Ian Hedge is a very ordinary man who sees himself as a secret super hero with a mission to protect the distressed and vulnerable. Single and living in a rented room with his sour-tempered landlady Mrs Wardle, Ian works 'undercover' as a council worker and spends the days walking the streets of the city in a high viz jacket holding a trundle wheel, with his costume ready to go in his backpack.
C.S. Lewis's biographer A.N. Wilson goes in search of the man behind Narnia, a highly secretive man whose personal life was marked by the loss of the three women he most loved.
Despite the 1960s free-love and alternative culture, many women found that their lives and expectations had barely altered. But by the 1970s, the Women's Liberation Movement was causing seismic shifts in the march of the world's events, and women's creativity and political consciousness was soon to transform everything - including the face of publishing and literature. In 1973 a group of women got together and formed Virago Press; an imprint, they said, for 52 per cent of the population. These women were determined to make change - and they would start by giving women a voice, by giving them back their history and reclaiming women's literature.
This is the story of Queen Victoria as never heard before; a psychological insight of the woman told through her own words, her experiences recounted solely through her personal diaries and letters.
Michel Roux Jr explores the life and influence of his great culinary hero, Georges Auguste Escoffier. The man who turned eating into dining. The first great restaurant chef, Escoffier established restaurants in grand hotels all over the world and in these centres of luxury and decadence, the world's most glamorous figures of the day would mix: actresses and princes, duchesses and opera singers. Catering to this international jet set, Escoffier produced fabulous dishes that combined luxury and theatricality, elevating restaurant food to an art form. In a time of untold luxury and decadence, when money and pleasure combined like never before, he cooked and named dishes for all of London's society - from Queen Victoria and Bertie, the fun-loving Prince of Wales, to the most glamorous entertainers of the day - Oscar Wilde, the actress Sarah Bernhardt and opera singer Nellie Melba.
Historian and author AN Wilson explores the life of Josiah Wedgwood. Wilson reveals the achievements of the self-made, self-educated creative giant famous for his pottery.
During the Second World War Alistair Urquhart was captured by the Japanese, tortured, starved and sent to work on the Death Railway in Thailand. After years in the camp he was loaded onto an airless cargo ship which was torpedoed by an American submarine. Alistair was one of the sole survivors - and drifted alone for days in the South China Sea before being picked up by a ship – a Japanese Whaling vessel. Half dead he was sent to a Japanese prisoner of war camp again. Continuing his thread of bad luck, the camp was in Nagasaki where Alistair bore witness to the devastation of the world’s second atom bomb. This one hour film is the heart-wrenching, personal testimonial of 91 year old Alistair Urquhart set against the backdrop of the little known war in the Far East.
Out of the tumult and fervour of the late 1960s emerged a generation of artists who set out to start a revolution. As women around the world joined forces to fight for liberation, the formative art movement of the last four decades was about to explode into being.