TV blog Feed

Must-see telly moments – on BBC iPlayer now

2016-06-01T09:05:11+00:00

Seals, skips and more send to all texts – catch these brill moments until Friday, 10 June on BBC iPlayer.

This emotional tale of a lost seal pup that’s as gripping as any drama

See the dangers facing seals and other animals in rural Scotland – Highlands – Scotland’s Wild Heart, BBC One Scotland

The best use of the word ‘shod’ you’ll hear this week (probably)

See how Nina’s fitting in – Love, Nina, BBC One

Alex Jones’ sheer range of emotions as Michael McIntyre types her ‘send to all’ message

Find out who replied – Michael McIntyre’s Big Show, BBC One

Ross Noble imagines Prince Harry’s life – as told by horses

See what else was discussed under host Gary Lineker’s watch – Have I Got News For You, BBC One

Trying to explain technology to your boyfriend’s mum

Get to know the new addition to the family, Kelly – Mum, BBC Two

Matt Lucas playing a donkey is everything you’d hope it would be

See his take on Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, BBC One

And finally, more confetti than an English country wedding at Radio 1’s Big Weekend

Watch performance highlights from the massive music event – BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend

And if you want to see what Springwatch’s Chris Packham picks out on BBC iPlayer this week you can watch Frank Skinner On Demand With...

The Great British Year: Our magic ingredient

2013-10-17T09:32:43+00:00

The changing seasons are something that makes Britain special: the lengthening days, the turning leaves, the first touch of frost.

These little signs are things that we naturally tune into – things that make our landscape unique.

In making The Great British Year, the team and I had to bring these moments to life on camera and, thankfully, today’s technology was a tool that helped like never before!

Perfect timing: Under a blanket of white a delicate flower makes its move

Much of the series relied on time-lapse filming - a technique that allows us to bring events in nature, that take many minutes, weeks or hours, to life - sometimes revealing things that would never have been obvious when viewed in normal time.

Take the story of the slime mould – one of my favourite characters in Autumn, the episode I produced.

Slime moulds look little more than blobs of yellow goo, yet they are fascinating and unique creatures that munch their way across the forest floor at about 1mm per second, clearing away bacteria from the leaf-litter.

The challenge was to bring their story to life and, for that, I called on expert time-lapse cameraman, Tim Shepherd.

Tim is no stranger to slime moulds, and using a carefully-constructed set where he could get in close with macro lenses and proper lighting, managed – over several weeks – to understand the slime mould’s behaviour and capture its remarkable life story through the lens.

Through time-lapse, a yellow blob comes to life as a moving, feeding character!

A dramatic time-lapse study of yellow slime mould as it crosses the forest floor searching for food

We also needed to capture events in the natural world that happen rapidly, and unpredictably... in places it would be too hard to reactively scramble a camera team.

For that, we cast the net out wide, to the nation’s fleet of amateur time-lapse photographers.

Technology today, means that almost anyone with a good-quality digital SLR camera can go out and shoot time-lapse – you can even do it on your mobile phone.

OK, the quality we needed had to stand up to broadcast level, but using Twitter and photography forums we began to tap into a network of time-lapse enthusiasts whose work was excellent, and who were ready and waiting in locations all across the UK.

One of these locations was the northernmost tip of Scotland – one of the only parts of Britain that witnesses the aurora.

Though clear to human eyes, the aurora is too faint for most cameras to film, but time-lapse, where each frame may be exposed for several seconds, allows enough light into the camera to capture the effect.

But predicting something so enigmatic is tricky, and it would have been very difficult for a camera crew to guarantee filming when conditions were right.

Enter Barry Stewart, a builder from Wick. Barry got in touch with the team via an online forum for amateur time-lapsers.

A keen photographer, Barry works as a joiner by day and by night, his hobby is filming with the time-lapse technique.

Barry had been photographing the night sky for a while, but one evening he happened to be out when an aurora was ‘playing’ overhead.

