Saturday 23rd March 2013
| Britain's Natural World |
The River Wye runs through some of Britain's most beautiful and varied countryside, from the mountain tops of mid Wales to the wide open spaces of the Severn Estuary. This film is a lyrical portrait of the valley through the eyes of four characters who make their living from the land: a cider maker, a salmon fisherman, a sheep farmer and a beekeeper. It might seem idyllic, but when you live this close to nature a change in the weather can make all the difference between success and failure.
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Sunday 24th March 2013
| Toughest Place to Be… a Firefighter |
Firefighter Neil Fairhall is leaving his fire station in Hayward's Heath and heading to the Amazon to fight some of the biggest forest fires in the world. While a lot of a British firefighters' time is spent attending small fires and false alarms, during the dry season in Mato Grosso state, the Jatoba Fire Brigade can work for four days at a time trying to save the forest from fire.
As Neil trains and works with fire chief Edimar Dos Santos Abreu and his crew, he learns that the blazes are often started deliberately in order to clear the forest for illegal agriculture and that this now represents the single biggest threat to the Amazon. It is tough and brutal work as a team of just five men work across an area the size of England in a seemingly hopeless battle. But now they are enlisting the help of the local indigenous people whose way of life is threatened by the encroaching fires and Neil flies to the heart of the jungle to help train local warriors in firefighting techniques.
| Perspectives |
Actor Warwick Davis explores the miraculous survival story of the Ovitz family - ten Jewish brothers and sisters from Romania, seven of whom were born with dwarfism. Their musical group The Lilliput Troupe toured Eastern Europe during the 1930s and 1940s, managing to elude Nazi persecution of Jews until 1944 when they were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The family underwent horrific experiments but lived to see the liberation of Auschwitz, spending several months returning to their home on foot. Warwick heads to the small Transylvania village where the five sisters and two brothers were born, their incredible yet poignant story prompting him to reflect on his own experiences as a dwarf actor and entertainer.
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Monday 25th March 2013
| Boris Johnson: the Irresistable Rise |
Boris Johnson is the biggest star in British politics. Nobody connects to the public like Boris, some even see him as a future Prime Minister.
So what really makes him tick and is he a serious contender for the top job?
With unprecedented access to Johnson himself, candid interviews and previously unseen archive, Michael Cockerell unlocks the secrets of the real Boris Johnson.
| John Portman: a Life of Building |
Film about the architect John Portman, capturing his approach in an intimate portrait that, by turn, assesses and appreciates his work, using dramatic time-lapse footage to show off his buildings at their best. Once a maverick who was nearly run out of the American Institute of Architects, Portman is now recognized as one of the most innovative and imitated architects ever. Over 45 years, his iconic urban statements and eye-popping interiors have risen in 60 cities on four continents to redefine cityscapes in America and skylines in China and the rest of Asia.
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Tuesday 26th March 2013
| Keeping Britain Alive: the NHS in a Day (1/8) |
The first of a landmark eight-part series, filmed on a single day in the NHS. 100 camera crews filming across the country capture the extraordinary breadth of demands placed on the country's biggest institution on just one day at a critical time in its history. On this day, 1,300 of us will die, 2,000 will be born and one and a half million of us will be treated.
In this first episode alone, this groundbreaking portrait of our national health service moves across the country revealing how the NHS copes with the growing demands of obesity, old age and cancer amongst others.
While Matron Liz deals with 130 patients through her doors in a Clinical Decision Unit in Birmingham, patient Lynn's weight-loss surgery in Chichester is interrupted by a devastating discovery. Further north in Leeds, stroke doctors use a revolutionary treatment to save the speech and movement of 64-year-old Graham.
'Keeping Britain Alive: The NHS in a Day' provokes profound questions about what the NHS does for us now and what we expect of it in the future.
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Wednesday 27th March 2013
| Danny Boyle: Man of Wonder - a Culture Show Special |
Oscar winning director Danny Boyle talks to Mark Kermode about his new film Trance, London 2012's afterglow and the highs and lows of an extraordinary film-making career.
As an explosive visual stylist with an enduring punk attitude, Danny Boyle has reinvented British cinema several times over, proving we can do populist, anarchic, violent and disturbing as well as American cinema. From epochal moments like Trainspotting to low-budget horror 28 Days Later and the brutal romance of Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle inhabits a uniquely kinetic style that has a poetic and surreal side too. All of these qualities were on spectacular display at last summer's Olympic opening ceremony, a creative triumph that brought Danny's name to a much wider audience.
