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: Nato: Then, Now, Now What?
BBC Radio 4
Saturday 5th April, 8pm
Nato was established on 4 April 1949. What’s happened to the organisation since? Michael Goldfarb traces a story involving neighbourly disagreements and surprisingly occasions when military personnel have gone into action. Plus what does the breakup of Yugoslavia tells us about the prospects for a potential European defence grouping?
Ancient Greece By Train With Alice Roberts
Channel 4
Saturday 5th April, 8.10pm
To Paros, where Alice Roberts joins an archaeologist for a tour of the sites he has discovered over his career. We’re also shown ruins on the island of Delos and some of the Ancient Greek marvels to be found at Ephesus in modern-day Turkey.
Portugal With Michael Portillo
Channel 5
Saturday 5th April, 8.15pm
The broadcaster concludes his travels in Portugal by heading to Sintra, once a cool summer highland retreat for Portugal’s royals. Plus look out for a new series of Great British Railway Journeys (BBC Two, weekdays from Monday 7th April, 6.30pm), beginning with a leisurely journey around the Weald.
Drama: London Belongs To Me
BBC Radio 4
Sunday 6th April, 3pm
Mike Harris scripts a new two-part adaptation of Norman Collins’ novel charting day-to-day life in the nation’s capital shortly before the Second World War. Drama: We The Young Strong (BBC Radio 4, Thursday 10th April, 2.15pm) is also set in London in the 1930s and explores far-right radicalisation.
Great Lives
BBC Radio 4
Monday 7th April, 3pm
Painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling speaks up for artists’ model, muse, writer and ‘Queen of Soho’ Henrietta Moraes (1931–99) as someone who lived a remarkable life. The connection here is unusually strong: Hambling and Moraes were lovers. The first of nine new episodes of Great Lives, as ever presented by Matthew Parris.
Simon Schama: The Road To Auschwitz – pick of the week
BBC Two
Monday 7th April, 9pm
Eight decades after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Simon Schama considers the origins of the Holocaust. According to Schama, antisemitism wasn’t just a Nazi obsession and the murder of Jews wasn’t confined to the death camps. A documentary that sees Schama visit Auschwitz for the first time.
What They Found
BBC Two
Monday 7th April, 10pm
Sam Mendes directs a documentary that tells the story of two members of the Army Film and Photographic Unit, Sergeants Mike Lewis and Bill Lawrie. The duo were cameramen whose haunting images of Bergen-Belsen captured the horrors of the camp shortly after Allied troops arrived. Featuring archive interviews with the two men.
Jack The Ripper: Written In Blood
Sky History
Tuesday 8th April, 9pm
What could be left to say about the serial killer dubbed Jack the Ripper? A new three-part drama-documentary series frames the killings as a story that, it turns out, has much to tell us about the rise of the tabloid press in the UK.
Fridge: The Secret Genius Of Modern Life
BBC Two
Wednesday 9th April, 8pm
Keeping stuff cold is quite tricky. So discovers Hannah Fry as she traces the secret history of the fridge. It’s a tale that involves ‘carrot droop’, a 17th-century chicken incubator and a monk who had a talent for chemistry. Plus Fry has huge fun taking a fridge apart.
In Our Time
BBC Radio 4
Thursday 10th April, 9am
Melvyn Bragg and learned guests discuss the battle of Clontarf. Fought in 1014 at a site close to Dublin on Ireland’s east coast, it pitted an army led by Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, against a coalition of Norse-Irish forces.