Join Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman for a sparkling celebration of two decades of Strictly Come Dancing.
This new special reveals the secrets of the long-running sitcom's extraordinary success. Helped by former cast and crew members, families of the stars no longer with us, and celebrity fans, we learn the secrets of this comedy classic and get to see previously unseen interviews and rare behind-the-scenes archive footage.
In an opera version of the famous literature classic, during World War I, an airplane pilot crashes his plane in the Sahara Desert, where he has a very unusual near-death experience.
Comic Relief Does Fame Academy is a spin-off of the original Fame Academy show where celebrities sing as students of the Academy. The programme was launched in 2003 to help raise money for the charities supported by Comic Relief, with the final of the show occurring on Red Nose Day. Coverage of the show was widely shown on BBC One, BBC Three, BBC Prime and the CBBC Channel. Many consider the celebrity version of the show to be far more successful than its predecessor. The Comic Relief series returned in 2005 and again in March 2007. It was announced by the BBC that Cat Deeley would not return because she was hosting So You Think You Can Dance. However, Patrick Kielty returned with co-host and host of the former spin-off show Claudia Winkleman.
The English National Opera first mounted David Alden's production of Ariodante, one of Handel's greatest masterpieces, in 1993. It met with unanimous critical and popular acclaim, and this 1996 revival features many of the leading singers from the original production. Ariodante is Handel's 1735 setting of an episode from Ariosto, in which the King of Scotland's daughter is treacherously accused of infidelity to her promised husband. The range of feelings provoked as the characters develop is caught in music of quite extraordinary emotional power, even by Handel's own exalted standards.
The opera takes place on the doorstep of a tenement on the East Side of Manhattan on two brutally hot days in 1946. The story focuses on two plotlines: the romance between Rose Maurrant and her neighbor Sam Kaplan; and on the extramarital affair of Rose's mother, Anna, which is eventually discovered by Rose's irritable father, Frank. The show portrays the ordinary romances, squabbles and gossips of the neighbors, as the mounting tensions involving the Maurrant family eventually build into a tragedy of epic proportions. Broadcast on BBC Two on New Years Day, 1993, this production was performed by the English National Opera and conducted by James Holmes.
A chance to see director Jonathan Miller at work on his acclaimed staging of Gilbert and Sullivan's famous comic opera.
Jonathan Miller set his well-known production of The Mikado, staged for the English National Opera, in a British seaside resort of the 1920s. The result, complete with a chorus of gentlemen of Japan as cartoon-like British peers, emphatically underscores the Englishness of the satire. The occasional non sequiturs, like a bunch of gentry dressed for Ascot and singing in Japanese, are loonily fun, and no more absurd than the fantasyland Japan that Gilbert and Sullivan invented. The time frame, though, seems little more than an excuse for a smart black-and-white production design.
Lesley Fram Garrett, CBE is an English soprano singer, musician, broadcaster and media personality. She is noted for being at home in opera and "crossover music".
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