Sunday Feature
| Episode | Title | First Broadcast | Repeated | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Homer's Landscapes |  | ||
| 01 | Ideas |  | ||
| 01 | Ideas - The British Version (series 2), Heartland Theory | 20090927 | Historian Tristram Hunt presents a series following the surprising journeys of ideas that first developed in Britain and then spread around the world. He traces the story of Sir Halford Mackinder, a forgotten British geographer, and his geopolitical 'Heartland Theory'. Mackinder argued that the geography of Eurasia meant that Russia and its border countries constituted a vast fortress, land-locked and impregnable - and that if this 'heartland' ever fell under the control of a single great power, it would give it the potential to dominate the world. HIs idea, first aired in 1904, was largely ignored in Britain, but in the years after the First World War, it was taken up - and twisted into a disturbing new shape - by a German geopolitician called Karl Haushofer. Haushofer was Rudolf Hess's intellectual mentor, and tutored him and Hitler while they were in prison in Munich in the 1920s. Haushofer drew on Mackinder to argue that Germany should form a grand alliance with Russia and Japan, in order to dominate the Heartland. So when news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact surprised the world in August 1939, American interest in Mackinder's theory suddenly sparked into life, and spread like wildfire. In the early 1940s, books, articles and even a Frank Capra propaganda movie - which Tristram watches with Mackinder's biographer - spelt out the Heartland idea and Haushofer's perversion of it, dubbing it the 'Nazi plan for world domination'. Finally, as it became clear that Germany would lose the war, the elderly Mackinder himself was reached in his West Country bolthole by the New York-based Foreign Affairs magazine. They invited him to give his own take on how his theory was relevant to the coming post-war world. Tristram goes to meet the current Managing Editor of the magazine, to see the letters between his predecessor and Mackinder, and how the resulting article helped to set the stage for the world after the war. Leading American foreign policy thinkers, steeped by now in Mackinder's newly-prominent analysis, began to argue that the emerging Soviet superpower needed to be contained. Tristram talks to US foreign policy analysts, including a former American Deputy National Security Advisor, who argue that Mackinder's ideas underpinned America's approach to the emerging Cold War. But is Mackinder relevant today, 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union? Tristram talks to scholars who argue that the Heartland Theory is now being rediscovered in the Heartland itself - in Russia and Central Asia. With contributions from Geoffrey Sloan, Brian Blouet, Colin Gray, Paul Coones, Nick Megoran, JD Crouch, Angela Stent, Holger Herwig, Chris Seiple, Gideon Rose, Charles Kupchan and Gerry Kearns. Tristram Hunt on how British geopolitics spread to Nazi Germany and the Cold War USA. | |
| 02 | Homer's Landscapes |  | ||
| 02 | Ideas - The British Version (series 2), The Separation Of Powers | 20091004 | Historian Tristram Hunt presents a series following the surprising journeys of ideas that first developed in Britain and then spread around the world. As a new Supreme Court opens in the UK, Tristram Hunt explores the idea behind it - the separation of powers. He examines how the doctrine was developed by the French Enlightenment thinker, Montesquieu, who observed the British constitutional system in the 18th century - comprising of a judiciary, an executive and a legislature - and saw it as a way of keeping tyranny at bay. Tristram starts his journey in Paris where an absolute monarchy during the 1720s led to a fierce underground debate about liberty. Ideas flowed between Paris and London and Montesquieu crossed the English Channel to better understand the English constitutional system and the English. One of the outcomes of this was his magnum opus The Spirit of Laws, which articulates the importance of the separation of powers to defend liberty. This idea was also central to the framing of the United States Constitution, and Tristram sees how the doctrine is embodied in the layout of Capitol Hill in Washington DC, reflecting the relationships between the Supreme Court, the Senate and the White House. Finally, Tristram returns to the new Supreme Court in London to discuss whether it is, in fact, a 300-year-old British idea returning home. Tristram Hunt explores the idea behind the new UK Supreme Court - the separation of powers | |
| 03 | Ideas |  | ||
