| 561 |
Frozen Planet 2 (2011) #593
DOCUMENTARY
Main
With David Attenborough, Alec Baldwin, Chadden Hunter, Ted Giffords. Focuses on life and the environment in both the Arctic and Antarctic. 2x1 hour. The Last Frontier, On Thin Ice. |
| 562 |
The Ides of March (2011) #610
FILM
Main
Directed by George Clooney. With Paul Giamatti, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ryan Gosling. An idealistic staffer for a new presidential candidate gets a crash course on dirty politics during his stint on the campaign trail. |
| 563 |
Modern Masters: Picasso (2011) #618
DOCUMENTARY
Main
60 mins. BBC. The life of Pablo Picasso is an exciting story of rebellion, riches, women and great art. In this episode of a four-part series dedicated to Modern Art, journalist Alastair Sooke travels through France, Spain and the US to see some of the artist's great works and recount tales from his life story. Talking to architects, fashion experts and artists, he investigates how Picasso's influence, particularly that of his Cubist work, continues to pervade modern life today, in the shape of buildings, interior design, clothes and of course contemporary art. Tracking down former Picasso model Sylvette David to her current home in Britain, he also hears how Picasso's images of her inspired the look of screen siren Brigitte Bardot. |
| 564 |
Prom 39: Spaghetti Western Orchestra (2011) #622
MUSIC
Main
Directed by Ian Russell. With Spaghetti Western Orchestra, Charles Hazlewood, Shannon Birchall, Jess Ciampa. BBC |
| 565 |
Carmen (2011) #639
MUSIC
Main
Directed by Gary Halvorson. With Trevor Scheunemann, Barbara Frittoli, Roberto Alagna, Keith Miller. It's a familiar story: Act 1, boy meets girl, goes to jail for her. Act 2, boy is out of jail, girl rewards him with special favors. Act 3, girl is bored already, moving on. Act 4, boy kills girl for ruining his life. We've all been there. Metropolitan Opera, New York. |
| 566 |
Holst: In the Bleak Midwinter (2011) #643
DOCUMENTARY
Main
Directed by Tony Palmer. With Tony Palmer, Gustav Holst, Imogen Holst, Michael Tippett. 2 hours 20mins. BBC. The first ever full-length film about Gustav Holst, composer and revolutionary - a man who taught himself Sanskrit; lived in a street of brothels in Algiers; cycled into the Sahara Desert; allied himself during the First World War with a 'red priest' who pinned on the door of his church 'prayers at noon for the victims of Imperial Aggression'; hated the words used to his most famous tune, I Vow to Thee My Country, because it was the opposite of what he believed; and distributed a newspaper called the Socialist Worker. Holst's music - especially the Planets - owed little or nothing to anyone, least of all the English folk song tradition, but he was a great composer who died of cancer, broken and disillusioned, before he was 60. |
| 567 |
Frozen Planet (2011) #774
DOCUMENTARY
Main
With David Attenborough, Alec Baldwin, Chadden Hunter, Ted Giffords. Focuses on life and the environment in both the Arctic and Antarctic. 2x 1 hour episodes. BBC. 5/7 Winter: The story of the few extreme survivors who remain in the polar regions during winter. 6/7 The Last Frontier: What draws humans to the coldest and most hostile reaches of our planet? |
| 568 |
Robson Green and the Pitmen Painters (2011) #776
DOCUMENTARY
Main
ITV. The story of the Pitmen Painters, a group of Northumbrian miners who decided to study art appreciation in their spare time and developed into a group of untrained but powerfully expressive artists, has been documented in a book by William Feaver and a play by Lee Hall. Robson Green's particular interest in the story stems from the fact that he's a miner's son, brought up in Dudley, a few miles south of the pitmen's hometown of Ashington. |
| 569 |
Faster Than the Speed of Light? (2011) #804
DOCUMENTARY
Main
1 hour. BBC. In September 2011, an international group of scientists has made an astonishing claim - they have detected particles that seemed to travel faster than the speed of light. It was a claim that contradicted more than a hundred years of scientific orthodoxy. Suddenly there was talk of all kinds of bizarre concepts, from time travel to parallel universes. So what is going on? Has Einstein's famous theory of relativity finally met its match? Will we one day be able to travel into the past or even into another universe? In this film, Professor Marcus du Sautoy explores one of the most dramatic scientific announcements for a generation. In clear, simple language he tells the story of the science we thought we knew, how it is being challenged, and why it matters. |
| 570 |
The Conspiracy Files: 9/11 Ten Years On (2011) #806
DOCUMENTARY
Main
A decade after the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, the Conspiracy Files looks at why some people still question what really happened on 9/11. Conspiracy theories continue to evolve and now question every aspect of the official account. Why, they ask, was the hole in the Pentagon so small? Why did the World Trade Centre buildings collapse as if being demolished by explosives? Why did one skyscraper fall when it was never hit by a plane? And why was the world's greatest military power so unprepared and so slow to react when warnings had been received? The death of Osama Bin Laden might have been expected to put an end to the conspiracy theories, but the failure to release any pictures of Bin Laden's death and the hasty disposal of his body in the Arabian Sea, has instead given these theories a new burst of life. Featuring key witnesses, CIA and FBI interviewees and leading sceptics, the programme analyses the evidence and looks at what makes conspiracy theories so persistent and so powerful. |
| 571 |
Who Do You Think You Are? Emilia Fox (2011) #807
DOCUMENTARY
Main
1 hour. BBC. Celebrities trace their family trees to reveal the lives of their ancestors. Emilia Fox, who was heavily pregnant while filming this episode, was intrigued to find out what family traits her baby might inherit. Part of the Fox theatrical dynasty, Emilia wants to find out just how far back the family's acting roots go. Emilia also discovers, in an extraordinary tale of rags to riches, that her great-great-grandfather Samson Fox made one of the most important inventions of the 19th century. Born into an impoverished family, Samson started work in a Leeds textile mill when he was just eight years old, but ended up becoming one of the richest men in Victorian Britain. As Emilia investigates further, she discovers how her illustrious ancestor was later touched by scandal. |
