BBC Four

World News Today

The latest news and business developments.

World News Today: 15/10/2008

15/10/2008

BBC News Channel - World News Today, 15/10/2008

The latest news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.

The latest national and international news, exploring the day's events from a global perspective.

BBC News Channel

An impartial and independent news service offering breaking news, analysis and insight.

A 24-hour impartial and independent news service offering breaking news, analysis and insight. It provides fast and comprehensive coverage of local, UK and international events.

Britain from Above

Britain from Above: Episode 4: The Land

Episode 4

Episode 4: The Land

The Land

BBC Two - Britain from Above, The Land

Comparing exhaustive footage of East Anglia in the 1940s with the countryside of today.

Revealing the transformation of East Anglia, which found its agriculture and landscape quickly industrialised to cope with the changes of the Second World War.

Turning back time and drawing on previously unseen archive footage and photography to focus on the dramatic transformation of Britain's cities, landscape and industry. Focusing on the period since the Second World War, Britain from Above explores the greatest period of change in the nation in the last 200 years. 

Nowhere shows the transformation that has swept the British countryside in the last 60 years more than East Anglia. Aerial photographs taken by both the RAF and the Luftwaffe before the war show an isolated rural landscape of small fields, hordes of labourers and horse drawn ploughs. But all that changed. Sparked by the war itself, East Anglia became the crucible of a land revolution as its agriculture was industrialised faster and on a larger scale than anywhere else.

Today hedgerows, horses and farm workers have all gone. While the number of people working on the land has collapsed, rural villages have grown, bursting through their old boundaries as commuters arrive. New roads and new employers such as Stansted Airport have heated up an already fast growing economy and the impact on the landscape can be clearly seen from above.

Using hitherto unseen land-use maps of the 1930s, together with wartime aerial reconnaissance photos, the programme reveals how and why East Anglia, and by extension Britain's rural landscape, has been shaped the way it has. Today we see a landscape under ever greater pressure from new housing, crowded roads and the sudden surge in food prices which makes farmland ever more valuable.

BBC Two

Knowledge, drama, comedy and the arts for a broad adult audience.

BBC Two is a lively channel of depth and substance, carrying a range of knowledge-building programming complemented by great drama, comedy and arts.

Revealing the transformation of Britain through the ages

The Land. How intensive farming methods introduced during the Second World War have gradually changed the shape of the British landscape. 
First shown on BBC2   
8.00 Man-Made Britain.  Andrew Marr goes on a voyage to discover how some of our most natural-looking landscapes have been shaped by human hands. 
First shown on BBC1

Britain from Above: Episode 3: Man-made Britain

Episode 3

Episode 3: Man-made Britain

Man-made Britain

BBC Two - Britain from Above, Man-made Britain

Andrew Marr discovers how some of Britain's greenest landscapes were shaped by humans.

Andrew Marr goes on a journey to discover how some of the greenest landscapes in the British Isles were shaped and moulded by human hands down the centuries.

Andrew Marr goes on a journey to discover how some of the greenest landscapes in the British Isles were in fact shaped and moulded by human hands down the centuries. 

He looks at the ancient 'wild wood' and Iron Age forts lurking in Britain's forests to the present-day strain modern economic needs put on the countryside, and how town planners restrict urban growth through the establishment of greenbelt areas.

He also looks down on Britain's national parks to show how we go to extraordinary lengths to preserve them as beautiful but artificial playgrounds. We also see how Britain's rugged landscape is used as the ideal testing ground for the Eurofighter.

BBC One

BBC One is a TV channel that started broadcasting on the 20th April 1964. It replaced BBC Television.

BBC Two is a TV channel that started broadcasting on the 20th April 1964.

Wilderness Explored

Wilderness Explored: Episode 2: Australia's Red Heart

Episode 2

Episode 2: Australia's Red Heart

Australia's Red Heart

BBC Four - Wilderness Explored, Australia's Red Heart

How early European explorers saw central Australia as a place of death and silence.

Series about European explorations of wildernesses looks at central Australia's deserts, seen as a place of death and silence by the first white explorers.

Australia's stark and beautiful red centre is now seen as part of the country's national identity, with Uluru, or Ayres Rock, a national symbol. But this vast desert centre was originally seen as a place of death and silence by the first white explorers. It has taken 200 years for a new perception to emerge, one that recognises it as a place of life and creation - the way it has always been seen by the continent's original inhabitants, the Aborigines.

