* A Room With a View: Radio 4FM, Sunday, June 11, 2.30pm. This is the first episode in a four-part reading of EM Forster’s novel. Set in 1905, the story records the life-changing experience of a young woman taking a trip to sensual Florence after an upbringing in the cramped morality of the English Home Counties. The series will later be sold by the BBC as an audio-cassette.
* Thatcher: The Path to Power and Beyond. BBC1, Monday, June 12, 10.10pm. Margaret Thatcher is now making the transition from active politician to figure from history. In this programme, David Frost interviews the former prime minister about her personal and public life, including her own account of how she ousted Edward Heath from the leadership of the Conservative Party.
How such political testimonies are interpreted by later generations is the theme of another documentary this week. The Living Dead: The Attic, BBC2, Tuesday, June 13, 9.30pm, considers how Margaret Thatcher was influenced by the wartime rhetoric of Winston Churchill the film recounts how Thatcher paced through Downing Street, repeating “Churchill 1940, Churchill 1940” to herself. The programme suggests that the image of Britain evoked by Churchill was itself a myth created from political necessity.
* Maths: Up to the Mark. BBC2, Tuesday, June 13, 6.20am. Ever wanted to calculate the half-litre point on a glass tumbler? Calculus is the answer, according to this Open University programme. In the same dawn stretch, at 7.10am, is Science Matters, an issue-based science programme which this week looks at the use of chemicals by apple growers.
* True Stories: The Trouble With Evan. Channel 4, June 15, 9.30pm. This documentary explores delinquency in children through a case study of an 11-year-old who already has been caught shoplifting, drinking beer and showing pyromaniac tendencies. An intelligent, shy child, Evan cannot explain why he makes “bad choices” and in a bid to understand his behaviour his family life was taped for three months by surveillance cameras.