| 03 LAST | Ideas - The British Version (series 2), The Garden City | 20091011 | Historian Tristram Hunt follows the 'garden city' as he concludes a series about surprising journeys of ideas that first developed in Britain and then spread around the world. The garden city was the utopian brain-child of a humble British clerk, Ebenezer Howard, who imagined a new kind of settlement that would fuse the best of town and country, creating not just decent living places for ordinary people, but a new social harmony. Unlike many utopian schemes, in 1903 Howard managed at least a partial realisation of his dream - at Letchworth, amid the fields of Hertfordshire. But as Tristram discovers, the idea mutated, and rapidly migrated beyond our shores. He follows Howard's influence from Letchworth, to west and north London, to suburban Paris and on to New Jersey. And he finds out how a twisted version of the Garden City model may even have had an unwitting influence on Nazi plans for occupied Poland. Finally, Tristram follows the trail back to Britain. Advocates of government-backed 'ecotowns' see them as a revival of Howard's Victorian dream of 'a peaceful path to real reform'. But can they really match Howard's achievements? With contributions from Stephen Ward, Sir Peter Hall, Mark Swenarton, Marie-Pierre de Guillaume, Jeanette Bate-Tornikian, Mervyn Miller, Louis diGeronimo and Gideon Amos. Tristram Hunt follows the surprising journey of the utopian 'garden city' idea. | |
| 07 | The Baltic States | 20011209 | `The Romantic Road: A Journey through the Literatures of Europe'. Julian Evans continues exploring the novel-writing traditions of European countries. 7: `The Baltic States'. | |
| A Day At The Proms | 19950903 | Producer: N. WILKINSON Next in series: CEAUCESCU'S COURT JESTERS Previous in series: THE QUINTESSENTIAL PAUL TORTELIER Broadcast history 03 Sep 1995 17:45-18:30 (RADIO 3) Recorded on 1995-08-12. | ||
| Conlon Nancarrow | 19960114 | Producer: D. PAPP Next in series: STATION ISLAND - Seamus Heaney Previous in series: POSTHUMOUS LIFE OF John Keats Broadcast history 14 Jan 1996 17:45-18:30 (RADIO 3) 31 Aug 1996 17:45-18:30 (RADIO 3) 16 Aug 1997 17:45-18:30 (RADIO 3) Recorded on 1996-01-05. | ||
| Paris 1900-1968: From Arcades To Barricades | 20020120 | To begin Radio 3's Paris season, Tim Marlow explores Paris's status as the capital of the arts world through seven decades. | ||
| 20020217 | A drama-documentary presented by Richard Holmes exploring the creation and impact of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. | |||
| 20020317 | Brothers Simon and Gerard McBurney travel to Drohobycz in Ukraine, home of Bruno Schulz, the Polish-Jewish writer shot in 1942, and meet some of the handful of Jews who knew him. | |||
| 20030126 | A feature on the life of philosopher Edith Stein, who was born in 1891 into a German Jewish family, died in Auschwitz in 1942 and was made a saint in 1998 by Pope John Paul II. | |||
| Prof Stuart Hall Assesses The Legacy Of Black American Sociologist, Writer And Political Activist W | 20030223 | E B Dubois (1868-1963). | ||
| 20030406 | The John Tusa Interview: Series of conversations with some of the world's greatest artistic originators. This week John meets the painter, teacher and father of Brit Art, Michael Craig-Martin. | |||
| The John Tusa Interview: Continuing His Series Of Conversations With Some Of The World's Greatest Ar | 20030504 | The John Tusa Interview: Continuing his series of conversations with some of the world's greatest artistic originators. This week he meets the architect Renzo Piano. | ||
| The John Tusa Interview: John Tusa Continues His Series Of Conversations With Some Of The World's Gr | 20030601 | The John Tusa Interview: John Tusa continues his series of conversations with some of the world's greatest artistic originators. This week he meets the sculptor Anthony Gormley. | ||
| Another Country 2. Half A World Away Award Winning Poet Owen Sheers Grew Up In Wales But Was Born In | 20030615 | Fiji in 1974. In accordance with local tradition his umbilical chord was buried under the roots of a coconut tree, a practice which is said to guarantee the person's return to the land of their birth. As he travels through Fiji's lush interior and coral-fringed coast, he finds himself following in the footsteps of another young poet who fell in love with the islands, Rupert Brooke. Evening Morning Afternoon / "Another Country 2. Half A World Away Award winning poet Owen Sheers grew up in Wales but was born in Fiji in 1974. In accordance with local tradition his umbilical chord was buried under the roots of a coconut tree, a practice which is said to guarantee the person's return to the land of their birth. As he travels through Fiji's lush interior and coral-fringed coast, he finds himself following in the footsteps of another young poet who fell in love with the islands, Rupert Brooke. Evening Morning Afternoon ". | ||
