 years. This collection from the BBC archives includes performances of Pretty Persuasion from the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1984, Orange Crush on Top of the Pops in 1989 and special acoustic versions of Losing My Religion and Half a World Away on The Late Show in 1991, along with performances on Later with Jools Holland and Parkinson. Also, vocalist Michael Stipe and bassist Mike Mills reflect on the band ending
| Later ... With Jools Presents REM |
Special edition featuring rock band R.E.M. live in the studio and in conversation with Jools Holland. The band perform songs from their album Up, plus some old favourites.
