Season 2003 2003

TV-PG

Documentary on Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's historic ascent of Everest in 1953. Including previously unseen material filmed on the expedition, and interviews with surviving members of the team and members of the rival Swiss team.

Step back in time and visit the "vanished city" on its last day, as the mighty volcano Vesuvius explodes in a 24-hour reign of terror. On August 24th, AD79, Pompeii's citizens witness day turning into night as 4 billion tons of pumice, rock, and ash burst forth from Vesuvius. Pompeii: The Last Day uses archaeological evidence, including the writings of one survivor, to unravel the mystery of those final hours. Lavish special effects reconstruct each stage of Vesuvius's cataclysmic eruption and its impact on soldiers, slaves, families, and lovers as they struggle with the unfolding tragedy. One of the greatest natural disasters - and most fateful days - comes to vivid life in this critically acclaimed dramatization.

The Colosseum in Rome is one of the world's most amazing buildings. This immense oval stadium was home to the most violent and deadly spectator sport in history, gladiatorial combat. The Roman gladiator whose story is told here is Verus, one of two victors in the only gladiatorial battle that was ever described in detail (by the Roman poet Martial in 80 A.D.). Using this factual record as its basis, Colosseum follows Verus as he is recruited from slavery, trained in gladiator's school, rises to favor among wealthy Romans, and ultimately battles his best friend, Priscus, to a crowd-pleasing draw in the inaugural games of glorious, brand-new Colosseum, the construction of which is shown in fascinating detail. Combining authoritative narration with diary-like voiceovers from Verus's perspective, this riveting 50-minute BBC production is simultaneously intimate and epic in scale, employing the latest in digital compositing techniques to achieve its unparalleled visual splendor. With well-cast actors speaking authentic Latin, this sumptuous production is both dramatically involving and exacting in every detail.

A documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, responsible for creating some of the most memorable television and radio music in British popular culture, including "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and "Doctor Who" (1963).

This documentary reveals a very different Isaac Newton from that of popular myth – a much more fascinating and complex man than the powder-wigged puritan of the history books.

The United States and Britain are preparing to wage war on Iraq, for its undisclosed weapons of mass destruction.
Israel's nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities have remained un-inspected.

Meanwhile Mordechai Vanunu has been imprisoned for 16 years for exposing Israel's secret nuclear bomb factory to the world.

Vanunu is seen as a traitor in his own country.

He has been abandoned by most of his family and has spent 11 years in solitary confinement.

Today only an American couple, who have legally adopted him, are among the few visitors he is permitted.

This film is the story of the bomb, Vanunu and Israel's wall of silence.

Part of the BBC Correspondent Series

Nicolae Ceausescu created a unique personality cult in the 1970s and 1980s, transforming communist Romania into one of the strangest regimes Europe has ever seen. Newspapers had to mention his name 40 times on every page, factory workers spent months rehearsing dance routines dressed as soldiers and gymnasts for huge shows at which thousands of citizens were lined up to form the words Nicolae Ceausescu with their bodies.

When the Romanian economy and living standards plummeted in the 1980s, the line between theatre and life blurred completely. Ceausescu went on working visits to the countryside where he inspected displays of meat and fruit made out of polystyrene, and closer to home began work on what would have been the largest palace in the world. At the final parade in 1989, workers walked past their leader to the sound of taped chants and applause.

Using Ceausescu's own archive of 35mm propaganda films, King of Communism offers a surprising and chilling view of the absurd world of the Romanian dictator's regime.

"This is a real-life communist version of Springtime for Hitler," says director Ben Lewis. "It's an all-singing, all-dancing unmasking of the illusions of communism, but it's also a serious study of the experience, effects and legacy of the twentieth century's most destructive political system."

The Victoria Cross: For Valour is a 2003 BBC television historical documentary presented by Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson examines the history of the Victoria Cross, and follows the story of one of the 1,354 men who were awarded it - Major Robert Henry Cain. The main part of the programme was to describe how in September 1944, Major Cain won what was described as the "finest Victoria Cross of the whole war" (Second World War) by his commanding officer Lt Col Derek Mcnally. It’s only at the end of the programme that it is revealed that Clarkson is married to the Major’s daughter who had no idea that her father was a VC winner until after his death in 1974.

This hour long documentary from BBC Three follows the award-winning reporter-sleuth Greg Palast on the trail of the Bush family, from Florida election finagling, to the Saudi connection, to the Bush team's spiking the FBI investigation of the bin Laden family and the secret State Department plans for post-war Iraq. These are the hard-hitting reports that have been seen in films like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, broadcast internationally on BBC Newsnight television, and are found in Palast's international bestselling book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Towering Ambitions: Dan Cruickshank at Ground Zero is a documentary film in which, 2-years on from the 9/11 attacks, Dan Cruickshank examines plans for the World Trade Center site.

The extraordinary story of how the 19-year-old Mary Shelley created Frankenstein, one of the world's most terrifying monsters. Daughter of Mary Woolstencraft, wife of Percy Byshe Shelley and close friend to Lord Byron, Mary Shelley's life was every bit as extraordinary as her most famous work. Dramatising the adventures, love affairs and tragedies of her young life, the film shows how her monstrous creation reflected her own extraordinary experiences.

