A Picture of Britain

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Contents 1 General Information 2 Cover 3 Information 3.1 The Romantic North 3.2 The Flatlands 3.3 The Highlands and Glens 3.4 The Heart of England 3.5 The Home Front 3.6 The Mystical West 4 Screenshots 5 Technical Specs 6 Links 6.1 Further Information 6.2 Release Post 6.3 Related Documentaries 6.4 ed2k Links

[edit] General Information

Arts, Culture, Nature, Travel Documentary hosted by David Dimbleby and published by BBC in 2005 - English narration

[edit] Cover

[edit] Information

A Picture of Britain is a celebration of the British landscape as seen through the eyes of artists, writers and composers. From the breathtaking mountains of the Scottish Highlands and North Wales to the intimate hamlets of Sussex and Gloucestershire, generations of artists have been captivated by Britain's countryside and, in turn, their images and words have influenced our impressions and love of the British landscape. A landmark six-part BBC ONE TV series presented by David Dimbleby, a Picture of Britain has been developed from the start as collaboration between BBC producers and Tate Britain curators. Drawing on major works from public and private collections - as well as from the Tate's own unrivalled collection of British landscape painting - the exhibition includes work by JMW Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable and Edwin Landseer, and more recently Paul Nash and Richard Long. For the BBC ONE series, David Dimbleby travels across the country, then to Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, to tell the stories of featured artists, reveal intriguing facts and anecdotes and discuss artistic technique. The words of novelists and poets from Charles Dickens to Dylan Thomas and the music of leading composers including Elgar and Vaughn Williams also feature in the series.

[edit] The Romantic North

The stunning scenery of the romantic North of England, birthplace of landscape art, has inspired some of Britain's most renowned painters and writers - from JMW Turner, Thomas Girtin and James Ward to Emily Bronte, Wordsworth and Coleridge. David Dimbleby travels to Lindisfarne, the Lake District, and Northumberland and on to Yorkshire for this week's episode of A Picture of Britain. Our journey includes Lindisfarne - one of the most mysterious and remote places in the country. Joined to the mainland by the narrowest of causeways, twice a day the island is cut off by the tide. The drama of this landscape has inspired two of Britain's most acclaimed artists at the start of their careers, Thomas Girtin and JMW Turner. Incredibly, 250 years ago the Lake District was seen as an ugly and inhospitable wilderness. Since then it has inspired some of Britain's most revered artists. At Grasmere, David learns that Wordsworth spent his most productive years here, composing British treasures such as The Prelude and The Daffodils. JMW Turner also took inspiration from the natural beauty of the Lake District, composing fine works such as Morning on the Coniston Fells. Moving on to Yorkshire, David visits Gordale Scar, nature at its most sublime. No artist before James Ward had attempted to contain such vastness on a canvas, but in 1812 the artist succeeded by creating his monumental Gordale Scar (12 foot by 14 foot). No trip to the romantic North would be complete without a visit to the rugged landscape which inspired Wuthering Heights. Haworth Moor, the setting for Emily Bronte's tragic love story, is David's final stop.

[edit] The Flatlands

David Dimbleby heads east this week to the area of England with the biggest skies of all. This part of Britain spawned more landscape painters per square mile than almost anywhere else in Britain. A Picture of Britain celebrates the British landscape which has inspired artists for the past three hundred years. This week, David travels from Constable and Gainsborough country in Suffolk to the Norfolk Broads, the Fens and the East coast. David ventures from the River Stour in Suffolk, past the idyllic millstreams where Constable worked alongside his father as a boy, and on to Sudbury, the birthplace of Thomas Gainsborough. From The Haywain to Mr and Mrs Andrews, this region has inspired some of the most reassuring and romantic images of the British landscape. Newmarket with its flat, fast turf and the world's champion racehorses is the next stop for David. Here he sees the 2,000 racehorses training in the early morning mists; has a flutter on the races; and learns more about the work of Stubbs, the most famous painter of horses ever. He sails on to the Norfolk Broads: home of barges and windmills, where it's easier to travel by boat than by car. He discovers the work of the home-grown artists, John Crome and John Sell Cotman, who couldn't easily travel to London, so found inspiration in this cut-off region. Then on to the Fens - a land of fertile fields and canals and dykes with The Isle of Ely rising majestically from the heart of it all. Here David gets a fish eye view of the watery landscape. He swims in the River Cam, swum before him by the poets Rupert Brooke and Lord Byron, and catches eels in the River Ouse with the last known eel catcher in the region. Finally David will reach one of the most isolated and haunting places on these islands - a corner of England unlike any other: the East coast. Here the remorseless sea, which eats away at the vulnerable coast, has provided inspiration for composers like Benjamin Britten and artists throughout the centuries - from the contemporary artist Maggi Hambling right back to the greatest sea painter of all time, JMW Turner.

