School Matters: Uniforms and Religious Dress

Teachers’ TV, Tuesday, May 2, 12.30-1pm

Teachers’ TV concentrates on matters of faith and religion this week.

Special programmes include two on telling religious stories for Year 6 (May 2, 3-3.30pm). The emphasis otherwise is on the less cosy topic of inter-faith relations: for example, demonstrating three different Christian approaches to other beliefs - defined as exclusivist, inclusivist and pluralist (Christian Ethics, May 5, 7.15-7.30pm), and the place of women in Islam (Islam Unveiled, May 2, 11-11.15pm; May 3, 11-11.15pm).

On a more practical level, this School Matters wades into the troubled waters of dress codes. In many schools, uniforms are coming back, partly for security reasons, since they make it easy to identify intruders. But how far should school policy be modified to allow for religious dress? France offers an example of one solution by insisting, for more than a century, that religion be kept strictly apart from education. Here, the approach is, typically, a fudge: a non-uniform uniform policy, so to speak, under which many flowers blossom, with all managing to look more or less the same.

The Lost World of Friese-Greene

BBC2, Tuesday, May 2, 8.40-9am

This is the final leg of Dan Cruickshank’s three-part journey, driving in the tyre-marks of Claude Friese-Greene, a film-maker who in the mid-1920s captured British life between Land’s End and John O’Groats with the help of his Vauxhall, a camera and his own colour film process. Cruickshank follows his route through Cornwall, past the Welsh mining valleys and the Lake District to Scotland, finding out how the landscape has changed and, incredibly, meeting a few of the people who appeared in the original films.

Last week, he found Grace, now in her eighties, who was orphaned soon after Friese-Green filmed her and sent to live away from her brothers, with an aunt who prevented her from seeing them again.

Great British Military Commanders

Discovery Civilisation

Friday, April 28, 6-6.30pm

Major Gordon Corrigan has the dash of eccentricity needed by the presenter of this kind of documentary when he is delivering a half-hour lecture enlivened by nothing more than his own presence and a few film clips. Hero of the week is Horatio Nelson who, looming over Trafalgar Square, is certainly the most prominent figure in the country’s military history. Corrigan retells the story effectively, making his case for Nelson as a tactical genius, a maverick and a leader, while admitting some notable flaws of character.