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. Monsieur Heger in her own work, but until now Interviews are conducted on the set of the new had never seen the letters first hand. Michele asks BBC TV production He Knew He Was Right in Wells Brontë biographer Lucasta Miller why the and in the Garrick Club, London, where Trollope publication of these letters in The Times at the start was a member. of the 20th century shattered many people’s image of the author of Jane Eyre. For details of The Pallisers, starring Juliet Stevenson and Greg Wise, see the Drama section, page 16. Sister Wendy Beckett goes to Tate Britain to look through Turner’s “well-organised” sketchbooks, Producer/Rebecca Stratford which were found after his death. She finds out from Turner biographer James Hamilton why the erotic imagery found within them meant that some The Conservation Pioneers of his books were destroyed. Saturday 7 February, 10.30am Producers/Sera Lefroy Owen and Rachel White Three Parts

Julian Pettifer presents a major series based on the Trollope On Trollope stories of the pioneers of the post-war British conservation movement. He hears from the unsung Thursday 29 January, 11.30am heroes who cleared polluted reed beds and the amateur lobbyists who implored governments to To accompany the new dramatisation of Anthony listen to their cause. Trollope’s The Pallisers, novelist Joanna Trollope explores the unconventional side of her namesake It was only after the war that large numbers of and explains why his work has particular resonance people started to become concerned about the for her. environment, and not until the Fifties that grass roots environmental movements began to spread. Joanna confesses that, while growing up, she rather At the heart of these movements were passionate, avoided Anthony Trollope’s books.After all, she’s largely amateur, conservationists at a time when not a direct descendant and, as a teenager, she the term “environmentalist” hadn’t even been balked at reading novels the size of suitcases invented and concepts such as “sustainability” which she believed were about dull Victorian were decades away. bishops and Prime Ministers.Though widely held, this view of Trollope is now one which Joanna Julian talks to the early members of these groups, feels is utterly unrepresentative. and explores the campaigns they fought to save stretches of meadow, strips of wetland and salt- In this programme, she aims to set the record marshes around the country. He also looks at their straight by looking at Trollope’s life and work, and analysing his unconventional and often dark side – achievements against a backdrop of the politics of a side that understood about lies and deception, the day, exploring the compromises that were being sex and betrayal, lowlife and outcasts. She explores brokered at a high level between landowners and Trollope’s sensitive treatment of women, marriage the government, and how conservation bodies and love in his books, and his brilliant observations emerged to pick up the pieces.

BBC Radio 4: Quarter 1 9 Factual

Julian Pettifer writes and presents the programmes. member as he starts a new life in London at the Contributors include Teddy Goldsmith, Miriam Trinity School of Music. Rothschild, Lady Phillippa Scott and David Bellamy. Meanwhile, back at home,Wagner, along with 20 Producer/Adam Fowler other youngsters, spends at least four hours a day practising the cello.The results are amazing: from the heart of the Amazon rainforest springs the Music From The Rainforest – sound of an exceptional orchestra.

One Year On Producer/Mark Rickards Tuesday 10 February, 1.30pm

The Pub Landlord’s Guide To Thackeray Thursday 12 February,11.30am

Comedian Al Murray – otherwise known as The Pub Landlord – unlocks his family archives to paint a portrait of the writer and satirist Thackeray, his great, great, great, great grandfather.

Producer/Robyn Read

The Children’s Cello Orchestra of the Amazon Wrestling With Words Wednesday 18 February, 9.00pm BBC Radio 4 returns to the South American rainforest it first visited in February 2002, to find out what has happened to the group of children Every word people utter uses 37 muscles and who, against all the odds, formed the Children’s thousands of nerves. It’s not surprising, then, that Cello Orchestra of the Amazon. for many, the process goes wrong.