[edit] The Highlands and Glens

The breathtaking Highlands and Glens of Scotland, Northern Ireland and parts of the Republic of Ireland are David Dimbleby's destination for this episode of A Picture of Britain. From Scotland, David crosses the Irish Sea to visit Sligo, home of William Butler Yeats, and travels north to discover the inspirational Glens of Antrim. Back in Scotland, David visits Fingal's Cave, Iona and finally Alloway in Ayrshire, birthplace of Scotland's national poet Robbie Burns. Tonight's journey begins in the Highlands - Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine, the setting for so many of Scott's popular adventures that drove 19th century tourists flocking to Scotland. The most famous tourist was Queen Victoria, who fell in love with the Highlands, building Balmoral Castle as her summer residence. Her favourite artist, Edwin Landseer, would come and stay with her at Balmoral, creating some of his most famous paintings, including the iconic Monarch of the Glen. This is the landscape that Sir Walter Scott introduced to the world in his best-selling novel Rob Roy and poems like The Lady of the Lake. Drawing on Scotland's myths and legends, he created a picture of Scotland that still grips the popular imagination today - the Scotland of the Highlands, tartan, and bagpipes. David travels on to Edinburgh, Scotland's capital city that at the turn of the 19th century was in the grip of an intellectual and social revolution. Alexander Nasmyth, engineer, town planner, and landscape painter reflected his city's achievements in a series of majestic landscapes which emphasised Scotland's modernity. Travelling north-west, David visits Glencoe, the site of the infamous 1692 massacre of the MacDonalds by the Campbells. The Scottish artist Horatio McCulloch captured the bleak beauty of the valley in his huge painting of Glencoe. Travelling further west, David visits the peninsula of Kintyre, where William McTaggart painted in the late 19th century. David sails to Ireland, where he visits Sligo, childhood home to William Butler Yeats, the national poet of Ireland. He was inspired by the Irish landscape to create a national art. Further west on Achill Island, the northern Irish painter Paul Henry found the 'soul of Ireland' amongst the windswept rocks and beaches of this secluded island. And in Northern Ireland, a whole school of northern Irish painters found inspiration amongst the beautiful Glens of Antrim. David learns how James Humbert Craig built a studio by the sea in Cushendun and composed many paintings of this beautiful village. Back in Scotland, David visits Fingal's Cave, inspiration to both Felix Mendelssohn and JMW Turner, and makes the short journey across to Iona, where the Scottish Colourists painted in the Twenties and Thirties. Finally David visits Alloway in Ayrshire, birthplace of Scotland's national poet, Robbie Burns, who forged an image of Scotland out of the hard toil of the working man and woman.

[edit] The Heart of England

Starting in Manchester, David Dimbleby heads off to explore England's heartland, the Midlands, in this episode of BBC ONE's A Picture of Britain series. On his quest to celebrate the beauty and diversity of this area of Britain, and the artists it has inspired, David takes in the Peak District, Shropshire, the Black Country, Wolverhampton, the Cotswolds, the Malverns and plenty more on the way. The journey begins in Manchester, once the first city of the Industrial Revolution in Britain: a place of darkness, child-labour, poverty and disease. Today all that has been swept away but, when the cotton industry was still going strong, the painter L.S. Lowry captured scenes which most artists turned their backs on: the smoking chimneys and terraced housing of Britain's industrial landscape. Lowry's pictures today offer a window onto a vanished world. From here, David's next stop is the Peak District of Derbyshire and the beginning of the story of landscape art and industry. In the 18th century, Derbyshire valleys echoed with the sound of the iron forges lining the banks of fast-flowing rivers. London-based artists didn't think the Derbyshire scenery worth painting, let alone its industry. All that changed in the second half of the eighteenth century when a Derby-based painter called Joseph Wright saw that scenes of industry could be just as thrilling as any mountain view. David then drives the old coach route between Derbyshire and Shropshire to see one of the great industrial sights of the 18th century: the cast-iron bridge at Coalbrookdale and the paintings it inspired. Industry rapidly transformed the landscape of Britain in the first decades of the 19th century, and no industry more so than the railways. The artist J. C. Bourne made railway construction his subject, but it was JMW Turner who captured the then utterly novel sensation of travelling at speed in Rain, Steam and Speed. David Dimbleby travels on to the Black Country: "Britain's Wild West at the start of the 19th century." 20,000 ironsmiths worked between Dudley and Wolverhampton. JMW Turner - whose eye was drawn to the drama of the scene - captured the forges at work beneath Dudley Castle, but Charles Dickens, who travelled through the Black Country a few years later, and was more attuned to the human consequences, was appalled. He used his impressions in his novel The Old Curiosity Shop. Wolverhampton is next and David discovers how, in the mid-19th century, local manufacturer Sidney Cartwright spent much of his hard-earned cash on paintings. But Cartwright didn't favour scenes of industry - he saw enough of that every day; what he liked were sentimental scenes of rural life. A great many Victorians came to share his taste. David Dimbleby now journeys south, out of the Black Country and into the Cotswolds. William Morris enlisted this landscape in his war against Victorian progress-at-any-cost. In his novel News From Nowhere he pictured his Britain of the future. There was a great anxiety at the end of the 19th century that the way of life of the countryside - which many artists and writers imagined to be the best of Britain - was under threat from the modern world. The photographer Benjamin Stone captured folk customs in and around Stratford-upon-Avon at much the same time as a young composer, George Butterworth, was travelling through the same landscape taking down folk songs and dances. Last stop is the Malverns, the 20 peaks that rise up out of the Worcestershire plain. This landscape is forever associated with the name of Edward Elgar, Britain's first great composer of romantic music.