Aurora activity is related to sun activity, which works on a roughly 11-year cycle. It goes through phases with low activity (meaning auroras are relatively uncommon), and then phases when spectacular events occur.

In John O’Groats the 18-hour nights are the perfect backdrop for the aurora borealis

Over the following months, Barry – along with fellow Wick time-lapser Maciej Winiarczyk – went out many times in order to document the best aurora.

Some shots were made from the sea shore, others from the local golf course – but all involved braving long hours in the cold Scottish night!

By working with people on the ground, suddenly a sequence of the Northern Lights which we didn’t dare hope to achieve, became possible.

Barry, and our other time-lapse contributors added the magic ingredient to The Great British Year – capturing ephemeral, yet magical moments in our seasonal landscape that it would be impossible to plan for or predict.

It’s a wonderful demonstration of how passionate people are about documenting Britain’s landscape – it may be our backyard, but the seasonal events on our doorstep can be an inspiration to us all.

Elizabeth White is the producer of episode four of The Great British Year.

Barry Stewart features in the Making The Great British Year section at the end of episode three.

The Great British Year continues on Wednesday, 23 October at 9pm on BBC One and BBC One HD. For further programme times please see the episode guide.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Secret Knowledge: The Art Of Witchcraft

2013-09-10T10:00:25+00:00

My father Alexander Goudie (1933-2004) was an artist. He was well known for his paintings of landscapes, still lifes and portraits (which included Billy Connolly and the Queen).

However, the subject that fascinated him most was the character of a witch who features prominently in Robert Burns’ poem Tam o’Shanter.

My father had loved the poem since childhood and in the last 20 years of his life he concentrated on painting pictures that illustrated the tale and particularly its witch Nannie Dee.

‘It was so extreme even we thought he was mad’ Lachlan on his father’s obsession with Nannie Dee

I’m presenting The Art Of Witchcraft, part of BBC Four’s Secret Knowledge series. The programme tells the story of my father’s strange fascination but it also reveals how, for centuries, artists have regularly painted witches.

In many ways they are responsible for the image of a wrinkly old hag with a hooked nose and terrible warts which we are all familiar with today.

As a child I was always thrilled by my father’s depictions of Nannie on canvas. His enthusiasm for his subject was infectious. He would often recite the poem as he painted and play classical music loudly on the stereo to get himself into the mood.

Coming home from school I was always excited to see what he would have created that day.

Occasionally we would go on research trips at the weekend into Ayrshire where the poem is set. We would hardly have left the driveway before my father would start to describe our route along the notorious A77, an apparently devastating stretch of tarmac stained with the blood of countless accidents.

Once in character he would employ the windshield like some great cinema screen of inspiration, looking left and right but rarely straight ahead!

Examining how representations of the witch shifted from the political to the theatrical in the 18th Century

On one Saturday afternoon jaunt we stopped to visit an old friend of my father’s in his new cottage. The light was fading, the ‘wizard hour’, and I remember climbing the stairs to the bedroom by torchlight so we could inspect the shotgun pellets embedded in the ceiling – the mark of the previous occupant’s suicide.

This grim experience highlights something important about my father’s relationship with Nannie.

Although he enjoyed creating dramatic paintings he also wanted to terrify his audience with images of horror. As a child the poem had scared him and he wanted to communicate that essential part of Tam o’Shanter’s power to the viewer.

He used every trick he could from corpses swinging in the trees to stewed babies piled up in a cauldron. He would often test out his paintings on his family to see if they had the desired, shocking effect!

It has been emotional revisiting my father’s Tam o’Shanter legacy. His paintings and sketchbooks seem to bring him back to life for me.

I can still visualise him on one of those many trips to Ayrshire, clambering up to the windows of a ruined church with all the energy of an excited child and peering in. He was always searching for ideas and inspiration!

It is this same enthusiasm for the subject that I wanted to recapture in The Art Of Witchcraft: bringing witches to life with the help of some of history’s greatest artists!

Lachlan Goudie is the presenter of Secret Knowledge: The Art Of Witchcraft.

