The Best Music Day - Bad Meets Evil & Bruno Mars – Lighters Daisy Goodwin delves into one of the most successful literary genres - romantic fiction. From Jane Austen to the present day, via Mills & Boon, this three-part series explores the enduring appeal of the love story and the integral part it plays in readers' lives.
HAPPILY EVER AFTER Jilly Cooper, Joanna Trollope, Sophie Kinsella and Marian Keyes contribute to this episode looking at how the romantic fiction industry has grown and why it remains so popular. Daisy performs a scientific experiment to explore whether reading romantic novels can lower stress levels.
HEROES Daisy Goodwin finds that heroes of the 19th century - Darcy, Rochester and Heathcliff remain firm favourites for today's women. She creates an E-Fit of her Mr Darcy and goes to America in search of Rhett Butler from Gone with the Wind. Interviews with P D James, Joanna Trollope and Andrew Davies.
HEROINES Contrary to what cynics might expect, romantic heroines have both reflected the times and have been role models for women. Daisy visits the set of the BBC's new Jane Eyre and spends a day with a Yorkshire book group. With Barbara Taylor-Bradford, Sophie Kinsella and Marina Warner.
Light Fantastic explores the phenomenon that surrounds and affects nearly every aspect of our lives but one which we take for granted - light.
1. Let There be Light Monday 7 August 2006 1.50am-2.50am (Sunday night) Greek and Arab scholars, and later Europeans such as Descartes and Newton all tried to understand light to gain a better understanding of God. Episode one shows how much of modern science's origins came from the desire to penetrate the divine nature of light.
2. The Light of Reason Tuesday 8 August 2am-3am (Monday night) The second programme explores the link between the development of practical tools that manipulate light and the emergence of new ideas. For example, Galileo's observation that the sun did not go around the earth, was made with a telescope that had been invented for Venetian soldiers and traders.
3. The Stuff of Light Wednesday 9 August 2am-3am (Tuesday night) Episode three charts the discovery of the true nature of light and its impact on the modern world. All of today's technologies - electricity, mobile communications and our ability to illuminate the world 24 hours a day - stem from unravelling the mystery of light.
4. Light, The Universe and Everything Thursday 10 August 2am-3am (Wednesday night) In the final programme Simon Schaffer finds that as more people were able to manipulate light, the more puzzling and tricky it became. This led to investigations into the strange relationship between light, the eye and the mind, and the development of new technology such as photography and cinema.
Colourful series marking the 200th anniversary of one of the most explosive and creative decades in British history. It presents a vivid portrait of an age of elegance presided over by a prince of decadence - the infamous Prince Regent himself, a man with legendary appetites for women, food and self-indulgence. Yet this was the same man who would rebuild London, carving out the great thoroughfare of Regent Street and help establish the Regency look as the epitome of British style through his extravagant patronage of art and design.
In this first episode, historian Dr Lucy Worsley chronicles the Regency's early years, which culminated in victory over Napoleon in 1815, and explores the complicated character of the Prince Regent, a man with legendary appetites for women, food, art and self-indulgence.
For Lucy, the Regency was an age of contradictions and extremes that were embodied in the person of the Prince Regent himself. She uncovers Prince George's modest childhood; bright and talented, the young George was beaten with a whip by his tutors and it was small wonder that he would later rebel, eventually embracing a scandal-ridden lifestyle that included illegal marriages and discarded mistresses.
So how did this overweight popinjay preside over an age in which art and culture mattered? A tour of his treasures in the Royal Collection shows Lucy that George was a genuine connoisseur, buying up Rembrandts and French furnishings while his excesses were at the same time inspiring satirical caricatures that mocked him as the 'Prince of Whales'. And she investigates George's collaboration with portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, who left the definitive images of Regency society and became George's flatterer-in-chief; Regency wags laughed at how his paintings magically transformed an overweight bald fifty-something into a 'well-fleshed Adonis'.
Meanwhile, the long war with France was having a huge impact on the British psyche; travel and trade with Europe were impossibly restricted. Lucy follows in the footsteps of painter JMW Turner who, unable to travel to the continent, toured the south coast in 1811 and captured startling images of a country at war. George liked to think of himself as a man of fashion, and Lucy takes us through surviving accounts from his tailors that reveal his shopaholic ways. These were the years in which the Prince's sometime friend Beau Brummell, the famous dandy, ruled fashionable London like a dictator, and Lucy samples a bit of butch Regency style by trying on some of the fashions he popularised, as well as joining Brummell biographer Ian Kelly on a tour of London's fashionable Regency haunts. She also discovers Brummell's spectacular fall from favour, after loudly referring to the Regent as someone's 'fat friend'.
Lucy visits the battlefield of Waterloo and discovers that the site became a prototype of battlefield tourism - Turner, Byron and many others all visited in the years after the battle and Lucy handles some grisly memorabilia purchased by Lord Byron.
The episode concludes with the most spectacular royal art commission of them all - Lawrence's series of paintings in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, paid for by George to memorialise his victory over Napoleon. Never mind that George wasn't at any of the battles - this was an age in which appearance and reality fused together to create monumental art.
This two-part scientific detective tale tells the story of a remarkable group of pioneers who wanted to reach the ultimate extreme: absolute zero, a place so cold that the physical world as we know it doesn't exist, electricity flows without resistance, fluids defy gravity and the speed of light can be reduced to 38 miles per hour.
Each film features a strange cast of eccentric characters, including: Clarence Birds Eye; Frederic 'Ice King' Tudor, who founded an empire harvesting ice; and James Dewar, who almost drove himself crazy by trying to liquefy hydrogen.
Absolute zero became the Holy Grail of temperature physicists and is considered the gateway to many new technologies, such as nano-construction, neurological networks and quantum computing. The possibilities, it seems, are limitless.
