The Diamond Queen
Three-part series, Mondays 9pm
BBC One
Andrew Marr presents a three-part documentary series looking at the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth II, with special interviews and remarkable archive footage. Parts 1 and 2 are still available on iPlayer; part 3 will be shown on Monday 20th February.
The Art of Monarchy
Saturdays 10.30-11am, episode 2 of 8
Radio 4
Will Gompertz continues his exploration of 1,000 years of British monarchs, through the objects they acquired.
In today's programme Will puts the Royal Collection on a war footing, as he examines six very different items covering 700 years. Together they show how the monarchy has rallied their subjects for war and endeavoured to keep the peace.
Archive of 4: Attention All Shipping
Saturday 18th February, 8-9pm
Radio 4
With the help of the BBC Archive, Peter Jefferson presents an elegy to the Radio 4 programme that inspires as it informs, the mundane but strangely beguiling Shipping Forecast.
Lucian Freud: Painted Life
Saturday 18 Feb, 9-10.30pm
BBC Two
Considered the greatest realist artist since the Second World War, Lucian Freud agreed to this landmark BBC Two documentary by award-winning director Randall Wright only months before he died in July 2011.
Broadcast to coincide with the long-awaited exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery in February 2012, the film explores Freud’s life and work, from his childhood escape from Hitler in 1934, through the bohemian early years in 50s and 60s London, to international adulation in old age.
Barbara Thompson: Playing Against Time
Sunday 19th February, 9-10.15pm
BBC Four
BBC Four’s Jazz Weekend comes to an end with the first television broadcast of Barbara Thompson: Playing Against Time, a moving and powerful exploration of Parkinson’s disease, seen through the prism of music. Featuring the virtuoso UK jazz saxophonist/composer Barbara Thompson and her husband, the brilliant jazz-rock drummer Jon Hiseman.
Interweaving musical and medical sequences and directed by the award-winning arts documentary film maker Mike Dibb, the film follows five years of Barbara’s inspiring struggle with Parkinson’s and her search for various available treatments which, until now, have allowed her to continue to play with her own band Paraphernalia and Jon’s rock band Colosseum.
The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff
Monday 20 February, 8.30-9pm
BBC Two
The Bleak Old Shop Of Stuff resumes tonight with the first of three half hour episodes following on from the Christmas Special.
The comedy adventure is set in the Dickensian world of Jedrington Secret-Past, played by Robert Webb. Jedrington is a fine, upstanding family man and the owner of The Old Shop of Stuff, Victorian London's most successful purveyor of miscellaneous odd things.
Junior Doctors: Your Life in Their Hands
Tuesdays 9-10pm
BBC ThreeThis ongoing series is worth catching on iPlayer if you've missed any. This is episode 5: the junior doctors have settled into their placements, but working anti-social hours and the hectic pace of hospital life is beginning to take its toll.
Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture
Friday 24 February, 9-10pm
BBC Two
Melvyn Bragg explores how class and culture – the two great forces which shape us as individuals and as a society – have impacted on one another over the last century.
Writers, artists and historians such as Irving Welsh, Peter Hennessy, Pete Townshend and Pat Barker help Melvyn piece together the complexities of British society - its snobberies and hatreds but also its capacity for immense creative change.
In the first of the series Melvyn explores how a rigidly class-based society responded to wars and economic hardship. Changes were brought about, but they meant cultural losses as well as gains.
Empire
Monday 27 February, 9.10-10.00pm
BBC One
In a new five-part series for BBC One, Jeremy Paxman traces the story of the British Empire.
In the first programme, A Taste For Power, he asks how such a small country got such a big head - a tiny island in the North Atlantic ruling over a quarter of the world’s population. He travels to India where local soldiers and local maharajahs helped a handful of British traders to take over vast areas of land. Spectacular displays of imperial power dazzled subject peoples and helped create a cult of Queen Victoria as Empress, mother, virtual God.
Look out for our feature on the British Empire next issue, on sale mid-April.
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