Category: History

06
Aug

Shakespeare’s Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman

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In Shakespeare’s Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman, Michael Wood tells the extraordinary story of an ordinary woman in a time of revolution. Born under Henry VIII, Mary Arden is the daughter of a Warwickshire farmer, but she marries into a new life in the rising Tudor middle class in Stratford upon Avon. There she has eight children, three of whom die young. Her husband becomes mayor but is  bankrupted by his shady business dealings. Faced with financial ruin, religious persecution, and power politics, the family is the glue that keeps them together until they are rescued by Mary’s  successful eldest son – William Shakespeare!

Using local documents and government archives, wills and inventories, and  even a report from an Elizabethan informer, Michael Wood reconstructs Mary’s story: the youngest of  eight sisters, who married an illiterate but ambitious glover John Shakespeare. John rose in the world to become a well-off middle class entrepreneur, and finally mayor of Stratford, before his shady business activities brought their world crashing down and bankrupted the family. It would be Mary’s eldest son who restored the family’s fortunes with the money from his box office hits.

The film also looks at women’s work, and at the role a Tudor mother played in the raising and education of her children. Could she read and write? Did she teach her kids to read?  What part might she have had in shaping  her son’s creative imagination? Mary’s story is dramatic, with its tales of bankruptcy, family feuds, political plots and  religious persecution.  Its the glittering Tudor world viewed from below, from a small provincial town:  a window onto an age of fantastic wealth, riches and cultural achievement, through whose storms Mary steered her family, in the process raising the world’s most famous poet.

PRAISE FOR PROGRAMME

“A fascinating portrait”

The Sunday Times

“A pleasureable odyssey” 

The Telegraph

“An entertaining way of looking at an era that has us more than ever in it’s thrall”

The Guardian

TRANSMISSION,  AND AVAILABILITY

1 X 60 mins for BBC 4. Producer: Rebecca Dobbs Writer and Presenter: Michael Wood

First broadcast 12th February 2015

Visit the site →

29
Jul

Christina: A Medieval Woman

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Michael Wood presents a fascinating portrait of ordinary people living through extraordinary times, tracing the life of a real-life peasant of 14th century Hertfordshire.

She wasn’t a famous person, or of noble blood, yet Christina’s story is important in understanding our own roots.

In this time of war, famine, floods, climate change and the Black Death, which would claim the lives of half the population, are the beginnings of the end of serfdom, the growth of individual freedom and the start of a market economy.

COMMISSION AND CREW

1 x 60 mins BBC4. Producer and Director: Rebecca Dobbs  Editor: Gerry Branigan. Composer: Howard Davidson

TRANSMISSION AND AVAILABILITY

First Broadcast on BBC4 5th May 2008

 

21
Jul

Comrades in Arms

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The Second World War is re-examined through the eyes of a group of gay servicemen and servicewomen, whose experiences range from ENSA-style entertainment to the River Kwai prison camp. Personal reminiscences, archive material and staged recreations of gay romances shot in the style of a 1940s black and white movies are combined in a humorous reclamation of a hitherto unrecorded history.

 

COMMISSION AND CREW

1 x 48 mins BBC4. Director: Stuart Marshall, Producer: Rebecca Dobbs

TRANSMISSION AND AVAILABILITY

First Broadcast on Channel 4 1990

 

 

21
Jul

The Battle for Malta

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Caught in a struggle between Britain and Germany to control the Mediterranean, Malta became the most bombed place on Earth. Beyond unimaginable austerity, the island was close to starvation by the summer of 1942, and the magnitude of the attacks reflected the importance of its strategic position. Like ants, the Maltese were forced to move by their thousands into man made caves and tunnels carved in island’s limestone. Historian James Holland presents a fresh analysis of this vicious battle and argues that Malta’s offensive role has been underplayed.

COMMISSION AND CREW

1 X 60 mins for BBC 2. Director Producer: Aaron Young

TRANSMISSION AND AVAILABILITY

First broadcast 7th Jan 2013 on BBC2

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21
Jul

Battle of Britain: The Real Story

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James Holland explores the Battle of Britain from the lesser-known German POV. He focuses on the tactics, technology and intelligence available to both nations, and examines how they decided to use their resources. He also gains access to first hand testimonies from German pilots, and diaries and documents that reveal a previously unknown account of this confrontation.

COMMISSION AND CREW

1 X 60 mins for BBC 2. Director Producer: Aaron Young

TRANSMISSION AND AVAILABILITY

First broadcast 22nd Sept BBC 2010

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21
Jul

Hitler’s Search for the Holy Grail

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The true story behind Indiana Jones: How Hitler and the Nazis went on a quest to find the power objects from history and prove the myths of Atlantis, the Grail and an ancient German master race. Michael Wood explains where these ideas came from, shows us how history was used as a political tool and the way top scholars collaborated to provide the ideas used by the SS as a justification for the genocide that followed, ending with chilling footage from the 1946 trial of Wolfram Sievers, the Ahnenerbe’s Chief Administrator. For the first time we see the Nazis traveling to the ends of the earth; Archaeological digs in Persia, Scientific Expeditions to Antarctica and Venezuela and skull measuring in Tibet.