| Another Country A Series Of Four Personal Journeys 3. The Red In My Mind The English Poet Lavinia Gr | 20030622 | Another Country A series of four personal journeys 3. The Red in My Mind The English poet Lavinia Greenlaw travels to Amherst in Massachusetts, the lifelong home of the great 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson. She famously published only a handful of poems in her life and lived an increasingly reclusive existence in her bedroom in the family home. Was she mad or did she know what she was up to? Lavinia Greenlaw, who spent some time teaching writing in Amherst, revisits the town and tests her own feelings for the place, its hostilities and hemmed in quality, with those of Emily Dickinson. With contributions from poet James Lasdun, critic Helen Vendler and museum curator Betty Falsey. | ||
| 20030629 | Another Country 4. Two Cultures? Last in the series of four personal journeys. Sunetra Gupta is a Reader in Epidemiology at Oxford University; she is also a novelist. She was born in Calcutta, raised in Ethiopia and Zambia, and spoke Bengali and Amharic long before she mastered English - the language she now works and writes in. These intersections of cultures - science and the arts - and traditions - the Bengal of Tagore and the scientific prose of 'Nature' - inform her life. How does she move between these other countries of the mind and heart? | |||
| My Father's Leg The Russian Émigré Novelist And Broadcaster Zinovy Zinik Returns To Moscow To Look F | 20030713 | or his father's legs - the real left one which was torn from his father's body by a German shell in WWII and then the succession of artificial ones that he made do with in the fifty years after the war until his recent death. Crossing the border back to Russia, Zinovy Zinik crosses the borders between life and death in the shabby mortuaries and crematoria of Moscow as he goes behind the curtain to watch the pathologists, priests and ovens at work and to think about the Soviet preoccupation with limblessness, Lenin's embalmed body and the Russian way of death. | ||
| 20030720 | Baptising The Gods: Travel writer Rory Maclean searches for traces of the classical past in the orthodoxy of modern Greece. | |||
| 20030727 | Curiouser And Curiouser. Ligeti At 80: Tom Service presents a portrait of Hungarian composer György Ligeti, including a substantial recent interview with him, and contributions from close friends and collaborators including Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Heinz-Otto Peitgen. The endless twists and turns of Ligeti's musical development have encompassed Hollywood sci-fi, African rhythms, Alice in Wonderland, and chaos theory. So what is it that makes all this music sound unmistakeably his own? | |||
| 20030824 | The Real O'Byrne Arnold Bax, composer of Tintagel Knight of the Realm, Master of the King's Music. Dermot O'Byrne, hibernophile friend of revolutionaries in the 1916 Easter Rising, poet whose work was banned as seditious by the British Military Centre. Strange though it may seem these two contradictory figures were the same man. Bax, born into Victorian prosperity in South London, travelled to Ireland first in 1902, inspired by the poet WB Yeats. He was to spend large periods of his life in the country until he died half a century later. Petroc Trelawny explores Bax's Ireland, revealing the enigma of this establishment figure who felt happiest in Ireland. | |||
| 20030907 | Chile: Heart And Soul 30 years ago in Chile following the brutal coup d'etat of September 11th 1973, books and records were burnt on the streets while thousands were arrested and tortured, exiled and disappeared. Chilean culture and society was devastated. Journalist Jan Fairley was teaching in the south of the country at the time - thirty years on she returns to find a heady cocktail of sex and human rights integral to the new culture emerging as Chileans finally get to grips with their bloody past and forge a new open identity. | |||
| Peter The Great Drove Thousands To Death To Create His Dream City - St Petersburg, 'a Window Onto Eu | 20030908 | rope'. Great violence and haunting beauty have marked the metropolis ever since. On the 300th anniversary of its foundation, writer Kevin Jackson evokes the spirit of Peter's city and questions the legacy of the Tsar's enlightened despotism. With reflections from Count Nikolai Tolstoy, descendant of one of Peter the Great's ambassadors; Hermitage curator Aleksei Leporc; travel-writer Colin Thubron, and other distinguished contributors. Readers: Eleanor Bron and Roger Allam | ||
