BBC Documentaries Collection

BBC Tchaikovsky Fate



Xvid | 576x432 | 1:25:34 | 700MB

The second of two films by Christopher Nupen about the music and the artistic preoccupations of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky explores the composers fascination with his own fate in the composition of Manfred and the last three symphonies. There are no featured actors, just singers, dancers, musicians and an anonymous storyteller, whose strikingly poetic words frequently come from Tchaikovsky himself.


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BBC Stephen Fry On Wagner 2010



Stephen Fry explores his passion for controversial composer Richard Wagner. Can he salvage the music he loves from its dark association with Hitlers Nazi regime? His journey takes him to Germany, Switzerland and Russia as he pieces together the story of the composers career.

Along the way he plays Wagners piano, meets the composers descendants and eavesdrops on rehearsals for the Bayreuth Festival, the annual extravaganza of Wagners music held in a theatre designed by the composer himself.


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BBC Storyville Barbados at the Races (2010)



x264 | 832x468 | 29mins/ep | Parts:4 | Part~413MB

This four-part series looks at Barbados today through the lives – at work and at play – of the island’s horse racing community. The series is centred on the Barbados Turf Club and following the stories of a colourful cast of characters, from the big white owners at the top of the tree right down to the poor black exercise riders and grooms. The Club and its racecourse have been based at the former British Army Garrison on the edge of the island’s capital Bridgetown for over a hundred years. These quirky and, at times, spiritually-minded programmes look at how the culture of Barbados today, its institutions and the mindset of its people have been shaped by the colonial past and the legacy of and slavery.

Part 1: Bajan Born and Bred
This programme explores what it is to be Bajan (Barbadian) during the run-up to Independence Day. Jonathon Simpson owns a farm and breeding stables in the hills, where groom Pat Coward is kept busy breaking in yearlings for training. Meanwhile in St Ann’s Fort next to the Garrison Savannah the Barbados Defence Force’s top Sgt. Maj. Cherrol Dean is drilling his troops for the 43rd annual Independence Day Parade. The programme discusses the ways in which Bajans – human and equine alike – are both bred and nurtured and compares the experiences of single mothers Pat and army medic Safreya Small. This first programme finds an island influenced – but perhaps surprisingly not overshadowed – by its colonial past, with a sense of historical contradiction and ambiguity that is the heartbeat of the series.


Part 2: The Jockey’s Prayer
This part is about the lives of three very different riders and centres on the life of the Bajan jockey – the trials and deprivations of keeping on top of your game, the glory and glamour of success and the temptations and pitfalls that can come hand in hand with financial rewards. All these forces create a tight-knit community united by their mutual competitiveness and their love of the adrenaline-fuelled buzz of the track.

Part 3: Run Cat Run!
It is not so long ago that the stands at the Barbados Turf Club were racially segregated, and until very recently the club was the preserve of the mainly white, wealthier classes. Now, however, the race track has attracted a new breed of small trainer determined to break into this exclusive gentleman’s club. This is a tale of two trainers – one big, powerful and white, one small, cash-strapped and black – and shows that in the world of horse racing everyone can find themselves out of their depth.

Part 4: The Favourite
The Club and its racecourse have been based at the former British army garrison on the edge of the island’s capital, Bridgetown, for over a hundred years. The quirky and, at times, spiritually-minded series looks at how the culture of Barbados today, its institutions and the mindset of its people, have been shaped by the colonial past and the legacy of slavery. There are two big races a year at the Turf Club – the Gold Cup and the Derby. This programme follows the build up for the Derby through the eyes of those who have trained and groomed the clear favourite in preparation for this historic race. Areutalkintome is on the verge of becoming only the sixth horse in over a century to complete the Triple Crown – all he has to do is win the Derby. As those around Areutalkintome face up to their role in his success, the programme becomes about more than just horse-racing. It is about chance, predictability, life, death, fate and faith.

