Irty Dancing

Since her retirement from professional ballet, Dame Darcey Bussell has become a formidable advocate for promoting dance in all areas of life. She’s piloted dance classes for schoolchildren across the country, and spoken in Parliament calling for dance to be a key part of the curriculum to help children’s fitness. She’s also returned to dance classes to lift herself, following her retirement from professional ballet.

Dame Darcey Bussell explores the value of dancing in improving mental health and meets a range of people using dance as therapy.

Momentum, drama, love and dance, music, mysticism, tradition, magic and dizzying images in the forests and mountains of Slovakia, a country in the very heart of Europe. Dancing on Broken Glass is a series of frescos about basic human needs and feelings.The narrative of the film is simple - love and the struggle to experience love. The story has few words, lots of authentic music, captivating mountains and irresistible dance sequences. And these are as dynamic, cruel and genuine as the lives of the main characters. The film's images transport the viewer back to the roots of proto-Christian Europe and universal emotions.

'Baby' is becoming a young woman during a family Summer vacation at a holiday camp where she meets Johnny Castle who teaches dance and in his off hours 'dirty dances' with the other dancers. She learns a routine so that one of the women can recover from an abortion and becomes Johnny's lover. As the Summer winds down, each of them must come to grips with responsibility and love and others' expectations.

At the height of the industrial revolution in the last decades of the 19th century there was a dance, now rarely seen, that resounded through the collieries and pit villages of the north east of England - the clog dance. For conductor and musician Charles Hazlewood, clog dance has become an obsession and he plans to put it firmly back on the map by staging a mass flashmob clog dance. Helped by a team of local enthusiasts led by expert clog dancer Laura Connolly, Charles recruits and trains 140 men and women from across the north east, and one sunny Saturday in a busy square in central Newcastle they ambush the public with a six-minute performance.

A musical re-imagining of the 1987 film, Dirty Dancing (1987).

90-minute documentary film presented by Jools Holland, Lucy Worsley and Len Goodman, celebrating the big band sound and uncovering the social history behind the music that kept the nation's spirits up through the Second World War.
Blackpool was one of the few resorts that remained open during the war, training troops by day and offering a welcome escape from the horrors of war. Featuring extracts from a specially recorded BBC4 concert given by Jools Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra at the Empress Ballroom, Blackpool.

Expert historian, yet novice rider, Lucy Worsley learns the 17th-century art of horse ballet leading up to a public performance. Along the way, she explores the origins of this peculiar pastime, witnesses spectacular displays abroad and discovers its surprising legacies.

Scientists genuinely don't know what most of our universe is made of. The atoms we're made from only make up four per cent. The rest is dark matter and dark energy (for 'dark', read 'don't know'). The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been upgraded. When it's switched on in March 2015, its collisions will have twice the energy they did before. The hope is that scientists will discover the identity of dark matter in the debris. The stakes are high - because if dark matter fails to show itself, it might mean that physics itself needs a rethink.

What's the best way to save the ageing breed of male Morris dancer from extinction? Richard Macer infiltrates the endangered world of bells, beer and beards to discover an unlikely saviour of this ancient masculine tradition in the form of women. The Morris Ring, the oldest Morris organisation in the country, has voted to admit women dancers for the first time with the hope that its member sides - as the teams are called - might stem the tide of declining numbers. But some hardliners believe females will dilute the very essence of what makes men's Morris great. So, is Morris better when danced just by men or are women and mixed sides just as good?