When US police investigated a double murder in the 1980s, they had no idea they were about to uncover the most daring trail of forgery and deception America had ever seen.

Mark Hofmann dared to forge on a level previously undreamt of as he manufactured historic documents at the core of the American constitution and history. And he fooled everyone - the FBI, the CIA, the Library of Congress, even the best forensic experts in the world and his own wife.

Hofmann's story begins in Salt Lake City and a growing hatred of the Mormon church - a hatred which would lead him to his first criminal acts designed to dupe a society only too willing to believe tall tales. And it's a perfect training ground for his ultimate goal - to make a fortune and fool America itself. Ultimately however, his ambition turns to murder.

Forty years ago autism was a highly obscure disorder which was thought to affect only four to five children in every 10,000, but now some British teachers are claiming to see it in one in every 86 children. Is there an epidemic of autism, and what's causing it?

The documentary looks at the history of the condition, and current research into cause and treatment. It includes interviews with some of the world's leading experts on autism.

Profile of the Italian fashion designer who has provided outfits for everyone from Jacqui O to Mick J and, as a long-time movie-buff, dressed the stars of countless films.

On the 300th anniversary of the founding of St Petersburg, historian and author Orlando Figes explores the life of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky who was commissioned by the Tsar to document his vast realm on film; and presents a striking visual portrait, both of Russia on the eve of revolution and St Petersburg today.

To coincide with the 50th anniversary of his death, this documentary presents an intimate portrait of one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century, including fresh evidence about his relationships with women, his family and his inner circle.

St Paul - for BBC1 in June 2003, this one hour documentary, presented by Jonathan Edwards, looked at the story of St Paul, and aimed to reveal the background to the story of Paul. The programme used dramatised reconstruction, computer graphics and location filming.

My Family and Autism is a documentary with an upbeat look at the daily life of the Jackson family. Jacqui Jackson has four sons and three daughters, and all her boys are on the autistic spectrum. 14-year-old Luke guides us through their family life.

Luke tells us what he thought about the BBC filming his family, we find out about the spectacles with colored lenses that he and his brother Joe tried out during filming, there are details of the diet that the boys are on to alleviate some of their symptoms and Joe is given a camera to capture the family at home.

The ruined Roman fort at Richborough in Kent contains a vast and mysterious slab of concrete, 30ft deep, which resembles a mausoleum or a strong room. In a fascinating programme based on informed detective work, the chief executive of English Heritage, Simon Thurley, shows how it was the foundation of a monumental arch built between AD80 and AD90. The arch, a symbolic gateway between land and sea, was covered in 400 tonnes of marble and surmounted by an emperor cast in bronze. The bulk and splendour would have reminded everyone for miles around what it meant to belong to the Roman Empire.

With 1984 having recently been revealed to be the book that people are most likely to have lied about having read it is worth remembering the man who wrote it, George Orwell. He remains perhaps the single most important literary voice of the 20th century. Unlike his contemporary left-wing writers Orwell actually became one of the dispossessed for whom he strove throughout his life and, consequently, was able to challenge ivory-tower intellectual leftism from a position of strength and knowledge. When the people of Spain rose up against fascism he did not write pamphlets in their support but picked up a rifle and went to fight. He combined a desire for revolution (which he believed to be the only way to improve the lot of the poor) with a fiery patriotism which celebrated the best things about the country and derided the worst. He was an idealist who was prepared to accept pragmatic realities. All this comes across with great force in George Orwell: A Life in Pictures.

Made by or for BBC4 in 2003 A Life in Pictures is a fascinating film which straddles the boundary between cinema and documentary. Orwell died in 1950 after the completion of his magnum opus 1984. Despite having lived in a time in which motion picture cameras and audio recording equipment were generally available there is no film of him and not one single recording of his voice survives anywhere. The film is an attempt to create a visual record of George Orwell's life. Orwell himself is played by Chris Langham who does a masterful job of bringing the author to life and not only that but looks so like him that in many photographs it is sometimes impossible to tell whether you are looking at the actor or the original.

The point is made early on that while the pictures are invented the words are not and everything that Langham (as Orwell) says during the film is something that Orwell wrote. It is a testament to Orwell's writing that it can be spoken by an actor and sound convincingly like the answer

A detailed account of the IRA’s attempt to blow up Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet.

Profile of the great British contralto Kathleen Ferrier. Contributors include Janet Baker, George Christie, Evelyn Barbirolli and Ian Jack.

A one-off documentary in which ex-drug user Carl John turned a camera on his own world and film his crack-addicted friends. With the co-operation of three prostitutes he'd known since children, he told the stories of Tanya, Nicky and Virginia

Dolly Parton is one of the world's great superstars, feted for her figure as much as for her music. Platinum Blonde goes inside her world to discover the woman under the wigs as she returned to the concert stage in the UK in 2002 after an absence of 20 years. Born into grinding poverty in rural Tennessee, Dolly has risen to the top of her tree in music, films and as a businesswoman who owns her own theme park.
Friends, family and colleagues - including Lily Tomlin, Kenny Rogers, Billy Connolly, Dabney Coleman and Alison Krauss - help tell her story, along with the full and frank views of Dolly herself. With cameo appearances from Sinead O'Connor, Norah Jones, Jonathan Ross and Terry Wogan.