One might expect children in the hot, tropical city Almost everyone hesitates, fluffs, stumbles and of Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon, to enjoy introduces often embarrassing spoonerisms from football and carnival. But 13-year-old Wagner time to time. It’s called mild disfluency and most Jacob’s dream is to join a remarkable group of people manage to communicate despite often children who are playing Vivaldi,Saint-Saëns and imperfect speech.At the other extreme of even Max Bruch. disfluency, a stammer can be debilitating.About five per cent of pre-school age children and half Theirs is a story of determination and tenacity. In a million adults stammer in the UK. But despite the Amazon region, there are few instruments, this condition being so widespread, scientists have fewer music teachers and little infrastructure to been frustrated in their efforts to pin-point what support their studies.Their parents are suffering causes it. great financial hardship, and there are few jobs or opportunities for musicians. Life-long stammerer and broadcaster Philip French explores how new research is at last giving One year on, their teacher has left them for the stammerers hope of effective treatment. It’s also United States and some of the children have opening the door to the next generation of speech become disillusioned with the Orchestra. But recognition systems and talking computers. Philip others persevere, and the programme follows one brings personal warmth and depth to his treatment

BBC Radio 4: Quarter 1 10 Factual

of this often embarrassing and sometimes resulted from one of Britain’s defining domestic debilitating condition. He draws on demonstrations events of the Eighties. and case histories, including his own, as well as contributions from experts at the cutting edge The first programme in the series examines in speech therapy, neuroscience, psychology the impact of the miners’ defeat on Britain’s and psycholinguistics. economy and industrial relations and asks whether it really did – as politicians promised – begin to Philip explores the reasons why people are more transform “the sick man of Europe” into a world- likely to be disfluent when talking on the telephone class power. rather than face to face; introduce more errors into dialogue than monologue; and are more fluent The programme analyses the current economy when giving instructions than describing pictures. of the South Yorkshire pit areas compared with Using functional brain imaging, scientists are now their condition before the strike and contrasts able to pin-point the areas of the brain involved in the success stories of some former miners who processing language. Disfluency occurs when one of have become local entrepreneurs with those the stages in this complicated language process of others who have moved away or remained breaks down. without work.

Stammering is the most extreme form of disfluency. From this objective, local view, the programme Psychologists are now beginning to understand examines the national pattern, drawing on a what makes people stammer. It’s less likely to be statistical comparison of the 20 years before the due to psychological trauma, such as bullying at strike with 20 years since in terms of productivity, school, or physiological difficulties in articulating levels of employment, wages, welfare costs and words. New research is revealing evidence of a other key measures. family history of stammering and may even be close to isolating a “stammering” gene. Scientists in Interviewees include high-profile contributors Germany have now discovered differences in from the trade unions, NCB management and structure and function between the brains of Conservative ministers from the time. people who stammer and people who don’t. The second programme examines the social and Using a lively mix of demonstration and interviews, political fallout from the Conservative victory over Philip shows how people tend to stop stammering the NUM, including its effect on the major parties when they sing, recite poetry, whisper, shout, put on and long-term implications for political alignments a different accent or even talk aloud to themselves. in Britain. Within the last six months, a possible explanation for this is emerging. British psychologists have The programme looks at Conservative strategy, found evidence that people who stammer may be including the charge that the party anticipated over-vigilant in monitoring and planning speech. and even encouraged the NUM’s militancy as These findings have kick-started a whole new range spring and summer approached while preparing of treatments and therapies. for a long siege with record stocks of coal. It also analyses the government’s handling of the strike Producer/Amanda Hargreaves itself and whether the Conservative party’s electoral fortune was largely made by its victory in the dispute. The Miners’ Strike – The Legacy Monday 22 March, 8.00pm The shattering impact on the Labour Party is also explored in probing interviews with its then Two parts leaders, and the change in relationship between Labour and the unions is analysed. Timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the miners’ strike, this series analyses the changes that Producer/David Ross