| Tropicalia The Story Of Brazil's Popular Music Revolution Of The 1960s, Which Was Played Out On Tele | 20030914 | vision talent shows against the backdrop of an oppressive military dictatorship. Tropicalia was the name taken by a small group of poets, singers and composers whose radical performances in 1968 led to the arrest and exile of their leaders Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Will Hodgkinson tracks down the various members of this cult collective, visiting the busy urban sprawl of São Paolo and the northern state of Bahia, birthplace of Veloso and Gil as well as other important Tropicalia artists such as Tom Zé and Gal Costa. | ||
| Dr Weiner's Library: Robert Mcnab Visits The Wiener Library In Central London, One Of The World's Gr | 20030928 | eat collections of materials relating to the Nazi era and the Holocaust, founded by Alfred Wiener. | ||
| 20031102 | The John Tusa Interview. John Tusa talks to Israeli-born video artist Michal Rovner. | |||
| 20031116 | Journeys In Thought 1. Wittgenstein In Ireland In the spring of 1948, Ludwig Wittgenstein abandoned his post as Chair of Philosophy at Trinity College Cambridge in search of solitude and simplicity. He was determined to finish the Philosophical Investigations - the work which would be his masterpiece and which would dominate the philosophical landscape of the twentieth century. In the first of a new series exploring turning points in the lives of great thinkers, Jonathan Rée travels to the west of Ireland in Wittgenstein's footsteps. | |||
| 20031207 | John Tusa continues his series of conversations with some of the world's greatest artistic originators. This week, he meets the veteran New York choreographer and dancer, Merce Cunningham. | |||
| The John Tusa Interview: In His Series Of Conversations With Some Of The World's Greatest Artistic O | 20040104 | The John Tusa Interview: In his series of conversations with some of the world's greatest artistic originators, John Tusa meets the Turner prize-winning sculptor, Rachel Whiteread. | ||
| Jimmy's Blues The Writer James Baldwin Was One Of The Giants Of Twentieth Century American Literatur | 20040111 | e. In many ways his essays, plays and novels explored and mirrored aspects of his own life - from growing up in the church in Harlem and fleeing segregated America for Europe to becoming one of the most articulate voices of the civil rights movement. The writer and critic Darryl Pinckney presents a portrait of James Baldwin in his own words. | ||
| 20040222 | The Day Carlos Died By Paul Heritage On July 16th 2003 Carlos Calchi was murdered. Carlos never stood a chance. In a moment Paul Heritage's life changed, as his lover was gunned down in a random act of slaughter. The tragedy is that Carlos, a talented theatre director who wanted to change lives, was at the very receiving end of those he wanted to help. This single ugly act led Paul Heritage and Kate Rowland in search of an answer. The Day Carlos Died combines elements of the murder investigation with interviews with artists, politicians and prisoners. One question dominated - does art matter when there is a war going on around you? Produced by Kate Rowland | |||
| 20040307 | The John Tusa Interview: John Tusa continues his series of conversations with some of the world's greatest artistic originators. This week, he meets Canadian film director Atom Egoyan. | |||
| 20040314 | A Portrait of Salvador Dali 100 years after his birth, Dali is still a controversial figure. Eric Shanes asks whether the artist sold out in his later career and became merely a wealthy showman. Shocking! A Portrait of Salvador Dali 100 years after his birth, Dali is still a controversial figure. Eric Shanes asks whether the artist sold out in his later career and became merely a wealthy showman. | |||
| Oscar Niemeyer: The Architect With Rio In His Eyes | 20040321 | British architect David Adjaye profiles the maverick auteur whose startling buildings have come to symbolise modern Brazil. Niemeyer's buildings are visions of the future, inspired he says by the curves of Rio and the women of Copacabana beach. | ||
| Jean-jacques Rousseau In 1766 The Swiss-born Writer Jean-jacques Rousseau Sought Refuge In England. | 20040411 | His books, considered both highly subversive, had been burnt in both France and Switzerland, and the Scottish philosopher David Hume helped Rousseau flee to Britain. But, as Jonathan Ree discovers in this series about turning points in the lives and thoughts of famous thinkers, Rousseau's time here was far from happy, and with his benefactor David Hume, there would be an almighty row. | ||
