Factual Factual It’s My Story In 1990, Giles Kershaw was killed in a flying Thursday 25 December, 8.00pm accident near Mount Kershaw (named in his honour) on the inaccessible Jones ice shelf on the Six parts Antarctic Peninsula. At the age of 78, Nancy Kershaw set sail with the crew of the 54ft yacht This acclaimed series returns with another set Pelagic to see if she could reach her son’s final of powerful programmes featuring the personal resting place.This programme tracks an evocative, experiences of ordinary people in extraordinary emotional and extraordinary journey to one of the circumstances. most spectacular areas of the White Continent. The family of Damilola Taylor and the policewoman Producer/Sue Mitchell who befriended them talk about how an uneasy relationship grew into an enduring bond; a 78-year- old woman makes a final attempt to reach the Programme 2: Life After Damilola grave of her son on the Antarctic Peninsula; a Thursday 1 January, 8.00pm mother and son face a pivotal moment as he prepares to leave home and live in the community as a person with Down’s syndrome; three After the murder of their son Damilola, Richard probation officers give revealing insights into their and Gloria Taylor were put in contact with Polly work; a doctor reflects on being under investigation Mills, a Family Liaison Officer on the brink of by the General Medical Council; and, in the space retiring from the Police Force. At first they viewed of a few minutes, a racehorse called Hamlet has an her with suspicion, but from the moment they had impact on the lives of four people. to identify their son’s body, an extraordinary bond developed between them. In the aftermath of the trial, it was Polly who found she needed to lean on Programme 1:Antarctica the Taylors, so devastated was she by the outcome. Richard, Gloria and Polly speak movingly of the Thursday 25 December, 8.00pm events that changed their lives and of their friendship.This programme is made by the same team who made the earlier It’s My Story – The Witness, in which Bromley, the key witness in the trial, spoke for the first time about the case. Producer/Sue Mitchell Programme 3:Will He Change His Socks? Thursday 8 January, 8.00pm This is an everyday story of a child leaving the family nest – with a twist. Carol’s 19-year-old son,Alex, has Down’s syndrome. Carol hopes that Alex’s first taste of independent life will be happy, safe and enriching, Nancy Kershaw and she wants him to get on well with his peers. But BBC Radio 4: Quarter 1 6 Factual she is also concerned about how he will cope when follows one day in the lives of all four: a day of he leaves their home. Felicity Finch charts the preparation, expectation and tension. experiences of Alex and his mother as they prepare for and then face this pivotal moment. Producer/Dave Sheasby Producer/Cathy Drysdale Lifeblood Programme 4:The Probationers Wednesday 7 January, 9.00pm Thursday 15 January, 8.00pm Two parts With Britain’s prisons at bursting point, the Blood, the liquid tissue, protects life.Through our service’s probation officers have a heavier workload veins marches an army of white blood cells which than ever before.This programme gives an insight prevent illness. In Edinburgh, scientists have into their world, exploring the experiences and harnessed this defence force to create a cancer caseloads of three probation officers. One is a new therapy which could revolutionise the treatment of recruit, an ex-champion boxer, based in London; the disease. one is a woman who has worked in the Scottish Highlands for almost 17 years; and the third works In a two-part series, Lifeblood, Georgina Ferry finds in the Midlands. out about the development of this novel cancer therapy, the building of a “killer” T cell bank and the Producer/Sarah Taylor potential that this “adoptive immunotherapy” holds for the treatment of a whole range of currently incurable diseases. Programme 5: Fit To Practise Thursday 22 January, 8.00pm In the first programme, Banking For The Future, Georgina visits the scientists who, working in sterile isolation, have developed the painstaking Fewer than 10 per cent of complaints referred to technique for “training” cells to rebuild the body’s the General Medical Council (GMC) are upheld, immune system. She follows the process from initial but many doctors live in social and professional cell selection, to the moment when a withdrawal is limbo for months or even years while full made from the bank for use in treatment. investigations take place. Fit To Practise hears the reflections of an anonymous doctor, his family, Georgina hears of the scientists’ past frustration at friends and colleagues on the experience of being the bank’s failure to help a patient because it