[edit] The Home Front

David Dimbleby ventures to the stunning South East for this week's episode of A Picture of Britain. From the magnificent white cliffs of Dover and the rural idyll of Kent, to bustling Brighton and the South Downs, David explores the area of Britain that has always been the most at risk from enemy invaders and has captivated artists for centuries. Julius Caesar first set foot here. William the Conqueror claimed this land for the Normans. And in 1940, the last great battle for Britain's survival was played out in the skies here. David learns how JMW Turner, more than any other artist, realised that the sea defined Britain and the British character just as much as any landscape. With paintings such as The Shipwreck and Snowstorm - Steam Boat Off a Harbour's Mouth, he captured the crashing drama of the sea. David travels onwards to the little village of Felpham. Here, in his only break from living in London, William Blake was inspired to write his iconic hymn Jerusalem. Next, David arrives at the South Downs and Arundel Castle. This Norman stronghold built in 1067 has been painted by scores of artists over the years including Constable and JMW Turner. Constable came to Arundel ten years after Turner and was in ill health. He found great comfort in the awe-inspiring beauty of this area, and painted his very last work here before he died: Arundel Mill and Castle. In the 1920s, the composer John Ireland adopted the South Downs as his spiritual home. David visits Chanctonbury Ring, a great Iron Age hill fort crowned with a circle of beech trees, which was the inspiration for Ireland's haunting work, Legend. Brighton is the next stop. Today this vibrant seaside destination is a haven for artists and tourists alike, but it wasn't always considered a beautiful spot for painting. Constable painted nostalgic and restrained views of the area but it was William Frith's Life at the Seaside that really captured the crowds and energy of Brighton for the first time. David reaches Kipling country - a little corner of East Sussex - and considers Kipling's poem, If, before travelling to Kent and the Garden of England. Here, he discovers how artist Helen Allingham created the quintessential image of Kent as the garden of England. Onward to Chartwell, where Churchill's love of painting is considered before David explores the paintings of Paul Nash. Commissioned to be a war artist, Nash created acclaimed works such as Battle of Britain. With the mighty white cliffs of Dover as a backdrop, David meets Dame Vera Lynn to discuss her song, White Cliffs of Dover, the tune that in Britain's darkest hour during the Second World War became a beacon of hope across the world.

[edit] The Mystical West

The Mystical West, an enormous area that stretches from Stonehenge in Wiltshire to the furthest tips of Cornwall and Wales, is David Dimbleby's destination for this week's episode of A Picture of Britain. In his quest to celebrate the British landscape that has inspired artists for the past 300 years, this week David Dimbleby encounters the work of Dylan Thomas, Constable, JMW Turner and many more. A land of pre-historic ruins, ley lines and crop circles, of druids and bards, King Arthur and Merlin, this area has come to epitomise all that is ancient and magical in Britain. Artists have been drawn here, not in search of pleasant pastures and pretty hamlets, but to immerse themselves in wild landscape and thrilling myth. David journeys to Stonehenge, where John Constable and JMW Turner, those giants of British landscape painting, chose to pit their strengths against one another in a Titanic clash for mastery. In Dorset, he goes in search of Thomas Hardy's Egdon Heath: the expanse of wild landscape where so many of Hardy's characters meet their fate, and which later provided the title for one of Gustav Holst's most famous pieces of music. Travelling north to Snowdonia, David discovers the work of Richard Wilson - one of the founding fathers of British landscape painting. Returning south, David reveals how Dylan Thomas' love for the countryside around his native Swansea saved this poet from the pubs of London - if only temporarily. After sailing across the Bristol Channel, David ventures into the savage landscapes and legends of Devon and Cornwall that inspired a unique genre of literature: the chilling West Country Gothic of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Finally, in St Ives, he sees the legacy of the famous artistic community that settled here in the Thirties, seeking to rediscover an innocence and purity of artistic vision in the unique and dramatic light of Cornwall.

[edit] Screenshots

[edit] Technical Specs

• Video Codec: XviD
  
• Video Bitrate: ~1588 kb/s
  
• Video Resolution: 672x384
  
• Video Aspect Ratio: 1.750
  
• Video Framerate: 25.000
  
• Audio Codec: 0x2000 (Dolby AC3) AC3
  
• Audio Bitrate: 192/48000
  
• Audio Channels: 2
  
• Runtime per Part: 58 mins
  
• Number of Parts: 6
  
• Part Number: 1
  
• Part Size: 746mb
  
• Ripped by Dentje

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[edit] Further Information

• Home page
• imdb page

[edit] Release Post

• MVGroup.org (torrent)
• VeryCD.com

[edit] Related Documentaries

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• How We Built Britain
• Britain from Above
• Sickert vs Sargent

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