Knowledge, arts, music and culture from the UK and the world.

BBC Four reflects arts, music and culture with an ambitious range of intellectually and culturally enriching programmes, taking an expert and in-depth approach to its subjects.

Documentary series about early European explorers' expeditions into Earth's wildernesses

New. 2/3. Australia's Red Heart 
Australia's red centre desert, now seen as part of the country's identity, and its most famous landmark, Uluru, or Ayers Rock, which has become a national symbol. See paneL

Wild Down Under

Wild Down Under: Episode 1: Wild Down Under

Episode 1

Episode 1: Wild Down Under

BBC Two - Wild Down Under, Wild Down Under

An introduction to the continent of Australia and its surrounding islands.

Series exploring the wildlife and landscape of Australia. An introduction to the continent and surrounding islands, capturing the enormity of this exotic land.

Series exploring the wildlife and landscape of Australia. An introduction to the continent and surrounding islands, capturing the enormity of this vast and exotic land which is home to some of the most unique wildlife in the world.

Series exploring the wildlife and landscape of Australia.

Aerial photography captures the beauty of the landscape of Australia and its surrounding islands, exploring the wildlife and scenery of this largely uninhabited continent.   
10.50 The creatures inhabiting 
Australia's central region, including a variety of lizards, wallabies capable of amazing leaps, and ferocious marsupials no larger than a matchbox.

Wild Down Under: Episode 2: Desert Heart

Episode 2: Desert Heart

Desert Heart

BBC Two - Wild Down Under, Desert Heart

Features Australia's huge central desert, home to a diversity of flora and fauna.

Series exploring Australia's wildlife and landscape looks at the huge central desert - no barren wasteland but home to a surprising diversity of flora and fauna.

Series exploring Australia's wildlife and landscape. This edition features the huge desert in the centre - no barren wasteland but home to a surprising diversity of flora and fauna. Nomadic budgerigars and giant red kangaroos flourish in a land battered by unpredictable cycles of drought and flood. Aborigines have lived here for thousands of years, but modern Australians are only just beginning to understand the terrain.

Travellers' Century

Travellers' Century: Episode 1: Eric Newby

Episode 1: Eric Newby

Eric Newby

BBC Four - Travellers' Century, Eric Newby

Benedict Allen follows the travels of quintessential British amateur traveller Eric Newby.

Benedict Allen follows the travels of quintessential British amateur traveller Eric Newby, author of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

Benedict Allen follows the travels of quintessential British amateur traveller Eric Newby. Born in suburban Hammersmith between the wars, Newby was dismissed by his public school as 'not clever', and his life became a catalogue of challenges. As a teenager, he went to sea to serve as a deck hand, sailing around Cape Horn. During the WW2 he joined the Special Boat Squadron, and was captured by the enemy. After escaping from an Italian POW camp, he met his future wife Wanda.  
 
Newby itched to discover the world and, in the mid-1950s, abandoned an unhappy career in the rag trade to head off with diplomat Hugh Carless into remotest Afghanistan and climb Mir Samir. The journey was immortalised in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

Fifty years on, Benedict Allen finds this lost corner of Afghanistan little changed - and comes away full of admiration for the author. Newby failed to reach the summit, but for all his sardonic understatement and self-deprecation, he was just a hair's breadth away. And all with the aid of a map drawn on the back of an envelope.

Benedict Allen follows in the footsteps of three celebrated travellers.

Travellers' Century: Episode 2: Laurie Lee

Episode 2: Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee

BBC Four - Travellers' Century, Laurie Lee

Benedict Allen retraces some of author Laurie Lee's journey across Spain in 1935.

Benedict Allen retraces author Laurie Lee's journey across Spain in 1935, which became the basis for Lee's celebrated travelogue As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

Explorer, writer and broadcaster Benedict Allen retraces part of author Laurie Lee's journey across Spain in 1935, which became the basis for his celebrated travelogue As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. 

Lee thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, and the book reveals a poet's sensibility in its meticulous, distilled observations of the country and people he quickly came to love. 

Allen tries to find out whether Lee's evocative prose actually works as travel writing and Lee is revealed as an enigmatic, mercurial figure in the tradition of the wandering minstrel or troubadour, with a huge array of talents and an astonishing facility to charm.

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Britain from Above

Episode 3: Man-made Britain

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Wild Down Under

Episode 2: Desert Heart

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Travellers' Century

Episode 2: Laurie Lee

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