John Keats the Doctor: Radio 4FM, Sunday, October 22, 7.30pm. Beginning a BBC season marking the poet’s bi-centenary, this programme looks at Keats’s career in medicine. From the age of 15, he practised as a doctor, later becoming a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, where he trained on corpses robbed from Southwark graveyards. The programme speculates on how his work was informed by these experiences (see Review, page 10).

Timewatch: Kamikaze: BBC2, Sunday, October 22, 7.30pm. Using previously unseen archive film from Japan and the United States, this programme explores how Japan turned suicide into a strategy of battle during the Second World War. The plan - for pilots to crash explosives-laden planes into ships - drew thousands of teenage volunteers. Almost all of them died, sometimes in mass suicide attacks, but the programme interviews a few of the survivors who recall facing what seemed to be certain death.

Nice Work: Thank You and Goodbye: BBC2, Tuesday, October 24, 9.30pm. This new series on employment begins with the traumas of redundancy. Since 1990 five million people have lost their jobs, and this documentary looks at the sense of failure that can follow. Among the horror stories are former employees recalling how their company invited them to a special meeting where they were served breakfast and then told that their contracts were being terminated (they were never allowed to return to their desks), and a manager recalling how an employee clutched his ankles and begged not to be made redundant (see Features, page 2).

People’s Century: 1927 - Great Escape. BBC1, Wednesday, October 25, 10pm. This television history of the 20th century continues with the story of the development of cinema. Using eye-witness accounts, the documentary follows the remarkable growth in cinema attendances, from a minor curiosity at the beginning of the century to a huge entertainment business by the outbreak of the First World War, with 26 million people a week visiting cinemas in the United States alone.