| 572 |
Page Eight (2011) #808
FILM
Main
Directed by David Hare. With Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz, Tom Hughes, Michael Gambon. Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) is a long-serving MI5 officer. His boss and best friend Benedict Baron (Michael Gambon) dies suddenly, leaving behind him an inexplicable file, threatening the stability of the organization. Meanwhile, a seemingly chance encounter with Johnny's striking next-door neighbor and political activist Nancy Pierpan (Rachel Weisz) seems too good to be true. Johnny is forced ... First in the Worricker Trilogy |
| 573 |
Imagine: The Man Who Forgot How to Read (2011) #816
DOCUMENTARY
Main
1 hour. BBC. Presenter Alan Yentob meets clinical neurologist and author Dr Oliver Sacks to investigate the myriad ways we experience the visual world and the strange things that can happen when our mind fails to understand what our eyes see. In the course of this investigation, Yentob tells the life story of Dr Oliver Sacks, the man who would become one of the world's most famous scientists. Alan delves into this world by going to meet several of the case studies from Sacks latest book, The Mind's Eye. He meets Stereo Sue, neurobiologist Sue Barry, who always saw the world as a flat 2D image until she suddenly acquired stereoscopic 3D vision in her late forties; Canadian crime writer Howard Engel, the man who forgot how to read, who remarkably continues to write despite a stroke that destroyed his reading ability; Chuck Close, the renowned portrait artist, who cannot recognise or remember faces and Danny Delcambre, an extraordinary and spirited man who, although having a condition which means he was born deaf and is gradually going blind, lives life to the full and uses close-up photography to record the world around him. Often overlapping with these case studies is Sacks' own story. Here, doctor and patient combine as he talks about his childhood, his own struggle with face blindness, and the loss he felt when eye cancer recently destroyed his 3D vision. |
| 574 |
This Green and Pleasant Land: The Story of British Landscape Painting (2011) #823
DOCUMENTARY
Main
90 mins. BBC. 400 years of art history in 90 minutes? This film takes an eclectic group of people from all walks of life, including artists, critics and academics, out into the countryside to take a look at how we have depicted our landscape in art, discovering how the genre carried British painting to its highest eminence and won a place in the nation's heart. From Flemish beginnings in the court of Charles I to the digital thumbstrokes of David Hockney's iPad, the paintings reveal as much about the nation's past as they do the patrons and artists who created them. Famous names sit alongside lesser-known works, covering everything from the refined sensibilities of 18th-century Classicism to the abstract forms of the war-torn 20th century with a bit of love, loss, rivalry and rioting thrown in. Contributions come from a cast as diverse as the works themselves, including filmmaker Nic Roeg, historian Dan Snow and novelist Will Self, who offer a refreshingly wide range of perspectives on a genre of art which we have made very much our own. |
| 575 |
Royal Wedding: William and Kate (2011) #824
DOCUMENTARY
Main
Prince William and Kate Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge, have been married at Westminster Abbey in London. Around a million people lined the streets of London to catch a glimpse of the couple and hundreds of millions of people were estimated to watch the proceedings worldwide on television. The prince wore the red tunic of an Irish Guards colonel and the Duchess wore a dress designed by Sarah Burton. |
| 576 |
Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2011) #827
DOCUMENTARY
Main
Auto generated, animated, slide show of stills taken on 14th April 2011 |
| 577 |
National Theatre Live: Frankenstein (2011) #1261
FILM
Main
Directed by Danny Boyle. With Jonny Lee Miller, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andreea Paduraru, Ella Smith. Created by Victor Frankenstein, the one known only as the creature sets out to discover the world and the meaning of life. |
| 578 |
Gershwin's Summertime (2011) #1303
DOCUMENTARY
Main
1 hour. BBC. The song "Summertime" was written by George Gershwin for the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. The lyrics are by DuBose Heyward and although not thought to be directly involved, Ira Gershwin gets an official credit. The song soon developed a life of it's own beyond the original opera and has been recorded and adapted into many different styles of music from jazz to opera, rock to reggae, soul to samba. It has been recorded and performed in many different languages around the world and remains one of the most famous and best loved songs ever written. This documentary looks at its history, how it came to be created, and its subsequent history as it traveled through time and around the world. "Summertime" is the most covered song on the planet. At least 25,000 versions of it exist. |
| 579 |
Code-Breakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes (2011) #1316
DOCUMENTARY
Main
1 hour. BBC. Documentary that reveals the secret story behind one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II, a feat that gave birth to the digital age. In 1943, a 24-year-old maths student and a GPO engineer combined to hack into Hitler's personal super-code machine - not Enigma but an even tougher system, which he called his 'secrets writer'. Their break turned the Battle of Kursk, powered the D-day landings and orchestrated the end of the conflict in Europe. But it was also to be used during the Cold War - which meant both men's achievements were hushed up and never officially recognised. |
| 580 |
The Harmony Game (2011) #1389
FILM
Main
The Harmony Game: Directed by Jennifer Lebeau. With Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Mort Lewis, Roy Halee. 40 years after the release of Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon, Garfunkel and the principles involved with it reflect on the making of the album |
PAGE 1
26
27
28
29
30
69
Recent...