Saturday 16th February 2013
| Swinging into the Blitz: a Culture Show Special |
When a handful of musical immigrants from the Caribbean islands came to Britain in the 1920s and 30s, it was the beginning of both musical and political change. Leslie Thompson, an innovative musician and trumpeter, and Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson, a brilliant dancer and charismatic band leader, pooled their talents to start the first black British swing band.
Clemency Burton-Hill reveals the untold story of the black British swing musicians of the 1930s, whose meteoric rise to fame on London's high society dance floors was cut short by unexpected tragedy at the height of the Blitz.
| Howard Goodall's Story of Music (4/6) |
In the fourth part, composer Howard Goodall examines the music of the middle to late 19th century, in which a craze for operas and music that dealt with death and destiny swept Europe. Inspired by Berlioz and his Symphonie Fantastique, music written about witches, ghouls, trolls and hellish torment became the norm. Even Italian opera succumbed to the death and destiny obsession, with Verdi's La Traviata. The tragic death of its heroine was also a comment on the hypocrisies of the wider society.
The composer who was the most influential figure of the mid 19th century was the cosmopolitan Hungarian-born Franz Liszt. Little wonder that he wrote pieces about two of the mythical figures that obsessed the composers of the period - Faust, the superior, brooding intellectual who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for esoteric knowledge and earthly pleasures, and Prometheus, who is punished for all eternity by Zeus for giving mankind the gift of fire. The age of the Superman was around the corner. And the image of the composer as a moody, misunderstood genius, apart from other men, was cemented in the pulic imagination.
One of Liszt's many innovations was music that seemingly 'sampled' the folk music of his native land. In the second half of the 19th century, this 'Ethnic Heritage' musical movement gathered pace. But what we hear, in Liszt, Brahms and Dvorak, is rarely genuine peasant forms. Although in Dvorak's New World Symphony, we do seem to hear a borrowed American-Indian tune, which caused great controversy. This was music for a middle class audience, with exotic flavourings.
The composer Liszt most influenced, though, not least in terms of musical nationalism, was his own son in law, Richard Wagner. Wagner reinvented opera, and introduced into it darker, more unstable harmonies, that were to change the music that followed him - derived, ultimately, from experiments already made by Liszt. Wagner's operas are a towering achievement. But they had a dark side. Wagner's operas - and his political writings - were later to act as an inspiration for Hitler. The swirling, nationalistic, romantic, nihilistic undercurrents of the music of this period is still troubling today.
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Sunday 17th February 2013
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Monday 18th February 2013
| Britain on Film |
This episode focuses on films examining the changing shape of the British Empire. At a time when many of its former colonies were achieving independence, Look at Life sent its film crews as far afield as Aden, Malaysia and Ascension Island to record the efforts made by Britain to manage the transition from imperial rule to the leadership of an emerging Commonwealth.
| Penguins - Spy in the Huddle (2/3) |
Watched by spycams, chicks are hatching out all over. Male emperors form an identity parade before handing over their newborns to the returning females. The mothers shuffle into a huddle to protect their offspring from a blizzard. Outside, one tiny chick doesn't make it and lies frozen by his mother. Chickcam films the young ones walking on their mothers' feet and taking their own first unsteady steps. Females without young try to kidnap the new arrivals and giant petrels force the chicks to huddle for protection.
On the Falklands, rockhopper chicks meet some unruly neighbours - king cormorants. Predatory vultures are seen off by a penguin army. Caracara birds grab an eggcam and film the aerial shots of the colony! Parents take a rock shower and even 'chimney climb' to their own private spa. The chicks face more predators and bereaved parents plan a chicknap.
In Peru, Humboldt chicks emerge into the desert. The adults leave their burrow plastered in mud and needing a bath. They're joined in the waves by Humboltcam and boisterous fur seals. Home alone, the chicks shoot gulls with projectile poo and the colony faces a huge cormorant invasion.
The chicks are learning to become adult penguins.
| Her Majesty's Prison - Aylesbury (1/2) |
Observational documentary series filmed over five months in the UK's most notorious young offenders institution. HMP Aylesbury houses some of the most dangerous criminals in Britain, including murderers, rapists, violent gang members and paedophiles. One in five of the inmates is serving a life or indeterminate sentence, but what makes this prison exceptional and disturbing is that the oldest among them is just 21. London gangs are dominant here, which leaves young men from other parts of the country feeling isolated and vulnerable. Many have to be segregated for their own protection, while harder cases can expect to end up in an even more secure 'prison within the prison'. In the first episode, there are shocking scenes as a group of newly-arrived northerners join forces and take another prisoner hostage, in a bid to negotiate a 'ship out' closer to home.
| Storyville: Google and the World Brain |
Storyville: Documentary which tells the story of the most ambitious project ever conceived on the internet and the people who tried to stop it. In 1937 HG Wells predicted the creation of the 'world brain', a giant global library that contained all human knowledge which would lead to a new form of higher intelligence. 70 years later the realisation of that dream was under way, as Google scanned millions of books for its Google Books website. However, over half those books were still in copyright and authors across the world launched a campaign to stop them, climaxing in a New York courtroom in 2011.