BBC Radio 4: Quarter 1 11 Factual

The Miners’ Strike – after the announcement that the pit would close even though there was still workable coal there. In Enemies Reunited 1984,Triona told the story of Harry Evans, a Tuesday 30 March, 8.00pm striking miner, and his wife, Jenny, a stalwart supporter of the NUM in the village of Brampton, Triona Holden spent the year of the miners’ strike which provided Cortonwood with most of its reporting for BBC Radio from South Yorkshire, on manpower. Jenny told Triona:“If my husband goes how families coped with the dispute. For Enemies back to work, I’ll kill him ... If you’ve got a scab in Reunited, she returns to bring together people your family, they are dead to you.” Towards the end caught on opposing sides, whose lives were of the strike, when hundreds had decided to return profoundly changed by the strike. Using testimony to work, Harry’s brother, Frank, opted to scab. from people at the coalface, the programme Harry felt he had no choice but to shop Frank to challenges some of the basic assumptions about the the union. Frank died last year but Harry and Jenny way of life that was being fought for, and helps to did not even attend the funeral.Triona brings paint a more accurate picture of the long-term together Frank’s children and Harry and Jenny, and impact of the strike. asks them about the cost to their family of the recrimination caused by the strike. In pre-strike Britain, the roles of men and women in mining villages and towns were clearly defined. Producer/Jim Frank Women left school with a minimum of education; they were expected to marry young, have babies, look after the household, and remain in the Voyeurs And Visionaries background.The strike changed all of that, giving Thursday 1 April, 11.30am these silent women a voice and thrusting them into the limelight.Thousands of women joined the Four parts largest pressure group,Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC), and overnight, some women who could scarcely read or write were making speeches to huge rallies, giving radio and television interviews and becoming influential public figures. But when the strike ended, the stardom was over, and for some women, the shock was too much to bear. Triona speaks to Marsha Marshall, who became the Barnsley spokeswoman for WAPC and ended up in a psychiatric ward.

Miners were regarded as the elite of the working class, desirable to women and envied by men in less exciting, less well-paid jobs. Many enjoyed an above- average standard of living, with second homes and holidays abroad.This was the lifestyle that was under attack when the colliery closures began. Miners didn’t get much support from the unions or the Labour movement during the dispute and part of the reason may be that they didn’t support other unions in their actions.Triona talks to wives of ex-miners, economists and social historians of the era. Francine Stock (above) explores the notion that The Cortonwood colliery was the flashpoint of the cinema was the art form and medium of the 20th strike.The NUM called for national industrial action century and affected every aspect of life, from

BBC Radio 4: Quarter 1 12 Factual

Einstein’s theory of relativity to the success of Programme Three: the vest.Along the way, she asks what role cinema Cinema Inside The Mind plays in people’s lives, what effect it has on other aspects of society and whether cinema gives an In the past century, film-makers have explored inverted vision of what is really going on, such notions of reality and perception, of individualism as lavish musicals in depression and war fantasies and collectivism, of time and the brain. Much in peace-time. contemporary work about time and memory has been prefigured by cinema style, with flash-back and Francine talks to writers, scientists, philosophers, fragmented narrative. Films such as 2001 and Blade film addicts and, of course, film-makers.The series Runner have sometimes triggered scientific enquiry. incorporates readings from novels, plays, extracts from films, scientific theories and adverts from the Francine discovers what the process of watching archives, all revealing how many of the things film – at 24 frames per second versus television’s people take for granted today have their origins 625 lines – does to the brain, which areas it in the cinema. specifically affects and what more it can do.

Programme One: Programme Four: The Politics Of Cinema Cinema And Life

From Ealing to Spielberg, via Reds from outer space This final programme explores the concept of in the sci-fi films of the Fifties to the mutant cinema as opiate of the people. It investigates the horrors of the Eighties and Nineties, film can be effect of films on people’s love lives – such as used as propaganda or to define national identity – encouraging the search for that “final reel” romantic all of which dress up fears in other clothes. resolution from, say, Sleepless In Seattle, and movie dialogue has long been used for chat-up lines; Francine questions whether cinema ever stimulates cinema’s encouragement of misconceptions and greater political engagement, as Costa-Gavras and illusions; and the way it seduces people into making Loach believe, or whether it affects politics in a far attempts to make life “more like the movies”. stranger, perhaps more pernicious, way. Francine also looks at cinema’s effect on fashion – the original movie moguls all came from the Programme Two: fashion industry and used films to sell clothes Cinema And Literature or for product placement. She discusses how cinema has changed people’s perception of “cool”, Much contemporary literature takes its idiom and how much it has created the celebrity and whether images from the cinema. It’s no coincidence that it has become largely a giant marketing tool, just the novel abandoned lengthy descriptions of place peddling merchandise. when cinema came in, and started to do what only novels can do – look inwards. James Joyce, a keen Producer/Stephen Hughes film-goer, knew this; stream-of-consciousness was borne partly out of a reaction to cinema.Writers such as Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith and Will Self now use film techniques, such as the panning shot, the zoom and the fantasy sequence, as devices in narrative. But the influence of the movies can be deadening. Howard Jacobson is horrified that the cheap romance of the screen has made many a literary love scene read like a B-movie.

BBC Radio 4: Quarter 1 13