10:14am Thursday 18th March 2010
Million Pound Bike Ride: A Sport Relief Challenge (BBC1, 9pm); The Lady and the Revamp (C4, 9pm); Henry Moore: A Culture Show Special (BBC2, 7pm)
WHEN it comes to raising money for Sport Relief, comedy star David Walliams has proved he’s in a league of his own. Four years ago, he swam the English Channel for charity, and now he’s burning a few more calories for a good cause.
“Water is one thing, but I’m not built for a bike. I’m not sure what I’ve let myself in for,” he said before the event.
The story is told in Million Pound Bike Ride: A Sport Relief Challenge and he’s not the only one pedalling. The Little Britain veteran leads a team including Miranda Hart, Davina McCall, Jimmy Carr, Russell Howard, Patrick Kielty and Fearne Cotton as they try to complete a non-stop cycle relay between John O’Groats and Lands End.
The gruelling four-day challenge involves cycling nearly 1,000 miles, day and night, rain, shine or, considering the weather we’ve been having lately, snow and sleet.
One thing is sure, they know it’s going to be far from an easy ride. “When I was told that we would be climbing the equivalent of Mount Everest on the first day alone I thought it was a joke,” said Cotton.
“But when you look at the route, it’s true. There’s almost 29,000ft for us to pedal up on the Scottish leg of the trip.
And a lot of that is in the dark.”
There’s a weekend of the usual sport, entertainment and fundraising on the way, of course, and that begins in earnest with the live phone-in show tomorrow night, hosted by Gary Lineker, Christine Bleakley, Richard Hammond and Claudia Winkleman.
But before that happens comes this documentary, which takes a close look at the training regimes of each of the stars as they prepare for the challenge.
Viewers will be flies on the wall in the team bus as we see the stars eat, drink, laugh, cry and sleep, and, of course, the programme wouldn’t be complete without us seeing how they fare in their fundraising.
The documentary captures every gruelling mile of the journey, as the celebrities face physical and mental exhaustion.
ONCE upon a time, Britain’s oldest weekly women’s magazine, The Lady, was a highly-respected and influential publication featuring anything from the correct length of a hem for a church service to a cure for baldness.
Unfortunately, these days, the journal is in need of a new lease of life as its circulation has fallen dramatically, forcing its owners, the Budworth family, to dig deep into their own pockets to keep it afloat.
The Cutting Edge film The Lady and the Revamp follows the magazine’s new editor, journalist and novelist Rachel Johnson, as she tries to revive the fortunes of the 125-year-old publication.
Ben Budworth, the great grandson of the magazine’s founder, Thomas Gibson Bowles, has taken a calculated risk in appointing Rachel, who, by her own admission, is more used to managing her family than an editorial team. But Rachel believes The Lady could be the perfect antidote to the knicker-flashing celebrity magazines that are currently found on the shelves of newsagents.
ANDY WARHOL may be more famous for having embraced film and TV, but long before he came to prominence, Yorkshire-born artist Henry Moore was appearing on classic shows such as Monitor, Face to Face, The Ascent of Man and even Nationwide. One of his sculptures appears on the earliest-surviving arts programme footage from 1937.
Moore saw these appearances as a way of promoting his often difficult and radical work, while his gentle, “salt of the earth” persona certainly helped him win over new fans.
In the documentary, Henry Moore: A Culture Show Special, Alan Yentob explores Moore’s use of TV, and meets legendary BBC producer John Read, who was responsible for several groundbreaking programmes about the sculptor.
Moore’s daughter, Mary, and fans such as Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor also offer their opinions.
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