Secret Knowledge: The Art Of Witchcraft is on Wednesday, 11 September at 10pm on BBC Four. For further programme times, please see the episode guide.

More on The Art Of Witchcraft
BBC News Scotland: In pictures - Witches and wicked bodies
BBC Arts: Alexander Goudie and the witch from Robert Burns' poem

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Our Food: Exploring Britain's colourful history

2012-04-04T11:00:33+00:00

Our Food is a celebration of the nation's food - its origins, its tastes and the story it can tell us about our island's history.

I'm passionate about food and where it comes from.

At home I try and grow as many fruits and vegetables as the garden and greenhouse will allow and firmly believe the love and care put into the growing of food comes out in the flavour.

For me Our Food was an opportunity to extend that passion nationally and to explore the story of my favourite food and the people responsible for its production across Britain.

Alex Langlands meets Gwyn Thomas and his mountain sheep

You might think that as an archaeologist there isn't much call for my services in the food industry, but you'd be wrong.

Archaeologists - especially on TV - have been guilty of portraying archaeology in too narrow a light.

Over the last decade or so it has moved on as a discipline and has become so much more than a few trenches, some broken pottery and a handful of dusty old bones.

Archaeology is all about the material world around us and how to read that world.

Our own lives leave in their wake an archaeology of sorts, and even the most contemporary of industries leaves behind an archaeological record that can be studied in its own right.

The structured landscape of the world around us and the built environment are archaeological resources that can tell us a huge amount about ourselves.

For example I was amazed to discover in Scotland just how big the herring industry had been and how crucial to its growth the railways were.

The smokehouses of Mallaig, the dry stone walls of the Welsh valleys and the ancient field systems of Norfolk (all of which feature in the series) are all archaeological remnants of food-producing industries that have come to define these places and the people that occupy them.

What's more, before the Industrial Revolution the overwhelming majority of people in this country worked in a rural setting where their lives were intimately bound up with the production of one thing - food. So as an archaeologist you're never far from studying that which we have eaten and its centrality to our island's history.

In episode two, I got the opportunity to explore sheep farming in the mountains and valleys of Wales.

It's a way of life that really appeals to me. My host Gwyn was a true inspiration and I can honestly say that after a day striding around the valley I didn't want to leave.

Carving out a living in this harsh environment is all about working with the conditions - not against them - and the idea that sheep can be 'hefted' to the hills fascinates me.

A 'hefted' flock is a flock that knows their patch of the hillside and knows where to be and when. So much so that when the farmer comes to round them up all he needs is a dog and a whistle and the ancient knowledge passed down from generation to generation of sheep kicks in.

The flock slowly make their way, without the encouragement of a quad bike or the constraints of barbed wire, to a convenient place on the mountainside where they can be counted and checked - magic and timeless.

Alex visits Norfolk in episode two to examine the impact of the turnip

You'll see in episode one that I've always struggled to enthuse people about the turnip and just how important it has been to British farming.

So when I was asked to travel to Norfolk and explore the history of this humble vegetable and the role it still plays in agriculture, I was delighted.

This was a chance, once and for all, to spell out just how key it was to arable and livestock farming.

Turnips were introduced into crop rotations in the 18th Century to improve fertility in the soil, break the cycle of pests and disease and to support greater numbers of livestock.

The results of its introduction can hardly be understated and there's little doubt that without this simple root vegetable farming would never have been able to support the huge population growth of the 19th Century.

It was in Norfolk that it was really brought home to me just how important food is.

Its production and consumption permeate almost every aspect of our lives and its story can tell us so very much more than we think about Britain's colourful and extraordinary history.

Alex Langlands is one of the presenters of Our Food.

Our Food begins on Wednesday, 4 April at 8pm on BBC Two and BBC HD (except for analogue viewers in Northern Ireland and Wales). The series will be available to watch in iPlayer until Wednesday, 2 May. For more information about analogue television and the digital switchover please visit Help Receiving TV and Radio.

For further programme times, please see the episode guide.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.