BBC Documentaries Collection

BBC Panorama Madeleine The Last Hope (2012)



Madeleine: The Last Hope?

Wednesday 25 April
10.45pm - 11.15pm
BBC1 Scotland

Five years ago, Madeleine McCann disappeared from a family holiday apartment in the Algarve, Portugal.

Why has the little girl, aged three when she went missing, never been found? Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, are adamant that their daughter was abducted. Frustrated by Portuguese police and public opinion that viewed them with suspicion, Madeleine's parents persuaded prime minister David Cameron to order a review of the case. Is this new investigation, by a top unit of the Metropolitan Police, the last chance of discovering what happened?

For the first time, the senior UK investigator tells Panorama how he is working collaboratively with Portuguese police and explains why he believes he has the best opportunity yet to help solve the mystery of Madeleine McCann.


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BBC Woolly Mammoth Secrets From the Ice (2012)



4th April 2012

Professor Alice Roberts reveals the natural history of one the most famous of Ice Age animals - the woolly mammoth. Mammoths have transfixed humans since the depths of the last Ice Age, when their herds roamed across what is now Europe and Asia. Although these curious members of the elephant family have now been extinct for thousands of years, scientists can now paint an incredibly detailed picture of their lives thanks to whole carcasses that have been beautifully preserved in the Siberian permafrost. Alice meets scientists who are using the latest genetic, chemical and molecular tests to reveal the adaptations that allowed mammoths to evolve from their origins in the tropics, to surviving the extremes of Siberia. In a dramatic end to the film, she helps unveil a brand new woolly mammoth carcass that may shed new light on our own ancestors' role in their extinction.


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BBC Escape From the Worlds Most Dangerous Place (2012)



Escape From the World's Most Dangerous Place

Monday 30 April
9.00pm - 10.00pm
BBC 3

Scarlett Johansson tells the story of 21-year-old model Samira, returning to Somalia for the first time since her family fled the country's brutal civil war. In a life-changing journey, with danger never far away, Samira discovers the harsh realities of the homeland she never knew and sees how different her life would have been if she'd stayed behind.

After an emotional reunion with the father she hasn't seen for 18 years, she experiences what it's like to live in the country's battle-ravaged capital, Mogadishu, and the refugee camps where thousands face a daily battle for survival. As she travels from catwalk to chaos, she encounters horrors she never imagined and, by the time she leaves Africa for the second time, has made an unexpected decision about her future.


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BBC Belgiums X-Files (2002)



Belgium's X-Files
an Olenka Frenkiel investigation

In 1996 Regina Louf came forward to the Belgian authorities to say she had spent years as the victim of a paedophile network. During all-night police interrogations she poured out a terrifying tale of systematic abuse, torture and even murder.
Her tearful account described child sex orgies involving politicians and other members of the country's elite; a Belgian underworld that no one wanted to believe, least of all the establishment.

Regina Louf

For years there was a huge effort to discredit her evidence, but now in an exclusive interview, the policeman at the centre of her investigation has finally broken his silence. He claims that his enquiry was blocked - because it threatened to reveal too much.

Aired on: Sunday 5th May 2002 on BBC Two at 1915 BST


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BBC Rowing the Arctic undefined (2012)



Scots adventurer Mark Beaumont (The Man who Cycled the Americas) joins polar veteran Jock Wishart on an expedition to row a boat to the 1996 north magnetic pole, a point only ever reached across solid ice. In their tiny boat, the six-man team navigate some of the world's most remote seaways, taking on fast-flowing sea ice that could crush their boat and roaming polar bears. Nobody has ever rowed so far into the Canadian high Arctic - a first in the world of exploration and adventure, only made possible by the dramatic retreat of arctic sea ice in recent decades


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BBC Face to Face VS Naipaul (1994)



CHANNEL | BBC 2
FIRST BROADCAST | 16 May 1994

SYNOPSIS:
Nobel Prize-winning author VS Naipaul talks to Jeremy Isaacs in this thoughtful interview about his life and work. The analytical approach Naipaul says he applies to the world through his writing is much in evidence here as he considers the way in which his experiences as a child and a young man have shaped both his character and his books.

DID YOU KNOW?
In 2008, Patrick French published an authorised biography of VS Naipaul that revealed, among other things, his treatment of his first wife, Pat. In an interview for the biography, Naipaul admitted: 'It could be said that I had killed her.


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British Olympic Dreams (2012)


British Olympic Dreams
Sonali Shah and Ore Oduba present the latest look ahead to the London Games, featuring a profile of gymnast Beth Tweddle, as she prepares for her final Olympics. The 27-year-old has tasted success at World Championships, Commonwealth Games and European Championships over the last decade, but Olympic glory has continued to elude her



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British Olympic Dreams (2012)


British Olympic Dreams
Sonali Shah and Ore Oduba present the latest look ahead to the London Games, featuring a profile of gymnast Beth Tweddle, as she prepares for her final Olympics. The 27-year-old has tasted success at World Championships, Commonwealth Games and European Championships over the last decade, but Olympic glory has continued to elude her



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BBC Eyewitness (Complete Series)



Xvid | 640x352 | 59m | 467.42MB

Part 1 of 3

Ten people are secretly filmed as they witness what they believe to be a real crime a knife attack in a Manchester pub. But when they are later interviewed by the police, their memories are radically different to each others and to what really happened.

