The Final Programme

On 8 November 1918, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a German gathered in secret, on a train carriage in a forest near Paris. Their meeting would last for three days. Its aim: bring peace to Europe, and an end to four long years of brutal and deadly war. One hundred years after the end of the First World War, this documentary uncovers the extraordinary events leading up to the Armistice negotiations, and the repercussions that would ripple across the continent, and throughout the 20th century - sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

On 8th November 1918, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a German gathered in secret, on a train carriage in a forest near Paris. Their meeting would last for three days. Its aim: bring peace to Europe, and an end to four long years of brutal and deadly war.

This foot-stomping six-part series - made by the BBC team who produced the critically-acclaimed "Lost Highway", "Walk on By" and "Dancing in the Streets" series - charts the evolution of soul music, with a fascinating combination of rare archive footage and over 100 contemporary interviews.

Series in which conductor Charles Hazlewood explores the lives, times and music of great composers.

Jean Françaix: a quintessentially French composer following in the tradition of Saint-Saëns, Poulenc and Satie; composer of some one-hundred-and-fifty works; and virtuoso pianist in his own right. The four works on this recording were composed between 1942 (the Divertissement—very much a 'distraction' during the Nazi Occupation of France) and 1977 (the Clarinet Quintet). All four share a high degree of compositional mastery, but this is always embedded within an air of grace, of profound charm, and of wit. It is perhaps this sense of humour which has so endeared Françaix's music to generations of musicians and music-lovers. But despite the facts that L'heure du berger was composed in honour of a Parisian restaurant who were to use it as 'background' music, that Françaix self-deprecatingly passed off A huit as a 'stop-gap to fill a programme' for the Vienna Octet, and that the Divertissement contains unashamedly blatant musical jokes, these compositions are unmistakably the work of an expert, a distinctively 'Gallic' artist.