didn’t under investigation by the GMC. hold enough compatible cells, but learns that it is now fully functioning and capable of providing an Producer/Graham Easton abundance of trained T cells at just a few hours’ notice.And finally, she meets the survivors – those who, with the help of the T cell bank, have beaten Programme 6: Hamlet post-transplant cancer. Thursday 29 January, 8.00pm In the second part, A Ubiquitous Therapy, Georgina Can the same three minutes make a difference to explores the potential of adoptive immunotherapy as four people’s lives? Well, that all depends on an international medical tool and learns that cells Hamlet. Hamlet is not the tragic Prince of have been sent successfully from Edinburgh to a Denmark but a racehorse taking part in the 2003 cancer patient in Paris. She also discovers that, in the St Leger, the last classic of the English flat-racing future, once the trigger of a cancer or autoimmune season, and the stakes are high for the owner, the disease has been identified, it should be possible to trainer, the jockey and the punter.This programme tailor-make an individual medicine to destroy it. BBC Radio 4: Quarter 1 7 Factual Aids-related lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and hasn’t come to an end and there’s a fault line other autoimmune diseases are next on the running across the Atlantic, but Britain is trying Edinburgh team’s hit list.As the technology is to patch things up. Over the next few months, refined, adoptive immunotherapy is set to have a members of the British Foreign Office will be huge international impact – and all from blood, the tasked with repairing relations with the Germans one tissue we can afford to share. and the French, bolstering the role of Nato, and helping to promote peace in the Middle East. Producer/Amanda Hargreaves Britain, meanwhile, faces its own crisis with the death of Dr David Kelly and doubts about whether the war in Iraq was justified. Inside The Foreign Office Monday 12 January, 8.00pm In programme two, New Boys, there are changes afoot and a few new faces as the Foreign Office Two parts decamps to New York for the Annual General Assembly at the United Nations.The world’s attention is focused on the big players, but much of the real action takes place backstage, where there are friends to meet and contacts to be made in hotel rooms and lobbies. Back on the other side of the Atlantic, efforts are made to prevent another rift in European relations, as Her Majesty’s civil servants travel to Berlin and Paris.There’s also a Presidential visit to work on, plus a new initiative to promote reform in the Arab world. Producers/Jo Glanville and Mark Savage Altered Images Thursday 15 January, 9.30am Five parts This series tells the stories of five famous characters whose personalities or work were crucially reassessed when items belonging to them Edward Stourton (above) goes behind the scenes at were found after their death. the Foreign Office at one of the most critical times in British diplomatic history.The series hears from Biographer Kathryn Hughes goes to the British the diplomats who stalk the corridors at King Library to talk to Andrew Motion about a cache Charles Street as they help shape Britain’s foreign of letters written by war poet Rupert Brooke. policy in the wake of the war in Iraq.Their work is Handed to the British Library in 1948 under punctuated by visits to the United States, Europe the proviso they were not to be opened for 50 and the Middle East, as well as by visits from years, they reveal Brooke’s part in a previously President Bush and the Israeli Prime Minister, unknown relationship. Ariel Sharon. Historian Hannah Greig meets Colin White at the The first programme, Crisis? What Crisis?, begins at National Maritime Museum to explain why recently the Guildhall in London, where Britain’s community discovered letters by Frances Nelson reveal, for the of foreign ambassadors are holding their first get- first time, how she tried to save her marriage together since the invasion of Iraq.The war still to Horatio. BBC Radio 4: Quarter 1 8 Factual Jane Pritchard, archivist at the Rambert Dance of the poignant gap between what humans hope for Company, talks to biographer Peter Kurth about the and what they get – observations that have greatly discovery of a rare dance manual hand-written by influenced her own writing. Isadora Duncan. It reveals Duncan’s attitude towards movement and dance at the very start of her career. The programme features interviews with thriller writer PD James, novelist Edmund White, actor Writer Michele Roberts has used the letters Anna Massey, academic Professor Valentine written by Charlotte Brontë to her Belgian tutor Cunningham and screen-writer Andrew Davies.