Saturday 10th November 2012
| The Golden Rules of TV (3/6) |
Comedian Robert Webb reveals more of TV's best kept secrets. This week we take a look at Noel Edmonds and his mysterious red boxes, Sir Trevor McDonald highlights the risky role of royal reporters, and Sinitta has some tips on how to survive in the jungle.
| Paviopetri: the City Beneath the Waves |
Just off the southern coast of mainland Greece lies the oldest submerged city in the world. It thrived for 2,000 years during the time that saw the birth of western civilisation.
An international team of experts is using cutting-edge technology to prise age-old secrets from the complex of streets and stone buildings that lie less than five metres below the surface of the ocean. State-of-the-art CGI helps to raise the city from the seabed, revealing for the first time in 3,500 years how Pavlopetri would once have looked and operated.
Underwater archaeologist Dr Jon Henderson is leading the project in collaboration with Nic Flemming, the man whose hunch led to the discovery of Pavlopetri in 1967, and a team from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. Working alongside the archaeologists are a team from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics.
The teams scour the ocean floor, looking for artefacts. The site is littered with thousands of fragments, each providing valuable clues about the everyday lives of the people of Pavlopetri. From the buildings to the trade goods to the everyday tableware, each artefact provides a window into a forgotten world.
Together these precious relics provide us with a window to a time when when Pavlopetri would have been at its height, showing us what life was like in this distant age and revealing how this city marks the start of western civilisation.
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Sunday 11th November 2012
| How Britain Worked (4/6) |
Guy Martin's project is the first piston engine ever built - The Newcomen Beam Engine - which the team set out to return to full working order at the Black Country museum.
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Monday 12th November 2012
| Chinese Murder Mystery |
...Channel 4 Dispatches Special: An examination in to the death of Neil Percival Heywood which sheds new light on his relationship with one of China's most powerful families.
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Tuesday 13th November 2012
| Britain on Film (2/10) |
In 1959 Britain's biggest cinema company, the Rank Organisation, decided to replace its newsreels with a series of short, quirky, topical documentaries that examined all aspects of life in Britain. For the next ten years, Look at Life chronicled - on high-grade 35mm colour film - the changing face of British society, industry and culture. Britain on Film draws upon the 500 films in this unique archive to offer illuminating and often surprising insights into what became a pivotal decade in modern British history.
This episode looks at the films that recorded one of the great boom industries of the 1960s. Having left behind the austerity of the immediate post-war period, Britain's increasingly affluent population took full advantage of the new leisure opportunities that made affordable newly-emerging recreational activities at home - as well as exciting holiday adventures abroad.
| Chateau Chunder: When Australian Wine Changed the World |
It's the 1970s and Australian wine is a joke - not for drinking, as Monty Python put it, but for 'laying down and avoiding'. The idea that a wine made Down Under could ever challenge the august products of Burgundy or Tuscany has wine buffs and snobby sommeliers sniggering into their tasting spoons. But little more than 40 years later, Australian winemaking is leading the world. London merchants sell more wine from Australia than from any other country, while the chastened French wine industry reluctantly take note of how modern winemaking - and wine marketing - is really done.
Chateau Chunder is both a social history of wine and wine drinking and an in-depth examination of how a small group of enterprising Australian winemakers took on the world and won, changing the way that wine is made and marketed.
With humour and insight, this documentary features winemakers, marketers, merchants, critics and drinkers including Bruce Tyrrell, James Halliday, Max Allen (Australian wine critics), Chris Hancock (Rosemount), Sir Les Patterson (Cultural Attaché to Australia, a comical creation of Barry Humphries), Robert Parker (US wine critic), Oz Clarke and Jancis Robinson (UK wine critics).
The starting point is the famous Python sketch - ''This is a bottle with a message, and the message is 'beware'. This is not a wine for drinking, this is a wine for laying down and avoiding''. And it was true. The idea that Australia could be a world class wine-making nation was a joke.
The documentary offers insightful detail on the nuts and bolts of the business and the way the Australians realised that the mid-price mass market needed labels that people could understand, good value, consistent quality (never the French way) and, most of all, some great branding. They pioneered the idea of selling wine by grape variety and colourful labels (Barramundi, Kanga Rouge, Wallaby White etc) rather than by the ancient and baffling classification systems of Europe. Cunningly, they also invented blind-tasting - wrapping French and Australian wines in brown paper bags, so the wines could be tasted without prejudice.
| The Mind Reader: Between Life and Death |
In a world exclusive, Panorama follows a group of severely brain injured patients and reveals the revolutionary efforts made to help them communicate with their families and the outside world.
