Today's story is "The Coconut" by Barbara Carr

The Royal Institution, London Annual Christmas Lectures to Young People
by Professor George Porter

Unlike Dr Who, we have no time machine which will take us in person back through time, yet astronomers travel back in time by studying the light and radio waves from great distances. And we have ways of looking at time through the telescope or under the microscope.

Reporters Jim Douglas Henry, Jeremy James, Jeanne La Chard, Gillian Strickland, Desmond Wilcox, Harold Williamson

Tonight: The Naked Ego
Living in the United States today, many people will tell you, is enough to drive you mad. Not mad enough to be locked up: just tense enough and pressured enough to feel in need of help.
Psychiatrists' couches have never been busier and now there's a new safety valve - encounter groups. At first they seem to be the maddest part of a mad world, but at the Esalen Institute on the Californian coast, where the movement started, they are reaching for an odd kind of sanity in an odder, madder, world.
Sometimes they do say: take off your clothes; slip into the communal bath; touch everybody you know; let love blossom. But they are concerned to strip away more than clothing and inhibitions. They reach, in chanting groups together, for their naked egos.
It may sound like a wild frolic, a sexy undisciplined piece of Americana, but these moneyed, middle-class, often middle-aged people - fed up with their everyday life - believe that at places like Esalen there is a kind of heaven on earth. Whether it lasts after you've left, whether it really helps, they don't pretend to know. They don't think it's dangerous or damaging - but then they don't think it's odd either.

As the year 1970 gets into gear, it's still unresolved whether the dispute between the two communist giants of Russia and China will turn yet again into a shooting match along their frontiers.
In Peking the Red diplomats still sit it out in a long drawn out battle of words.
Tonight Europa looks at another battle, a battle of words and pictures, the propaganda battle between Moscow and Peking.
The story of how Chairman Mao came to power in China is the subject of one film. But it's the story as seen through Russian eyes; as put out by the Russian domestic television service. Then there is the official Chinese film about their dispute with Russia; about their hatred and fury with those they say have polluted the doctrines of Karl Marx. And the language they use about each other is pretty strong stuff.
Introduced by Derek Hart

An invitation to step into the humorous and imaginative world of James Thurber
A series based on a selection of his famous stories and cartoons starring

There's a considerable shortage of shining armour for one thing. And fiery steeds aren't all that easy to come by either.

Talk, argument, people, diversion with Joan Bakewell, Michael Dean, Tony Bilbow,
Sheridan Morley