| Journeys In Thought Karl Marx In 1843, A Young Journalist Called Karl Marx Arrived In Paris. Already | 20040425 | he was becoming notorious throughout Europe as a polemicist and trouble-maker, but his economic and political ideas were still in their infancy. In Paris, Marx met radicalized artisans, and befriended Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Engels. In Journeys In Thought, Jonathan Ree goes to Paris, retracing Marx's steps. Last in the series. In Journeys In Thought, a series about turning points in the lives and thoughts of famous thinkers, Jonathan Ree travels to Basel in the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche. | ||
| John Tusa Continues His Series Of Conversations With Some Of The World's Greatest Artistic Originato | 20040502 | John Tusa continues his series of conversations with some of the world's greatest artistic originators. This week, he meets David Hockney | ||
| Jonathan Glancey Investigates Europes Largest And Most Controversial Regeneration Initiative The Tha | 20040509 | mes Gateway Project. This fast track urban development is set to transform the South East of England forever, creating a string of townships and rejuvenating industrial land on both sides of the river from the Tower of London to the sea. This feature describes the ambitions of the Thames Gateway project. It explores how such a complicated and far reaching master plan (the biggest urban intervention in Britain for decades) came into being, and answers some of the urgent questions that are being asked of it. Is the Thames Gateway a work of enlightened planning or more urban sprawl? | ||
| Persepolis Regained Persepolis Was The Spiritual Centre Of The Ancient Achaemenian Empire, Ruled By | 20040516 | the kings of kings Cyrus the Great, Darius, Xerxes and Antaxerxes. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis of the British Museum visits her homeland of Iran and Persepolis to find out why this extraordinary complex of palaces, adorned with hundreds of exquisitely carved reliefs, is so important to modern Iranians. What the Persians of old had to say to the world resonates across 2,500 years, bringing the remaining great columns and marching immortals careering into the modern consciousness. Persepolis Regained Persepolis was the spiritual centre of the ancient Achaemenian Empire, ruled by the kings of kings Cyrus the Great, Darius, Xerxes and Antaxerxes. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis of the British Museum visits her homeland of Iran and Persepolis to find out why this extraordinary complex of palaces, adorned with hundreds of exquisitely carved reliefs, is so important to modern Iranians. What the Persians of old had to say to the world resonates across 2,500 years, bringing the remaining great columns and marching immortals careering into the modern consciousness. | ||
| 20040523 | Something About Eleanor She died 800 years ago; she lived for 82 years - a life that swirled with music, poetry, intrigue and infamy. Mother of Richard the Lionheart, wife to the Kings of England and France, Eleanor of Aquitaine was the most powerful and enigmatic women of her age. She has enchanted biographers ever since yet each has warped the mirror that they have held up to her. She's been portrayed as the Queen of Courtly Love, as a murderess and even as a witch - all of this eclipsing her reputation as a politician, a diplomat and the founder of a dynasty of kings. The classical historian and author Bettany Hughes travels from Poitou to Winchester, chasing the shadows of a powerbroker, a poetess and a female icon. | |||
| 20040606 | Landscape with Figure Three days after D-Day, Keith Douglas, a tank commander in the Sherwood Rangers and probably the finest poet of World War Two, was killed by a shell burst in a field overlooking the Normandy village of St Pierre. It was death that Douglas, a veteran of the desert campaign, anticipated in poems, such as Simplify Me When I'm Dead, written even before the experience of battle. Sean Street retraces Douglas' last movements in an attempt to understand a soldier-poet 'by distance simplified'. Also taking part are the poets J C Hall, Anne Stevenson and Tim Kendall, as well as Douglas' biographer Desmond Graham, Stuart Hills of the Sherwood Rangers and archive recordings of Douglas' last girlfriend, Betty Jesse, his comrade John Bethell-Fox and the Padre who buried him. | |||
| 20040613 | On the Air Steven Connor breathes in and out and thinks about the air, that most overlooked essential of all our lives. Air is more than a universal physical necessity: the ideas of air and breath are diffused through the poetry, rituals and symbolism of all cultures. We not only live on air, we also subsist on the complex idea of air. Contributions from medical historians, classicists, air-therapists, musicians and the sound of the air itself help explore three aspects of the air: its positive associations with power; its negative associations with corruption, disease and intoxication; and the emerging idea of the air as a medium or habitat. | |||