This is a film about the dreams, dilemmas and dangers of the internet, set in spectacular locations in China, USA, Europe and Latin America.
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Tuesday 19th February 2013
| The Railway: Keeping Britain on Track (2/6) |
Documentary following the staff, passengers and police officers on the railways in and around Leeds during summer. This is the most challenging season for staff, when binge drinkers, cable thieves and trespassers all threaten to delay the trains.
For driver Jason, driving the trains on the 'Real Ale Trail', a pub crawl by train, is the most dreaded shift of the week as drunken party-goers fill his carriages and begin to stumble across the tracks to catch their trains but the real- alers think of it all as harmless fun.
Elsewhere, when a teenager is killed after trespassing on the track, British Transport Police officer Craig has the difficult task of breaking the news to the boy's mother.
To add to the challenges for the staff running the trains in and out of Leeds, it is the wettest summer in a century and flooding brings the network to a standstill. With costly fines for every minute of delay, just one day of flooding costs the industry over a million pounds and ruins thousands of passengers' days.
| The Sound and the Fury: a Century of British Music (2/3) |
The second episode looks at how the freewheeling modernism that had shocked, scandalised and titillated audiences in the first two decades of the 20th century comes under state control. Initially, many practitioners thought the totalitarian regimes would be good for music and the arts. What followed in Germany was a ban on music written by Jews, African-Americans and communists, while in the Soviet Union there was a prohibition on music the workers were unable to hum. In the USA, many composers voluntarily embraced music for the masses.
After the cataclysm of the 1940s, a new generation of 20-something composers - Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Nono, Ligeti - turned their back on what they saw as the discredited music of the past and decided to try and reinvent it from scratch. Or, at least, from serialism, which became, as the 1950s wore on, as much of a straitjacket as the strictures of totalitarianism had been before. But from this period of avant-garde experimentation, which many listeners found baffling and even terrifying, came some of the most influential and radical musical innovations of the century.
The story is told by a musical cast list including Pierre Boulez, Michael Tilson-Thomas, Peter Maxwell-Davies, Harrison Birtwistle and John Adams.
Storyville: The Pirate Bay
BBC 4, 10.00pm - 11.10pm
Storyville: Documentary telling the story of The Pirate Bay, the world's largest file sharing site which facilitates downloading of copyrighted material. The film follows the three Swedish founders of The Pirate Bay through their trial after they are taken to court by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, accused of breaking copyright law. Seeing themselves as technicians whose aim is to run the world's largest web platform, in scenes bordering on the absurdly comedic they claim that their actions are about freedom and not money. The closer the film gets to them, it becomes increasingly clear that they are rather unworldly nerds, whose social skills and ability to comprehend the analogue world, and each other, are somewhat limited.
| The Fried Chicken Shop: Life in a Day |
Exploring the phenomenal rise in public affection for fried chicken, this Cutting Edge film offers an intriguing insight into contemporary London life through a busy chicken shop.
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Wednesday 20th February 2013
| The Culture Show |
Now in their seventh year and bigger and better than ever, the Kermode Awards are the antidote to the Oscars - the awards to watch for real movie buffs. In a low-fi awards ceremony that has become a Culture Show tradition, film critic Mark Kermode hands out his coveted statuettes to his pick of the best of movie making talent who have been shamefully ignored by the Academy Awards.
He talks to some of the film-makers and actors who deserve to be celebrated for their achievements in the last year and welcomes one lucky director into the Kermode Fellowship. Featuring Sam Mendes, A Royal Affair star Mads Mikkelsen and newcomer Alicia Vikander.
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Thursday 21st February 2013
| Britain's Secret Shoppers (2/5) |
Justin helps two label-loving ladies haggle money off an impressive frock while some London cabbies try to bag a hi fi bargain. And Justin goes undercover at a secondhand car dealership.
| The Holocaust and My Father: Six Million and One |
'My siblings refused to open my father's memoir after his death', recalls filmmaker David Fisher. 'I opened it, uncovering his demons'. Fisher's father Joseph, a Hungarian Jew, was interned in the Gusen and Gunskirchen concentration camps in Austria during the Second World War. His memoir detailed the horrendous ordeal that he survived and prompted David, dragging his reluctant siblings along with him, to re-trace their father's footsteps. This resulting film is a bittersweet account of their journey into their father's past.
| Walking Wounded: Return to the Frontline |
British humanitarian photographer Giles Duley became a triple amputee after stepping on an IED in Afghanistan. This programme follows him as he returns to Afghanistan.
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Friday 22nd February 2013
Sea City (2/3)
BBC 2, 8.30pm - 9.00pm
The second in a three-part documentary series about the Port of Southampton.
The pilots who guide large ships into Southampton, assisted by the marine staff on patrol and those in the control tower, are at the heart of making the port work smoothly. They are challenged by the danger of ships going aground and by dealing with leisure craft which frequently get in the way of the safest route into Southampton.
Plus the work involved in turnaround day for a cruise ship, and a family on board spring a birthday surprise for dad.
The Swing Thing
BBC 4, 9.00pm - 10.30pm
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.