BBC Stealing Shakespeare



Xvid | 704x400 | 49mins | 701MB

The remarkable story of how a 53-year-old rare book dealer from the North East of England became the centre of a mystery surrounding the disappearance of a long lost Shakespeare First Folio.
The film follows bachelor Raymond Scott as he finds himself the focus of a worldwide investigation, involving the FBI, a Cuban fiancee and Durham CID. This is well worth watching,so funny in parts i know this guy he thinks he’s James Bond, he lives about 5km from me. (artistharry)


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BBC Secrets of the Arabian Nights (2011)



BBC Secrets of the Arabian Nights (2011)
x264 | 832×468 | 59mins | 633MB

The Arabian Nights arrived in the West 300 years ago and its stories have entranced generations of children and seduced adults with a vision of an exotic, magical Middle East. Richard E Grant wants to know why the book he loved as a child still has such a hold on our imagination. He travels to Paris to discover how the stories of Sinbad, Ali Baba and Aladdin were first brought to the West by the pioneering Arabist Antoine Galland in the early 18th century. The Nights became an overnight literary sensation and were translated into all the major European languages. In Cairo, Richard explores the medieval Islamic world which first created them and finds that some of the stories are still controversial because of their sexually-explicit content. Richard meets the Egyptian writer Gamal al Ghitani, who received death threats when he published a new edition of the book, and finds that the ribald and riotous stories in the Nights represent a very different view of Islam than fundamentalism.


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Subtitles: eng

BBC Pompeii Life and Death in a Roman Town (2010)



Xvid | 720×416 | 59mins | 746MB

Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town
Pompeii: one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in history. We know how its victims died, but this film sets out to answer another question – how did they live? Gleaning evidence from an extraordinary find, Cambridge professor and Pompeii expert Mary Beard provides new insight into the lives of the people who lived in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius before its cataclysmic eruption.
In a dark cellar in Oplontis, just three miles from the centre of Pompeii, 54 skeletons who didn’t succumb to the torrent of volcanic ash are about to be put under the microscope. The remains will be submitted to a barrage of tests that will unlock one of the most comprehensive scientific snapshots of Pompeian life ever produced – and there are some big surprises in store. Using the latest forensic techniques it is now possible to determine what those who perished in the disaster ate and drank, where they came from, what diseases they suffered, how rich they were, and perhaps, even more astonishingly, the details of their sex lives.
The way the remains were found in the cellar already provides an invaluable clue about the lives of the people they belonged to. On one side of the room were individuals buried with one of the most stunning hauls of gold, jewellery and coins ever found in Pompeii. On the other, were people buried with nothing. It looked the stark dividing line of a polarised ancient society: a room partitioned between super rich and abject poor. But on closer examination the skeletons reveal some surprises about life in Pompeii.



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BBC Saving Britains Past Series 1 (Complete)



Series charting the development of the conservation movement in Britain since the Second World War.

Episode 1: The City (24th August 2009)

Architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff describes how Bath, widely regarded as Britain?s most beautiful city, was almost destroyed by Hitler?s bombs, before narrowly escaping further damage from developers. Plus, a look at the birth of the listings system.

Episode 2: Streets in the Sky (31st August 2009)

Tom Dyckhoff visits the most controversial listed building in Britain: the Park Hill flats in Sheffield. Although it was once heralded as the most pioneering public housing scheme in Britain, decades of decline and neglect have transformed it into a grim sink estate. Now it?s protected by English Heritage and raises questions about what we should be saving for the nation.

Episode 3: The Country House (7th September 2009)

Tom Dyckhoff explores the decline of the country house and its fight for survival. He visits Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire to see how its owners have saved a family home from destruction. Features interviews with Sir Roy Strong and the Dowager, Duchess of Devonshire.

Episode 4: The Market (14th September 2009)

Tom Dyckhoff tells the story of the battle for Covent Garden market and how its residents and workers took on the planners and won. For the first time in over forty years, we hear from the main protagonists in the Covent Garden story, all still passionate about telling their side of the story.

Episode 5: The Pit (21st September 2009)

Tom Dyckhoff visits Big Pit in South Wales to see how a mining community used industrial heritage to reinvent itself and ended up becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Episode 6: The Crofters (28th September 2009)

Tom Dyckhoff visits Assynt, a small community in the highlands of Scotland, where the land reform movement began in the 90s. Their struggle to end a centuries old system of private land ownership has raised new problems as they attempt to develop one of the most beautiful parts of the UK.