In this programme, Danny gives Mark the inside story on his wildly diverse films and also reveals how his working class, left-wing upbringing helped shape his vision for London 2012.
| Barry McGuigan: Sports Life Stories |
Eight-part series in which sporting legends speak candidly about their careers, giving a fascinating insight into the mindset required to reach the very top of their game. This episode features a true legend of boxing - former world featherweight champion in the 1980s Barry McGuigan. The Irish boxer talks frankly about the highs and the lows he experienced in his journey to become the best in the world. Arguably McGuigan did something during the troubles in Ireland that the politicians could not achieve. In those brief moments when he fought in the ring he united a nation in conflict.
| Are You Having a Laugh? Comedy and Christianity |
From Life of Brian to Rev, our country holds a strong tradition of Christian based comedy. Meanwhile, over on the stand-up circuit, comedians from Bill Hicks to Ricky Gervais have helped to establish Christianity as a favourite subject for atheists. To mark Holy Week, Ann Widdecombe looks at some of our favourite comedies to see why Christianity is such ripe material for comedy.
Comedians and commentators - including Marcus Brigstocke and Monty Python's Terry Jones - join Ann to help shed light on what comedy can reveal about how we view this country's major religion. Has there has been a shift to more offensive forms of comedy in recent years? Is there a line that should not be crossed? Does Ann have a point when she claims her faith is subject to more mockery than other faiths? Ann's views are challenged but she challenges back with some surprising results.
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Thursday 28th March 2013
Panorama: The Great Savings Wipe Out
BBC News Channel, 4.30am - 5.00am
Panorama investigates a series of financial scandals which have put at risk the life savings of tens of thousands of people.
A twice-bankrupt, former double glazing salesman from Essex has collected an estimated quarter of a billion pounds from investors, which is now at risk. In one of Britain's biggest ever pension scandals, he promised to build luxury rental homes in the Caribbean, some on the island of St Vincent, where the film Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed. Wimbledon tennis champion Pat Cash and golfing legend Gary Player helped promote the property scheme. However, reporter Paul Kenyon finds most of the planned properties have yet to be built and there are disputes over planning permission and land ownership.
A worrying number of savings scandals are coming to light as more than a million people chose to look after their own pension savings through Self-Invested Personal Pension schemes. In a second SIPP case a respected finance house failed to raise the alarm to investors before £100m went missing after clear warnings to the financial regulator from a whistle blower.
| Kids With Tourettes: in Their Own Words |
Tourette's Syndrome affects one in a hundred children, most of them boys. These are the stories, in their own words, of three boys - Connor, Marco and Callum - who are living with the condition. This documentary follows them through six months of treatment at Great Ormond Street Hospital as they are taught strategies to suppress their tics, individually and in a group. Along the way they form friendships, get on with family life, and discuss the challenges, as well as the more humorous aspects, of living with the condition.
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Friday 29th March 2013
| Nile Rogers: the Hitmaker |
Nile Rodgers has sold over 100 million records. As the co-founder, songwriter, producer and guitarist of Chic he helped define the sound of the '70s, as disco took the world by storm. Nile and musical partner Bernard Edwards captured the essence of New York's iconic Studio 54 creating hits like Dance Dance Dance, Le Freak and Good Times for Chic and We Are Family and Lost In Music for struggling vocal group Sister Sledge. But the music that had made Chic would also break them, thanks to the 'Disco Sucks' backlash. What could have been the end for Nile Rodgers would actually be a new beginning as a producer, helping create some of the biggest hits of the '80s for the likes of Diana Ross, David Bowie, Madonna and Duran Duran.
In this profile documentary, the ever-charismatic Rogers contributes an engaging and often frank interview to tell the tale of how, born to Beatnik, heroin-addict parents in New York, he picked up a guitar as a teenager and embarked on a journey to learn his craft as a musician, before becoming one of Disco's most successful artists.
In the '70s and '80s he lived the party lifestyle thanks to his success with Chic and as one of the music industry's hottest producers. Drugs and alcohol would become part of everyday life for Nile, contributing in part to the break up of Chic in the early '80s. The band would reform in the mid '90s, but their return was quickly marked by tragedy with the death of Nile's long-time friend and musical partner, Bernard Edwards in 1996.
Then in 2010 Nile was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of prostate cancer, which last year he announced he had beaten. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, Nile's talent and ambition remains undimmed, deservedly earning himself the title of hardest-working man in pop, with Chic's seemingly inexhaustible live performance schedule.
Nile Rogers: The Hitmaker recounts a captivating and moving story of a man who has created some of the most sparkling and ebullient pop music ever recorded.
Contributors include: Nile Rodgers' fellow Chic members, singers Norma Jean, Alfa Anderson and Fonzi Thornton and keyboard player Rob Sabino, as well as recording engineers Bob Clearmountain and Robert Drake.
Other artists Nile has worked with talk passionately about his talents, including Sister Sledge's Kathy Sledge; Bryan Ferry; Steve Winwood; Johnny Marr; La Roux's Elly Jackson; Valerie Simpson; Debbie Harry and Chris Stein from Blondie and Duran Duran's John Taylor.
Britain: My New Home (2/3)
More4, 9.00pm - 10.00pm
This new episode of the long-running series speaks to teens Imran, Altynay and Marshal about their second and third years in Britain, as it explores what it's like to start a new life here.
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