Programme Information

Lark Rise To Candleford Ep 5/12

Sunday 25 January

8.00-9.00pm BBC ONE

www.bbc.co.uk/larkrise
Press pack

Time rests heavy on the residents of Lark Rise and Candleford as baby Annie stirs up emotions of days gone by and loves yet to be found, as the popular adaptation of Flora Thompson's childhood memoirs continues.

With Emma Timmins feeling the strain of feeding and clothing her family, Dorcas Lane offers to lend a helping hand – unaware of the consequences that her generosity will bring. The feelings baby Annie inflames for both Dorcas and Ruby Pratt become too much to bear. But, with the Timmins house empty, Robert and Emma embrace their new-found freedom.

Whilst the post office welcomes baby Annie, Thomas struggles to cope with the feelings which her presence brings. He must learn to accept his past and move on, if he and Miss Ellison are to have the future they so desperately long for.

James Dowland, meanwhile, is keen to continue the progress of modernising Candleford and hires the help of the young and self-assured Fisher Bloom. Laura is quickly taken with his arrival but feels uncomfortable and unable to let her true emotions show.

James and Dorcas also do their best to avoid the feelings that they so obviously share for one other.

Emma Timmins is played by Claudie Blakely, Dorcas Lane by Julia Sawalha, Ruby Pratt by Victoria Hamilton, Robert Timmins by Brendan Coyle, Thomas Brown by Mark Heap, Miss Ellison by Sandy McDade, James Dowland by Jason Merrells, Fisher Bloom by Matthew McNulty and Laura Timmins by Olivia Hallinan.

Lark Rise To Candleford is also being simulcast on the BBC HD channel – the BBC's High Definition channel available through Freesat, Sky and Virgin Media. With up to five times more detail than standard definition television, HD gives you exceptionally vivid colours and crisp pictures to make Lark Rise To Candleford a truly cinematic TV experience.

GJ

Sue Barker presents highlights of the 2009 European Figure Skating Championships, which have been taking place in Helsinki. It's 15 years since Great Britain last won a gold medal at the European Championships, when Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won for the fourth and final time in Copenhagen. Scottish siblings Sinead and John Kerr have started the season strongly – but can they get on the podium?

As well as the Ice Dance competition, there's action from the pairs, men's and women's events, including the sensational 21-year-old Italian Carolina Costner, who is bidding for her third consecutive European crown.

NA

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High Altitude

Sunday 25 January

10.00-10.30pm BBC TWO

www.bbc.co.uk/sport

Ed Leigh and Graham Bell present a brand-new, all-action winter sports show, and begin the series in New Zealand, where they attempt a "Tyrolean Traverse" – a 100m crossing between two mountain peaks on a single piece of rope.

Supermodel and ex-Strictly Come Dancing contestant Jodie Kidd, who is an avid skier, also goes on the trip of a lifetime and heli-skis with Ed and Graham. While the untouched powder is exhilarating, Jodie discovers, first hand, the serious avalanche dangers of off-piste skiing.

NA

As Scotland prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of one of its most famous sons, Robert Burns, writer Andrew O'Hagan asks what made this man one of the world's favourite poets.

To answer this, he sidesteps dusty archives, heading instead for the places which the poet once knew – and where the rhythms of life that fuelled his wild imagination still pulse.

O'Hagan adds: "What is it – 250 years after Robert Burns was born – that causes this man to stand at the centre of a whole culture? Is it sentiment; is it patriotism; is it commerce that makes Burns so universal? Or is it the work itself and the story of this extraordinary man who came from nothing to become the world's most representative poet, the writer who appears to stand for the universal values of humanity?

"The whole world has a claim on Robert Burns – his politics, his morality, his sense of sexual freedom. Yet the story of his life is still hidden out there in the landscape of Scotland, and the question, still unanswered, is: 'What in the world made this man so special?'"

From the Ayrshire of Burns's early years – its pubs, landmarks and people – O'Hagan travels to Edinburgh, where the poet was feted and, latterly, to Dumfries, where he spent his difficult last years.

It was to the literati, high society and the masons of 18th-century Edinburgh that Burns turned his attention, in a bid to boost his reputation and his income.

Upon his arrival, he was promoted as a genius in The Lounger, the literary magazine of its day. The great and the good lined up to proclaim Burns a literary star, naming him "the heaven-taught ploughman". O'Hagan questions this well-worn description, asks how Burns could have considered becoming a slave driver and sheds light on the poet's masonic connections, in this stimulating new appraisal of the "other" Bard.

HM