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11th 1973, two jets launched a deadly attack on the Presidential Palace of La Moneda in the heart of Santiago, Chile. The result was fire, the suicide of President Salvador Allende and ultimately the death or disappearance of over three thousand people. "Chile: The Other 9/11" pieces together the dramatic hour-by-hour events of the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power and marked a turning point in the Cold War.

Andrew Graham-Dixon considers the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter and poet who reinvented the Victorian ideal of female beauty... and who dug up his wife's coffin to retrieve poems he had buried with her. (2003)

In this 2003 BBC4 programme Francine Stock does a quick recap of Noam Chomsky's career as a pre-eminent figure in the field of linguistics and outspoken controversial political activist. But the main interview explores his critiques of western imperialist amp; corporate power and how he views it as being maintained through the media as well as advocating the use of popular world opinion as a potent counterforce in opposing the powerful elites and their servants.

How an obscure Soviet camera conceived at the height of the Cold War inspired a huge following.

Are sharks robotic killing machines or intelligent animals, capable of complex behaviour? Roboshark, an animatronic shark with a camera is used to film the behaviour of sharks.

The extraordinary yet true account of a secret US government-backed attempt to build a spaceship the size of an ocean liner and send it to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, propelled by thousands of miniature nuclear bombs.

Beginning in 1958 Project Orion ran until 1965, employing some of the best scientists in the world, including the brilliant British mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson. "Freeman Dyson is one of the few authentic geniuses I've ever met", says Arthur C. Clarke. "Orion isn't crazy. It would work. The question isn't whether we could do it, but whether we should do it".

Gil Scott-Heron was one of the most influential musicians and poets of the last 50 years. In Don Letts's documentary, Gil tells his own story for the first time - from being one of the first black children to integrate an all-white Southern state school to becoming the Godfather of Rap. There are contributions from Chuck D, Mos Def, Richie Havens and the Last Poets, among others. Filmed in October 2003, Gil performs live and recites poetry out on the streets of Harlem, which have inspired so much of his music.

How did Hitler, Franco and Mussolini manipulate the beautiful game? Gary Lineker and Real Madrid's Alfredo Di Stefano are among the contributors.

Dramatised documentary which analyses the catastrophe and national tragedy that could happen to Britain if its already over-burdened transport systems reached breaking point. Set in the future on 19 December 2003 and presented as if it were a retrospective documentary made subsequently, complete with mock archive footage and hindsight interviews.

There have been many twists and turns in the journey of the controversial Eurofighter Typhoon.

Conceived at the height of the Cold War by the UK, Germany, Italy and France to combat the superiority of the Soviet Union's air force, the aircraft's in-service delivery date of 30 June is ten years late and -- at a cost of more than £50 billion -- it's become the most expensive European defence project ever.

The work of an unprecedented number of nations, the aircraft's troubled genesis has seen out the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bosnia, 9/11 and two Gulf wars.

France dropped out in 1985 in favour of building a rival plane, the Rafale, and each change of strategy and political environment has left a legacy of compromise, escalating costs, manufacturing blunders, loose management and delays.

The documentary exposes several crises where the project nearly came to a halt because of national self-interest and stubbornness and covers the calamitous events of 2002, the year when the first aircraft was due to be handed over to the Air Forces for training purposes.

First the delivery date was postponed yet again and then the Spanish prototype, the DA-6, crash-landed near Madrid at a cost of £30 million prompting the governments of the four nations to delay the delivery date to June 2003.

This 50 minutes documentary, produced by The Open University for BBC FOUR, talks to many key players involved in the drama of building a cutting-edge combat aircraft.

Test pilots think the Eurofighter is "a deadly machine" and military experts point out that its ability to switch role by voice command, enabling it to fight air-to-air as well as air-to-surface battles, in all weathers, makes it the most sophisticated fighter-bomber of its age.

But some, like defence analyst Susan Willett, think the plane is outdated and an embarrassment for the RAF.

There are interviews with the test pilots, with Malcolm Rifkind (UK Defence Secretary 1992-95) and with Andr

This documentary was made by the BBC to celebrate the 40th anniversary of "Doctor Who". It features extensive interviews with the four remaining Doctors, interviews with various other members of the cast and crew, and many clips from the series showing the best of the dangerous and exotic monsters that did battle with 'The Doctor' over the previous four decades.

It was introduced by Jon Culshaw, who impersonated the Fourth Doctor.

Professor Richard Dawkins spearheaded the biggest intellectual revolution of the past 20 years - but are his views still valid?

Documentary recalling the revolution in British advertising during the 60s and three men who were instrumental in bringing it about. David Puttnam, Alan Parker and Charles Saatchi, who all worked for the same agency, were among the first to recognise the social changes, with the emphasis on individualism, which were taking place, and the style of advertising needed to appeal to the new breed of customer.