Episode 7: The Street (12th October 2009)

This is the story of an extraordinary London street. Often fractious, never dull, Brick Lane encapsulates everything that 21st-century multicultural Britain should be. Tom Dyckhoff tells its rollercoaster story through the people who have lived, worked and played there, and asks whose street it is anyway.



Sample Screens

BBC Nuremberg Nazis on Trial (2006)



DVDRip | Xvid | 720x544 | 29.97fps | 1539kbps | MP3 | 48kHz | stereo | 104kbps | 3x700Mb | ~60 min each
Subtitles: Portuguese (SubRip)


In the first episode, Nathaniel Parker plays the most inscrutable Nazi on trial at Nuremberg, Hitlers architect and armaments minister Albert Speer. He was the only defendant who unreservedly accepted responsibility for the Nazis crimes. But was Speers remorse genuine or just a clever defense strategy to get off the hook? The film tells the intriguing behind-the scenes-story of Speers trial and his showdown with unrepentant rival, Hermann Goering. The second episode tells the story of the trial of Hermann Goering, Hitlers charismatic and ruthless second-in-command. On trial for his life at Nuremberg, the unrepentant Reich Marshal turned the tables on the Allies. So much so that Chief Prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson began to wish the Allies had followed Churchills suggestion and shot the leading Nazis out of hand. This documentary drama traces the behind-the-scenes story of Goerings attempt to re-ignite Nazism from the courtroom and reveals the role that Jewish psychologist, Gustave Gilbert played in Goerings final defeat. In the third and final episode, Ben Cross delivers a compelling performance as Hitlers deputy, Rudolf Hess. After his bizarre flight to Scotland in 1941 to offer peace to Britain, the Fuehrer had Hess declared insane. At Nuremberg, Hesss fitness for trial was at the center of his case. He claimed not to remember his Nazi past and seemingly suffered from paranoid delusions. American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley and prison psychologist Gustave Gilbert sought to unlock the mystery of Hesss state of mind. What they found offers revealing insights into the psychology of Nazism.


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BBC Natural World One Million Snake Bites (2011)



x264 | 1280x720 | 58mins | 1.71GB

From the giant King Cobra to the tiny saw scaled viper, India is home to many of the world’s deadliest snakes. Now a new report has revealed that India is in the middle of a snakebite epidemic of epic proportions, with a loss of human life far in excess of any official figures.
Armed with more than forty years of field experience, snake expert Romulus Whitaker and his team set out on a journey around India to investigate the natural history behind these chilling new statistics and to see what can be done to help India’s people and ultimately, its snakes.




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BBC My Kid Could Paint That



XviD | 624x352 23.98fps | MP3 | 75 mins | 700 MB

What begins as a charming celebration of childhood creativity takes a dark turn in My Kid Could Paint That, a compelling documentary that leaves you wondering if there is nothing sacred in this stinking world. Is four-year-old Marla Olmstead a Picasso in the making, or did father Mark have a hand in the remarkable abstract paintings that made her a global sensation? Director Amir Bar-Lev isnt sure, and neither are we at the end of this unsettling real-life portrait.

Perky and precocious, its not surprising this baby Jackson Pollock from Binghamton, New York became a tabloid darling whose colourful canvases changed hands for tens of thousands of dollars. Once the whiff of scandal got attached to her story, however, Marla became the centre of a media witchhunt. Invited by the Olmsteads to film their daughter at play in order to refute allegations her creations were phoney, the director found to his dismay his footage only strengthened the evidence against her. The piece thus becomes as much about Bar-Lev himself as he struggles to reconcile his affection for the family and the trust they have placed in him with his determination to uncover a potentially unpalatable truth.