COMMISSION AND CREW

1 X 78 mins for Channel 4. Director: Kevin Sim, Producer: Rebecca Dobbs

TRANSMISSION AND AVAILABILITY

First broadcast 1999 on Channel 4

21
Jul

Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the German Dams

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James Holland presents a fresh analysis into the legendary 1943 Dam Busters Raid: A low-level night mission that took nineteen Lancaster bombers deep into the heart of enemy territory to destroy German dams with a brand new weapon – the bouncing bomb.

Of the many extraordinary things about the Dams raid, the biggest is that it almost never happened. When finally green lit, it set off an incredible race against time to form and train a new squadron. Their mission: to deliver a weapon that didn’t yet exist. Unprecedented by any scale, and even more remarkable because the crews were not the experienced elite that legend sometimes suggests, Holland examines why this truly is the greatest raid of all time, and why its true impact has been greatly underestimated.

COMMISSION AND CREW

1X 60 mins for BBC 2. Director Producer: Aaron Young

“Enlightening” – Daily Mail

“Eloquent” – Sunday Telegraph

TRANSMISSION AND AVAILABILITY

First broadcast 8th Nov 2011 on BBC2

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21
Jul

Desire

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From 1910-1945 Germany was subjected to one of the most turbulent periods of social and political change that has been experienced by any European country in the twentieth century.

In Desire, Stuart Marshall traces cultural and official attitudes towards sexuality through this period as competing forces struggled to define the meanings of masculinity and femininity.

COMMISSION AND CREW

88 minutes 16mm Channel 4

Director: Stuart Marshall
Producer: Rebecca Dobbs

TRANSMISSION AND AVAILABILITY

As part of the first magazine series for Gays and Lesbians Out on Tuesdays 1988

21
Jul

Saddam’s Killing Fields

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Two years after the allied victory in Kuwait, Saddam Hussein is persecuting the Shia and exterminating the Marsh Arabs in Southern Iraq. Michael Wood pieces together this shocking story of destruction using secretly shot footage, to show a reign of terror previously unwitnessed. Today, this film remains the only detailed telling of the Marsh Arabs’ struggle for survival. The stories told by these people are as relevant as they were fifteen years ago.

CREW AND AWARDS

Written & Presented by Michael Wood
Director: Christopher Jeans
Producer: Rebecca Dobbs

Winner of both the Silver Nymph Award for Best Current Affairs Documentary and the Critics Prize at Monte Carlo Television Festival.

Saddam’s Killing Fields was also nominated for a BAFTA.

TRANSMISSION AND AVAILABILITY

1 X 50 mins for ITV 1993.

21
Jul

In Search of Shakespeare

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William Shakespeare is the world’s greatest writer, but his life story remains a tantalising mystery. In this engrossing four-part historical detective story, Michael Wood investigates Shakespeare’s life in the turbulent times of Queen Elizabeth I. Using fascinating new evidence from spies’ reports, local archives and even a coded prison diary, he uncovers the dark side of Shakespeare’s world. Present day witnesses help him trace William’s early days, his schooling, his father’s shady business deals and the dark secret that ruined the family.

CREW, TRANSMISSION AND AVAILABILITY

4 X 60 mins for BBC/PBS. Director: David Wallace Producer: Rebecca Dobbs Camera: Peter Harvey

BBC2 June 2003. PBS Feb 2004 DVD available from BBC

Book available from Amazon

Visit the BBC History site

EPISODES

Ep 1 A Time of Revolution – Shakespeare’s life in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. William is one of the privileged few, brought up in a nice house, lots of money, servants, and a good education. But suddenly William’s world turns upside down. His father is hounded by informers, loses his fortune, and sells off his lands.   Now we learn the family’s dark secret. In the new Protestant state of Elizabeth, Shakespeare is brought up at home in a family loyal to the old faith, Catholicism. Between 12 and 15 the family is ruined and the boy has to leave school early. At eighteen, William gets a local girl pregnant and his shotgun marriage also gives us his first known work, a love poem to his wife on their wedding day.

Ep 2 The Lost Years – How this young man from Stratford became a star of the London stage. Michael Wood travels with the Royal Shakespeare Company who perform the plays in a Tudor inn yard as Shakespeare did, and using Tudor maps and remarkable Victorian photos brings his first London home back to life. And he follows Shakespeare’s great rival Christopher Marlow on his fateful journey by river to Deptford – and a murder which left 29 year old Shakespeare as the star of Elizabethan London.

Ep 3 The Duty of Poets – Shakespeare’s rise to fame and fortune in Elizabethan London. With ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘ A Midsummer Nights Dream’, Shakespeare becomes England’s top entertainer. But now tragedy strikes, as his only son Hamnet dies at the age of 11. Plunged into a mid-life crisis William falls in love with a beautiful teenage nobleman, has a passionate affair with a mysterious married woman and is summonsed for GBH! Meanwhile his theatre company builds the Globe Theatre, and is caught up in the rebellion against Queen Elizabeth. But in the midst of it all, William creates some of the greatest characters in the literature of the world.

Ep 4 For all Time – Shakespeare’s life in the era of King James 1. Michael Wood unearths his neighbourhood in London and visits the present queen’s robe makers for evidence of Shakespeare’s role in the royal coronation. But Shakespeare’s world would be transformed in 1605 by the Gunpowder Plot, a Jacobean September 11th. The entertainment industry responded, and Shakespeare contributed a daring play about the murder of a King – ‘Macbeth’. Finally Wood follows Shakespeare back to Warwickshire and looks at the riddle of his will, and its strange bequest to his wife Anne.