Archive On 4: The Great Outdoors

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BBC Radio 4

Saturday 3 June, 8pm

Matthew Sweet explores the history of the great outdoors. How has the idea we should commune with nature because it’s good for us developed over the years? Plus Sandra Kerr, the folk singer who voiced Madeleine the rag doll in Bagpuss, helps Sweet explore how rural romanticism preoccupied song collectors in the early 20th century.

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Ancient Egypt By Train With Alice Roberts

Channel 4

Saturday 3 June, 9.10pm

Donning a sun hat, Professor Alice Roberts takes to the rails to explore the history of one of the world’s oldest civilisations, travelling back in time over four episodes. She begins in Alexandria and visits a site where, it’s been suggested, Cleopatra may be buried.

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Gods Of Tennis

BBC Two

Sunday 4 June, 9pm

The 1970s and 1980s are remembered as a golden age in tennis. Why? How did the game change over these decades? And how did these changes reflect wider society? The first episode in a three-part series focuses on sportspeople who in their different ways campaigned for equality: Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe.

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Windrush: A Family Divided

BBC Radio 4

Monday 5 June, 11am

It’s 75 years since HMT Empire Windrush became one of the first ships to bring a large number of West Indian immigrants to the UK. Over four episodes, Professor Robert Beckford and his Jamaican-born wife, Jennifer, consider what the Windrush generation gained by leaving – and whether those who left might have been better transforming their own countries.

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Close Encounters

BBC Radio 4

Monday 5 June, 1.45pm

The National Portrait Gallery has been closed for three years for refurbishment. Over 10 weekday episodes. Martha Kearney celebrates its reopening this summer by inviting notable people to discuss their favourite portraits. First up, fashion designer Sir Paul Smith selects a black-and-white shot of photographer and designer Cecil Beaton and poet Stephen Tennant.

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Wedgwood: A Very British Tragedy

BBC Radio 4

Monday 5 June, 8pm

Dr Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, tells the story of visionary ceramics entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) and the company that bears his name. It’s a tale of innovation and ambition, but also of the company’s fluctuating fortunes down the years and the near-terminal decline of Wedgwood plc in the 21st century.

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Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland

BBC Two

Monday 5 June, 9pm

The history of the Troubles reaches the Thatcher years and a programme centred on the testimony of three women whose lives were shaped by conflict. The mix of the political and personal is hugely powerful as, for example, we hear from Bernadette, just 10 when she was told her father, IRA prisoner Joe McDonnell, was going on hunger strike.

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Vicky McClure: My Grandad’s War

ITV1

Monday 5 June, 9pm

Actor Vicky McClure joins her grandfather, 97-year-old Ralph, on a journey into the past. The focus here is on D-Day. Then a teenager, Ralph was a ship’s signaller with the Royal Navy and was among those who landed on Sword Beach.

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History’s Secret Heroes

BBC Radio 4

Wednesday 7 June, 11.30am

Major Charity Adams was the first African-American woman to be commissioned in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). Helena Bonham Carter relates how she came to be sent overseas, initially to Birmingham in the Midlands of England, and as leader of a company of Black WAACs efficiently tackled a huge backlog of mail.

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The Gallows Pole

BBC Two

Wednesday 7 June, 9pm

Episode two of Shane Meadows’ drama and David Hartley (Michael Socha) has come up with a scheme money-making – coin clipping, or using slivers of metal from real coins to create counterfeit currency. But how to get enough coins to get started? This won’t, you suspect, end well.

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