Never before filmed, this Panorama Special spent more than a year with a group of vegetative patients in Britain and Canada.
They witness the moment when a patient regarded as vegetative for more than a decade is able to answer a series of questions whilst inside a brain scanner.
The findings have profound implications for the patients and their families, as well as ethical consequences for scientists and medical staff.
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Wednesday 14th November 2012
| SuperScrimpers: Winter Survival Tips |
Mrs Moneypenny offers money-saving ideas to live life for half the price, from cleaning to entertaining the kids, and gardening to recipes for leftovers.
| Getting On (5/6) |
A few days have passed and the stormclouds have continued to gather. Damaris has gone, Megan is angry, Den is playing games and Mrs Dethick is back on the ward.
On a positive note, Hansley has turned out to be something of a star turn and the Vag-At is going from strength to strength - at least it was, until a mix up with the oncology Christmas card competition leads to complications. A delicate situation needs careful handling, as a funny turn with the coma patient has unexpected consequences.
Back on Red Bay, there's bad news for Mrs Dethick and a bittersweet moment as Pippa again diffuses a tricky situation and still finds time to settle up with Hansley.
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Thursday 15th November 2012
| Everyday |
Michael Winterbottom's Everyday tells the story of four children separated from their father, and a wife separated from her husband. Starring John Simm and Shirley Henderson.
| The Year the Town Hall Shrank (3/3) |
Documentary series telling the story of how the city of Stoke-on-Trent struggles to cope with the impact of the largest funding cuts to local government ever imposed by central government.
The depth of the cuts forces not just the council to reconsider what they do and how they do it, but the people of Stoke to ask themselves what they expect their local authority to do for them. This is not just the story of Stoke, it is the story of us all as it goes behind the rhetoric of whether we are all in it together in this age of austerity, or whether it is right to take tough choices because we have become over-dependent on services that we can simply no longer afford.
With in-depth access to the council and its decision makers and following the human consequences of decisions taken in the town hall and Whitehall, this is a gripping and moving tale of power, competing priorities and the intimate human costs of cuts recorded over the course of a year.
It's summer 2011 and having just made the biggest budget cuts in a generation, the council is staring down the barrel once again. It has cut £36m this year and expects to slash another £20m next year. But the irony is that the council is owed £20m in unpaid council tax. With one of the worst collection rates in the country, the council leader and chief executive are under pressure to chase the debtors and perhaps bridge the funding gap.
However, this is a city with huge levels of deprivation and unemployment and getting people to pay up isn't easy. Out with a local bailiff, it gradually becomes clear that there are those that simply can't pay, but also those that won't if they can get away with it. And as council services close across the city, it begs the question - how many might have stayed open if everyone had paid their dues?
But civic responsibility doesn't end there. The Big Society is being championed by the prime minister and now it's time to see if it can work in Stoke. If services are to survive, maybe it's down to residents to run them? The country's oldest Victorian swimming pool has been closed by the council as part of the cuts. The local vicar, Father John, has formed a residents group to try and keep it open. He needs to show the council that the community has the will and the appetite to run it themselves. More than that, he needs to raise money quickly.
Everyone is fighting for a slice of an ever-diminishing cake. After a year of campaigning, Stoke's mums continue to knock on the door of the council's re-elected leader, Mohammed Pervez. They plead for him to change his mind about cuts that might devastate the city's Sure Start centres and lobby to be reprieved of 750,000 pounds worth of cuts already announced. But if he agrees, someone else is bound to lose out.
After a year of cuts in Stoke, what is the future for the city itself and what lessons are there for the rest of the country as the austerity measures continue to reshape all our relationships with local government?
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Friday 16th November 2012
| Unreported World - Dominican Republic: Baseball Dreams |
Unreported World visits the Dominican Republic, where baseball is one of the few routes out of poverty for young men. But the cost of failure at 18 years old can be devastating.
| Sound it Out |
Over the last five years an independent record shop has closed in the UK every three days. This film is documentary portrait of one of the very last still trading - a vinyl record shop in Teesside, a cultural haven in one of the most deprived areas in the UK. Filmmaker Jeanie Finlay, who grew up three miles from the shop, follows daily life in a place that is thriving against the odds, ensured of survival by the local community that keeps it alive. A distinctive, funny and intimate film about men, the North and the irreplaceable role music plays in our lives.