| The John Tusa Interview: A Series Of Conversations With Some Of The World's Greatest Artistic Origin | 20041010 | The John Tusa Interview: A series of conversations with some of the world's greatest artistic originators. This week, John meets leading British potter Edmund De Waal. | ||
| The John Tusa Interview: John Tusa Continues His Series Of Conversations With Some Of The World's Gr | 20041107 | The John Tusa Interview: John Tusa continues his series of conversations with some of the world's greatest artistic originators. This week he meets leading British playwright David Hare | ||
| 20050612 | John Tusa continues his series of conversations with some of the world's greatest artistic originators. He meets the novelist William Trevor | |||
| 20050703 | As part of the Africa Lives on the BBC season, poet and playwright, Gabriel Gbadamosi investigates the role of the book in Sub-Saharan Africa. Talking to writers, publishers and readers he traces the history of book production and consumption from the 19th century to present day - from vanity publishing in dingy backrooms, to short stories in cyber-space, and the prize-winning literature of Soyinka, Ngugi Wa Thiongo and Ben Okri on sale internationally. He talks to Cyprian Ekwensi, who at 84 is one of Africa's oldest living writers, and examines a new generation of young writers, like 28 year old Chimamanda Adichie, author of Purple Hibscus, who are reaching new readers, both within and outside Africa. Set against this is the hard economic and social reality of a continent where poverty, insecurity and escapism mean good fiction often come second to motivational books, Christian tracts, romances and thrillers. | |||
| 20051113 | John Tusa ends his interview series with an investigation into the origins of creativity itself. Contributors include Bernardo Bertolucci, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Bill Viola, Simon McBurney, Merce Cunningham and Frank Auerbach. | |||
| 20060319 | Writer and singer Shusha Guppy tells the fascinating story of how Islamic philosophers brought the treasures of classical Greek thought to the West. By the 9th Century, the works of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had largely been lost in the Latin West. In the Islamic East it was a very different story. For centuries they had been translating these and other Greek philosophical school works, harvesting the knowledge they contained and in turn, writing their own commentaries. As the Islamic empire spread to Europe, that knowledge travelled with it. | |||
| 20080323 | Nature writer Richard Mabey presents an exploration of spring and its influence on literature and art, with bird expert Mark Cocker, nature writer Ronald Blythe and Cornish artist Kurt Jackson, best known for his dramatic landscapes and his ecological artistic work. | |||
| 20090125 | Poet and Burns scholar Professor Robert Crawford of St Andrews University, examines how Robert Burns became a sensation at home and abroad. With contributions from Douglas Dunn, who considers the strength of Burns's verse, Professor Fiona Stafford, who discusses whether Burns was the first romantic poet and David Hopes, who asks whether Burns's image is going to be renewed again in the making of the new birthplace museum. There is also debate on Burns's newest scholarly incarnation as a radical, and Dr Leith Davies looking at how the once very male and clubbable world of the 'Burns club' and Burns Supper now contends with new cultural fusion such as Gung Haggis Fat Choy, which melds Burns night with the Chinese New Year celebrations. Robert Crawford on why Robert Burns was a poet and songwriter of international importance. | |||
| Handel Week: Liquid Assets - Handel's Finances | 20090412 | BBC business correspondent Peter Day looks at Handel's extraordinary success on the stock market as well as examining the financial matters involved in putting on operas and oratorios in 18th-century London. Handel speculated in the newly-formed London stock market throughout his life in the capital. Strikingly, he put money into South Sea stock in 1716 when prices were low and had sold up by 1720 when the South Sea credit bubble burst in one of the great financial cataclysms in fiscal history. Many others lost fortunes, including Sir Isaac Newton, warden of the Royal Mint. The composer profited handsomely and, while others shied away from the uncertainties of speculation, he continued to invest throughout his life. From 1744 Handel's investments just grew and grew. Talking to Handel experts and financial historians, Peter Day enters the tough economics of 18th-century music-making and visits the Bank of England to see the composer's extravagant signature on numerous ledgers as he traded annuities. BBC business correspondent Peter Day looks at Handel's financial dealings. | ||
