History TV and radio in the UK: what's on our screens this week?
Can't decide which shows to watch or listen to this week? Here are the latest history radio and TV programmes airing in the UK that you won't want to miss
Archive On 4: Forged in Steel
BBC Radio 4
Saturday 24th January, 8pm
In the 1990s, oral historian Alan Dein received a commission from the Steel Industry Project. His task was to record the voices of workers in a declining industry. Tough times seemed to lie ahead. Three decades later, many areas that lost jobs associated with steel are still waiting for employment opportunities that would make up for what was lost.
Call The Midwife
BBC One
Sunday 25th January, 8pm
Inspired by Blue Peter, the Turner children decide to bury a time capsule representing life in 1971. Elsewhere, Rosalind has to deal with a difficult domestic case and, seconded to hospital, Joyce befriends a single mother who has a rare blood group.
An American Journey
BBC Radio 4
Monday 26th January, 11am
In the second episode of his travelogue, James Naughtie explores what it means to be an American. As well as taking in a celebration of Italian-American identity at Chicago’s Columbus Day parade and a visit to the Wisconsin birthplace of the Republican Party, the broadcaster considers the impact of the social movements of the 1960s on American political life.
Book Of The Week: Craftland
BBC Radio 4
Monday 26th January, 11.45am
Author James Fox reads from his own book about lost arts and vanishing skills. In the first of five weekday episodes, he focuses on dry-stone wallers, whose work even now cross-crosses the UK. On Tuesday, he recalls meeting the last of the traditional Highland thatchers.
Clive Myrie’s African Adventure
BBC Two
Monday 26th January, 6.30pm
Always good company, the BBC journalist and newsreader presents a 10-part weekday series showing “the Africa we rarely see on TV”. He begins in South Africa, a country where he was once a foreign correspondent, and highlights include a meeting with activist Ndileka Mandela, granddaughter of Nelson Mandela.
A People’s History Of Punk
BBC Radio 4
Tuesday 27th January, 4pm
Chris Packham meets some of those outsiders who, as punk spread out across the UK, took it as an inspiration. For Mark Jordan in Liverpool, for example, punk allowed him to experiment and find out about his sexuality. However, there are darker sides to the story, as Packham also learns how right-wing groups tried to co-opt punk’s energy.
Digging For Britain
BBC Two
Wednesday 28th January, 8pm
Alice Roberts and Tori Herridge take in more excavations from across the UK. Highlights in the fourth of six episodes include the lost estate of England’s last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson, and a hilltop fort in Fife yielding artefacts linked to the Picts.
Bridgerton – pick of the week
Netflix
Thursday 29th January, streaming
The frothy yet undeniably entertaining romantic drama set in a Regency era off to one side of yer actual history returns for a fourth series. The focus this time around is on the upstairs-downstairs dynamic between Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson) and Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha). Four episodes are available to stream this week, with more to follow in February.
In Our Time
BBC Radio 4
Thursday 29th January, 9am
Misha Glenny chairs as his learned guests discuss the often short life of the gladiator, which played out in amphitheatres across the Roman Empire. Many in Rome’s elites, we learn, thought such combat to be corrupting, and there was constant fear that fighters could be employed within private armies.
Britain’s Favourite Railway Stations With Si King
More4
Thursday 29th January, 9pm
Concluding the railway history series, the Hairy Biker heads for busy Glasgow Central Station. To King’s delight, the architecture is fabulous, and the station turns out to have hidden tunnels, a forgotten platform and wartime shelters. Plus stations that serve communities in unexpected ways.