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Private Notes
Welcome to 1973 - the year that saw the three-day week and the arrival of a fictional character from 2006 in the BBC1 drama Life on Mars. The success of the latter has acted as a springboard for a week-long BBC4 season. This excellent Time Shift concentrates on the winter of strikes and power cuts.
In conversation with writer and broadcaster Andrew Collins, the creators of the time-travel cop show Life on Mars reveal the story behind the series, including their seven-year battle to bring it to the screen and how they drew inspiration from their own experiences of life in the 70s. They offer insights into the show's characters and explore how the programme has broken the mould of popular TV drama.
An exploration of how Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code was able to influence popular culture and challenge the traditional view of Christianity, thus to be attacked by the church, the art world and academics.
Over the past sixty years, a university education has gone from being the preserve of the privileged few to an expected rite of passage for more than a million young adults a year. This spectacular expansion transformed the expectations of generations and provided the crucible for everything from sexual liberation to political revolution, and it inspired a unique literary phenomenon rich in controversy and comedy - the campus novel.
Daisy Donovan narrates a documentary looking at the rollercoaster fortunes of robots, androids and cyborgs in fact and fantasy, from the Flash Gordon serials via the Six Million Dollar Man to Marvin the Paranoid Android.
For decades we were alternately warned that robots could take over the planet or promised that they would liberate us from the drudgery of everyday labour, but in the real world scientists struggled to design robots that could even climb the stairs. Yet the continued appeal of the Star Wars films, the remake of the TV classic A for Andromeda and the return of the Cybermen to Doctor Who all prove that there is artificial life in the machine men yet.
Looking at how the relationship between Australia and the UK has changed since the Queen's trip Down Under in 1954.
Bill Nighy narrates a documentary telling the story of the long and often extraordinary relationship between fact and fiction in the mysterious world of British espionage. The programme charts the evolution of spying through the twentieth century and looks at the parallel development of spy fiction during the same period. Contributors include Stella Rimington, Daphne Park, David Shayler, John le Carre, Charlie Higson, Bernard Porter, Nick Hiley and Stephen Dorril.
Time Shift enters the world of table tennis and traces how an English parlour game once known as ‘whiff-whaff’ became the most popular sport in Asia, championed by Mao Zedong and how it almost brought an end to the Cold War.
The programme revisits the glory days of table tennis in the 1930s and 1940s, when thousands packed Wembley Stadium in London to watch heroes like Johnny Leach do battle with the greats of Europe.
It researches how a simple bat made of sponge changed the game forever in 1952 and the programme interviews one of the game’s mavericks, the New York hustler Marty ‘the Needle’ Reisman.
Playful viewer's guide to entering another dimension, narrated by Richard Ayoade, featuring some of TV and cinema's best-known alternate universes, from the likes of Star Trek, Sliders, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Futurama and Doctor Who.
A comic exploration of the cult of Dracula. From Bela Lugosi to bloodsucking bikes, with a Mexican tag-wrestling version thrown in for good measure, this ghoulish compilation is an entertaining homage to the vampire tradition gifted us by Bram Stoker's famous Count.
Time Shift presents a humorous look at Britain's cultural landscape, comparing the way that the traditional middle class places more emphasis on status than the possession-orientated generations who have recently risen up the social ladder.
This documentary traces the rise and fall of a great British brand. In the days when Britain's car industry was the envy of the world, Rover epitomised everything to which the driver of taste aspired, but in 2005 it reached the end of the road. The film explores how Rover cars went from defining their eras to becoming victims of their times, telling the story behind the key models to the controversial joint ventures with Japanese and Indian manufacturers in later years.
Timeshift looks at how the reduced influence of religion for children today means that milestones in their lives are rapidly changing from the previous norm.
Documentary, narrated by Caroline Quentin, looking at how and why weddings are on the increase and divorce rates in decline in the UK. It asks if we've rediscovered love and romance or if we're just getting swept along by the hype of celebrity weddings and the marketing powers of the mushrooming wedding industry.
Documentary which celebrates the high and lows of children's TV and asks if the future of mainstream television be one where children are neither seen nor heard, as ITV cuts back on its commitment and the BBC now only makes programmes for under-11s.