| Les Ballets Russes | 20090809 |  Dance critic Judith Mackrell tells the story of Les Ballets Russes, the infamous but short-lived dance company, which gave its first sensational performance in Paris in 1909. She considers how in only 20 years it revolutionised ballet, moving away from the fairytale tradition and bringing modern dance into the 20th century. Notorious for innovative choreography, design, controversial performances, scandal and tumultuous love affairs, the company sparked a ballet boom.Contributors include Sadler's Wells Theatre artistic director Alistair Spalding, Royal Ballet director Monica Mason and choreographer Javier De Frutos. Dance critic Judith Mackrell tells the story of infamous dance company Les Ballets Russes. | ||
| In Search Of Gododdin | 20100110 | Poet Gwyneth Lewis explores the origins and meaning of the Gododdin, a sixth-century Welsh poem elegising the slain British warriors who made a last stand against the Saxons in the famous Battle of Catterick. Fourteen centuries ago an elite band of three hundred warriors set out from Edinburgh and marched south to Catterick in Yorkshire to meet a force of 10,000 Saxons in a bloody pitched battle. At the end of a week of ferocious combat all but three of the 300 lay dead and, with them, the last hope of the Old North - the original Britons - against the Saxon invaders. But the battle left an enduring literary legacy: one of the three survivors, Aneirin, fled back to Edinburgh and composed the Gododdin, an epic poem to commemorate his fallen comrades. Gwyneth follows the war band from the Edinburgh stronghold where they spent a year feasting and drinking mead to the landscape of northern England where they met their fate. As she travels she discovers new insights into contemporary Britain from a sixth-century poem written in Welsh about a group of warriors from Scotland who fought a battle in Yorkshire. Poet Gwyneth Lewis explores the sixth-century Welsh poem the Gododdin. | ||
| Seven And A Half Years | 20100124 | Susannah Clapp explores why the unforgettable Russian playwright Chekhov believed that he would be remembered for no more than seven and a half years. Shortly before he died, the great Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, confided in a friend that he believed he would be remembered for seven, perhaps seven and a half years. One hundred and seven and a half years later, in the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth - and now that Chekhov is second only to Shakespeare in popularity as a playwright across the globe - Susannah Clapp explores his obsession with memory and the passage of time, and his fear of being forgotten. She gathers a special Chekhov repetory company, including Anna Maxwell Martin, at the BBC's Maida Vale studios, to discuss and perform new translations by the young poet Sasha Dugdale, of Three Sisters, his most memory-obsessed play; and hears from Chekhov experts in Britain and Moscow, including the translator Michael Frayn, the director Declan Donnellan and Anatoly Smelianski, director of the Moscow Art Theatre school, to tell a story of broken clocks, spinning tops, tuberculosis and immortality. Actors: Melissa Advani, Bruce Alexander, Joseph Cohen-Cahn, Emerald O'Hanrahan, Tessa Nicholson, Anna Maxwell Martin and Piers Wehner. Producer: Beaty Rubens. Susannah Clapp explores Chekhov's obsession with memory and being forgotten. | ||
| Songs Of Trebizond | 20100131 | The Black Sea Region of Turkey was once the ancient kingdom of The Pontus and its Christian orthodox inhabitants subsequently thrived through the Byzantine and Ottoman times. But for centuries this culture, centred on the great trading port of Trebizond on the caravan route to Persia, was living on borrowed time. The 1923 exchange of populations between modern Greece and Turkey, resulting from the Lausanne Treaty, was the end game that gave rise to the Pontic nationality splitting into multiple citizenships. The shepherds in the high mountains behind the city of Trebizond, who for more than a thousand years had driven their flocks up onto the high plateau in summer and back to the narrow coastal plain in winter, sometimes adopting a Christian persona, sometimes a Muslim one, disappeared and the economy has never really recovered. Worse than this for some, the architectural jewel that was Trabzon (as it is now called) has become an almost Soviet-like conglomeration of tower blocks. The final insult came five years ago with the much opposed construction of a coastal motorway, which has chopped this once great maritime city off from the Black Sea. The isolation that kept ancient cultures protected has finally gone - along with the cultures. Tom