History TV and radio in the UK: what's on our screens this week?

Saturday 27th July, 3pm

She’s little remembered now, but in the 1930s, Elsy Borders (Anne-Marie Duff) became a national figure when, objecting to shoddy workmanship, she refused to pay the mortgage on her newly built Kent home. When the building society sued, she represented herself in court. Part of Radio 4’s Breaking The Rules season, built around the theme of rule-breaking.

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Drama: Moscow Notebooks

Radio 4

Sunday 28th July, 3pm

In the 1930s, Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested and sent into internal exile. His ‘crimes’ included not only writing a poem that mocked Stalin, but reading it in public. His error was arguably not to anticipate how bad the clampdown against artists would become. A biographical drama written by Michael Symmons Roberts.

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Britain Behind Bars: A Secret History

Channel 4

Sunday 28th July, 9pm

Rob Rinder visits Shrewsbury Prison, a base from which to explore the story of capital punishment. Central to the narrative are Albert, Thomas and Henry Pierrepoint, who turned execution into a kind of family trade. While we might recoil at the evident pride they took in their work, those Albert executed included Nazi war criminals.

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Saucy! Secrets Of The British Sex Comedy

Channel 4

Sunday 28th July, 10pm

In the 1970s, the British film industry was at a low ebb. How could it reinvent itself and turn a profit? One answer lay in producing bawdy sexploitation comedies. Over two episodes, a look back at films such as Confessions Of A Window Cleaner, movies that it’s fair to say haven’t dated well.

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Extreme

Radio 4

Monday 29th July, 3.30pm

In a new series that follows stories of people who push themselves to the edge, historian and fitness expert Natalia Mehlman Petrzela takes us back to 1980s Los Angeles and the world of bodybuilding. At the centre of the story is William Dillon, who helped launch the largest illegal steroid-dealing ring the USA had ever seen.

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Eiffel Tower: Building The Impossible

BBC Four

Monday 29th July, 9pm

Built over the course of two years for the World’s Fair in 1889, the Eiffel Tower was a monumental engineering project. This one-off documentary traces the story of its construction and reveals how Gustave Eiffel drew on innovations in civil engineering to complete the project.

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Book At Bedtime: Giovanni’s Room

Radio 4

Monday 29th July, 10.45pm

Kyle Soller reads over five weekday evenings from the James Baldwin’s novel about an American living in Paris who begins an affair with an Italian barman. Continuing programming to mark the centenary of Baldwin’s birth, The Lost Archives Of James Baldwin (Radio 4, Tuesday 30th July, 4.00pm) investigates why so many of his papers are in France.

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Worse Than Murder

Radio 4

Wednesday 31st July, 9.30am

In 1969, kidnappers targeting Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Anna, abducted the partner of one of his executives, Muriel McKay, in error. She has never been seen since. Jane MacSorley investigates a crime that remains unresolved. All episodes of the series are available via BBC Sounds.

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Atomic People – pick of the week

BBC Two

Wednesday 31st July, 9pm

In 1945, the USA dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They remain the first and last such weapons used in war. This feature-length documentary mixes archive footage and photography, much of it difficult to view, with the memories of those who survived what the Japanese call ‘Hibakusha’.

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Interview With The Vampire

BBC Two

Thursday 1st August, 9pm

For those who don’t mind dramatic journeys into the past having a fantastic edge, the adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire novels returns for a second series. Bloodsucker Claudia wants to know more about her heritage and looks for clues in Romania as the Second World War winds down.

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