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BBC My Big Decision Revisited (2009)



XviD | 608x336 | Runtime: 57min | 465MB


As My Big Decision, part of BBC3 The Adult Season, draws to a close, this final episode takes a look back at the journeys that some of the teenagers went on in a bid to make their big decision. In each episode, two teens took a break from everyday life and, along with their mothers and their grandmothers, embarked on a five day road trip across the UK, immersing themselves in the grown-up world of pregnancy, cosmetic surgery, sex and binge drinking. It was the last chance the older women had to persuade the teenagers to really think about making the right choice.

This edition catches up with Chantelle and Lydia, who were both desperate to have a baby; Riah and Shauny, who were thinking about losing their virginity; Kat, Kianna and Sam, who were unhappy with their bodies and wanted to go under the surgeons knife; and Jess, who binge drank 79 units of alcohol every weekend, which led to numerous, unprotected one night stands.

The teens relate what they are doing now and what they really thought about the radical road trip they shared with their families. Do they still stand by the decisions they made or have they gone ahead and done the things their mums and grandmothers were trying to persuade them against doing?




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BBC Diana the Last Day (1997)



XviD | 528x400 | 40mins | 700MB

BBC journalist Jane Corbin gives a detailed, chronological report on the

last day in the life of Diana, Princess of Wales. She interviews everyone

involved in those last 24 hours in Paris: the French doctor who gave the

dying princess first aid; the only surviving passenger in that ill-fated

Mercedes, Dodis bodyguard; and some of the pursuing

reporters/photographers.

First aired on 15 September 1997 in the BBC Panorama series.
Unfortunately, the quality of this TV-to-VHS recording can only be


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BBC Tchaikovsky Women



Xvid | 576x432 | 1:10:08 | 650MB

The first of two films by Christopher Nupen about the music and the artistic preoccupations of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky covers the period from the first tentative stirrings of Tchaikovsky’s musical talent to the composition of his opera Eugene Onegin and the disastrous failure of his marriage to Antonina Milyukova.

It looks at the women who fired his musical imagination in the early years, from Katerina Kabanova in his first orchestral work, The Storm, to his dearly loved Tatyana in Onegin. There are, however, natural correspondences with the women in his private life – his mother Alexandra, his governess Fanny Durbach, the Belgian opera singer Desiree Artot, Antonina Milyukova and his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck.

Up to the time of his marriage the prime source of inspiration for much of his best music lay in Tchaikovskys deep identification with the fate of his vulnerable young heroines. All through his life he was preoccupied with the idea of fate and in the beginning it was the fate of these young women that touched him most – Katerina in The Storm, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Francesca in Francesca da Rimini and above all Tatyana in Eugene Onegin. His identification with Tatyana was so complete that it had a direct influence on his decision to marry Antonina Milyukova with such unhappy consequences.

The film features Cynthia Harvey and Mark Silver, both principal dancers with the Royal Ballet, as well as Welsh soprano Helen Field and Swedish Soprano Clarry Bartha. The music is performed by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy.


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BBC Britains Park Story (2010)



x264 | 832x480 | 59mins | 759MB

Historian Dan Cruickshank reveals the history of Britains public parks. He travels the country to discover their evolution a story of class, civic pride, changing fashions in sport and recreation which helps re-evaluate the amazing assets they are. From their civic heyday in the 19th century to the neglect of the 1980s and their resurgence today, the film is a fascinating and entertaining history of an often-overlooked great British invention.



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BBC Attenborough and the Giant Egg (2011)



x264 | 1280x720 | 59mins | 1.72GB

David Attenborough returns to the island of Madagascar on a very personal quest. In 1960 he visited the island to film one of his first ever wildlife series, Zoo Quest. Whilst he was there, he acquired a giant egg. It was the egg of an extinct bird known as the ‘elephant bird’ – the largest bird that ever lived. It has been one of his most treasured possessions ever since.
Fifty years older, he now returns to the island to find out more about this amazing creature and to see how the island has changed. Could the elephant bird’s fate provide lessons that may help protect Madagascar’s remaining wildlife?
Using Zoo Quest archive and specially shot location footage, this film follows David as he revisits scenes from his youth and meets people at the front line of wildlife protection. On his return, scientists at Oxford University are able to reveal for the first time how old David’s egg actually is – and what that might tell us about the legendary elephant bird.


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