de Waal traces some of what has been lost to the Soumela Monastery where every August 15th people of Pontic descent from across the globe come to remember the feast of the Virgin. Here there is a collision of Russian, Turkish and Greek interests, which provides a lesson in modern regional politics. But connecting all of these disparate people is music - the Greek Lyre and the Turkish Kemence, a small violin played like a 'cello. They play the same, they dance the same. Culturally connected and politically divided this is a story of people who are really cousins, or even brothers, but cannot quite bring themselves to admit it. Producer Neil Trevithick. Tom De Waal on the history of Pontic Greek culture in the Black Sea region of Turkey. | ||
| Turkey In Europe | 20100207 | Four hundred years ago, much of Central Europe was under Turkish rule and the traces of their presence remain to this day. We bathe, drink coffee and eat croissants courtesy of the Ottoman Turks. Even the music of Mozart is full of Turkish sounds. Yet many nations still resist Turkey joining the EU. Is this because they are in denial about the past influence of the Ottoman Empire? Visiting today's Turkish communities in Vienna and the Moslem districts of Sarajevo, Dennis Marks poses that question to contemporary Austrians, Bosnians and Turks - artists, scholars, politicians and historians - to discover what they share and what they fear. Dennis Marks investigates why some nations are resisting Turkey joining the EU. | ||
| Sinan The Magnificent | 20100214 | Koca Mimar Sinan was court architect to one of the most powerful dynasties the world has known: the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Responsible for some four hundred sublime and inventive buildings throughout Turkey, the Balkans and the Middle East he is virtually unknown in the West. Why is this? Architectural journalist Jonathan Glancey tells Sinan's astonishing story. Born a Christian in crumbling Anatolia, Sinan converted to Islam and was taken into the Janissary Corps which fought to extend the Ottoman Empire. He participated in the campaign for Rhodes in the 1520s, learning to build rapidly and well - catapults, mosques and caravanserais, all the structures a vast army needed. The experience would stand him in good stead when he became chief architect to Sultan Suleiman I soon after. Sinan's best known work is perhaps the Suleiman Mosque in Istanbul. But he also created madrassas, bathhouses and viaducts. Influenced by the Byzantine buildings that surrounded him in Constantinople, it is also likely that he had contact with the designs of Renaissance figures including Michelangelo, who was his contemporary. But did the artistic dialogue go both ways? Did Sinan's reputation reach into Western Europe through the strong links between the Ottoman Empire and Italy in particular? It's a tantalizing thought which the programme explores. Producer: Jane Beresford. Jonathan Glancey tells the astonishing story of Ottoman court architect Koca Mimar Sinan. | ||
| John Dankworth In South Africa | 20100314 | Marking the death of John Dankworth earlier this year another chance to hear this account of his visiting South Africa for the first time in just over 50 years. As a young man John Dankworth flew in to Johannesburg to give a short series of concerts in South Africa. Unaware until he arrived of the growing menace of apartheid, he joined the protest movement. In this programme, John returns to South Africa for the first time since then, to discover how music continued to be made during the years of struggle, and how it is doing in today's rainbow nation. He meets veterans Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa, visits a music school in Daveyton township, encounters younger musicians such as trumpeter Feya Faku, saxophonist McCoy Mrubata, and guitarist Louis Mhlanga. From choir competitions to solo pianists, the programme paints a vivid picture of contemporary South African musical life, and asks potent questions about the future. The programme was first broadcast in 2007. Producer Alyn Shipton (R). The story of John Dankworth's return to South Africa after a gap of 50 years. | ||
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| Creating Burns's Reputation |  | |||
| Deep France, Deep Problem? |  | |||
| Exploring Our Amazement: Poetry And Its Audience |   | |||
| Hark: An Acoustic Archaeology Of Elizabethan England |  | |||
| John Milton's Adventurous Song |  | |||
| Liquid Assets: Handel's Finances |  | |||
| Rebellion And Fear: Artists In The Great War |  | |||
| Rona |  | |||
| Simone Weil |  | |||
| Smashing The Idols |  | |||
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| Vril |  | |||
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See Also