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Lucy Worsley's Christmas Carol Odyssey (2019) #1340
DOCUMENTARY-MUSIC
Main
1 hour. BBC. In this festive treat featuring the Kingdom Choir and Hampton Court Choir, Lucy Worsley reveals that there’s much more to our best-loved carols than meets the eye. She reveals how their stories add up to a special kind of history of Christmas itself. In the ancient past, the wassail, a pagan fertility ritual, gave us door-to-door carol singing. Wassailing was also an integral part of an older midwinter festival that was adopted by Christianity when it came to Britain, and was rebranded as ‘Christmas’. Religion, however, soon turned its back on carols. They were far too frivolous for the Puritans, who wanted to ban Christmas altogether. French Catholics on the other hand didn’t mind fun and frolics, and Lucy crosses the channel to learn a French renaissance jig, written by a dancing priest in the 16th century. The tune she dances to went on to become the carol Ding Dong Merrily on High in the 19th century. In strict Protestant Britain, the carol survived outside the Church and new ones turned up in some surprising places. Lucy visits the British Library, where she discovers an 18th-century children’s book that contains a little memory game called The Twelve Days of Christmas. Christmas carols could also be politically dangerous and subversive. British Catholics were oppressed for generations after the Reformation, but one Catholic scribe, John Francis Wade, hid a coded message of support for a Jacobite rebellion in the carol O Come All Ye Faithful. Eventually, the Church of England couldn’t resist the power of the carol, and finally opened its doors to all of them, thanks to a chance pairing of words and music in Hark the Herald Angels Sing, performed in the programme by the renowned gospel ensemble, The Kingdom Choir. In the 20th century, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s passion for English folk music took him to the villages of Surrey. Here, Lucy meets a folk singer who tells the tale of an elderly farm labourer, Henry Garman, who sang a tune for Vaughan Williams, which became O Little Town of Bethlehem. Finally, in the snowy Austrian Alps, Lucy discovers the simple story of a young parish priest with a poem in search of a tune. When he found one, the result was Silent Night. During the First World War, this simple carol would become a hymn for peace during the famous Christmas truce of 1914. Silent Night also reminds us that carols are, and have always been, ‘popular music’, music for the people, fulfilling an enduring need to celebrate and sing together at Christmas. |
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Angels & Demons (2009) #176
FILM
Main
Directed by Ron Howard. With Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgård. Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon works to solve a murder and prevent a terrorist act against the Vatican. |
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The Ascent of Man (1973) #1490
DOCUMENTARY
Special
The Ascent of Man is a 13-part British documentary television series produced by the BBC and Time-Life Films first broadcast in 1973. It was written and presented by British mathematician and historian of science Jacob Bronowski, who also authored a book adaptation. Intended as a series of "personal view" documentaries in the manner of Kenneth Clark's 1969 series Civilisation, the series received acclaim for Bronowski's highly informed but eloquently simple analysis, his long, elegant monologues, and its extensive location shoots. The programme began broadcasting on BBC2 at 9 pm on Saturday, 5 May 1973 and was released in the US 7 January 1975. 01 Lower than the Angels - Evolution of humans from proto-ape to the modern form 400,000 years ago. 02 The Harvest of the Seasons - Early human migration, agriculture and the first settlements, and war. 03 The Grain in the Stone - Tools, and the development of architecture and sculpture. 04 The Hidden Structure - Fire, metals and alchemy. 05 Music of the Spheres - The language of numbers and mathematics. 06 The Starry Messenger - Galileo's universe - and the implications of his trial on the shift to "northern" science. 07 The Majestic Clockwork - Explores Newton and Einstein's laws. 08 The Drive for Power - The Industrial Revolution and the effect on everyday life. 09 The Ladder of Creation - Darwin and Wallace's ideas on the origin of species. 10 World within World - The story of the periodic table - and of the atom. 11 Knowledge or Certainty - Physics and the clash of the pursuit of absolute vs. imperfect knowledge, and the misgivings of the scientists realising the terrible outcome of the conflict. Auschwitz. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 12 Generation upon Generation - The joys of life, sex and genetics and the dark side of cloning. 13 The Long Childhood - Bronowski's treatise on the commitment of humanity. |