In an extraordinary experiment with the Greater Manchester Police, the problem of eyewitness recollection is dramatically brought into focus, as are the remarkable techniques used by the modern police to counter our unreliable memories. Narrated by Philip Glenister.

Part 2 of 3

In the second programme of this series we discover how difficult it is for witnesses to identify suspects. When bystanders get caught up in a bungled armed robbery and one of them is kidnapped, what effect do weapons and fear have on their memories? High tech eye tracker cameras allow us to compare what witnesses remember from the crime with what they actually saw. The difference between recall and recognition is illustrated by witnesses who cant describe suspects they clearly saw, yet recognise suspects they cant describe. Narrated By Phillip Glenister.

Part 3 of 3

When the Only Witness Is Also the Victim Documentary examining how victims of crime often make unreliable witnesses, investigating the case of a man who served 11 years in prison for a rape he did not commit after being misidentified. The programme also studies how Stephanie Slater was able to lead police to her kidnapper despite being blindfolded for the duration of her captivity, and looks at the cutting-edge techniques used to gather uncontaminated evidence today. Last in the series.


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BBC George OrwellA Life in Pictures The Real Room 101 (2003)


George Orwell: A Life in Pictures
Broadcast: June 14th 2003
Channel: BBC4

Screenplay: Chris Durlacher & Paul Whittington
Director: Chris Durlacher

George Orwell: A Life in Pictures is an Emmy award winning 2003 BBC Television docudrama telling the life story of the British author George Orwell.

Using a bold and original approach to put him on the screen, Chris Langham plays the writer and every word he speaks is as written by Orwell himself. But the pictures are all ‘invented’ - a specially created ‘archive’ because there’s not a single frame of archive footage of Orwell in existence. Not even one word or one of his trademark hacking coughs on recorded audio. All that is left is one oil painting and a couple of hundred photographs. By bringing to life his extraordinary treasure trove of writing - nine books and some eight thousand pages of journalism, essays, diaries and letters - the film creates a unique dramatised biography of Orwell.

Written essays become authored documentary films shot in the style of the day; events described in diaries are ‘captured’ on home movies; and Movietone footage is manipulated to reveal Orwell in the trenches of the Spanish Civil War. From Eton and Burma to London and Paris, Orwell’s writing - poignant and polemical, scathing and sometimes just funny - is at last caught on film.



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BBC Charles Rennie Mackintosh A Modern Man



Charles Rennie Mackintosh, architect, designer and artist is celebrated around the world as one of the most significant talents to have emerged in the period from the mid 1890s to the late 1920s.He was one of the greatest, most original talents of this time and has been judged a precursor of firstly the modernist style and subsequently of the Art Deco movement. His legacy lives on all around us in his instantly recognizable style. A modern man takes a critical look at Mackintosh’s life and artistic career and the importance of the friends and patrons who provided him with regular work when it mattered most.

Influential critics, including the designer Terence Conran, give their views on Mackintosh’s current reputation. All are unanimous in their appreciation of “the complete designer”. Together, they recognize his importance as an influential architect of the 20th century and acknowledge that Charles Rennie Mackintosh was very much a modern man. This is the story of the man and his life and his work.



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BBC Modern Spies (2012)



In the first of two programmes, Peter Taylor looks at the real world of modern spies. For the first time on television, serving British secret agents talk about their work - from an MI6 agent runner to an MI5 surveillance officer. This time, Modern Spies investigates how today's spies are recruited and probes the secrets of spycraft, from the sleeper cell to the brush pass and the cut out to the cyber spy
In the second of two programmes, Peter Taylor looks at the real world of modern spies and investigates how far today's spies can go to prevent terrorist attacks. For the first time on television, serving British secret agents talk about their work. When does an undercover operation cross the line and become entrapment? Were British spies complicit in the rendition of terrorist suspects in Libya, where they were allegedly tortured? Do spies ever have a license to kill?


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BBC Leotards and Vests The Great British Workout (2012)


Leotards and Vests: The Great British Workout

Thursday 12 April
9.00pm - 10.00pm
BBC4

Bench presses, barbells, rowing machines and electric shock mittens - just some of the tortures revealed by Mark Benton in this funny look at the British way of keeping fit.


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BBC Dounreay The Atomic Dream (2006)



The story of the rise and fall of a daring experiment into atomic energy. At a time when nuclear is firmly back on the agenda, this documentary meets the original Dounreay pioneers and charts the high and lows in the history of one of Britain’s most ambitious scientific projects.


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BBC Panorama Murdochs TV Pirates (2012)


Panorama - Murdoch's TV Pirates

Vivian White reveals fresh allegations of hacking at the heart of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, this time involving its pay-TV services. The investigation examines the alleged role of former senior police officers in recruiting people to break the law in order to bring down one of the media mogul's commercial rivals. Postponed from Monday March 12


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