Episode 5 The One Show - Best of Britain

Welcome to The One Show: The Best of Britain, with Angellica Bell.

And Phil Tufnell, and another chance for you to see

some of your favourite One Show films.

Tonight, we're in an ancient seat of learning

named after the river that runs through it,

a magnet for visitors from all over the world - Cambridge.

The university was formed in the early 13th century,

when scholars taking refuge from hostile locals in Oxford

migrated to Cambridge and settled here.

Charles Darwin, Francis Bacon,

David Attenborough and Stephen Fry

are among the famous names who have studied here

but you don't have to be an academic to achieve success.

I took a trip to Scotland to talk to a top-selling artist

who left school at 16.

In 2004, 500 people queued up outside this stately home,

Hopetoun House in Edinburgh.

Those who made it inside would witness history being made.

A picture entitled The Singing Butler

was expected to sell for between £150,000 and £200,000 at auction

but the hammer eventually went down on a whopping £744,800,

a new world record for a Scottish painting sold at auction.

It outsells the works of Vincent Van Gogh, Dali and Monet

and has been reproduced on posters, cards, calendars and even umbrellas.

The Singing Butler has sold over a million copies in Britain alone

and it's easily one of the most recognisable pictures in the world,

but its roots are firmly planted in Fife,

the place where its painter, Jack Vettriano, began his career.

How did The Singing Butler come about?

It was inspired mainly by Leven beach, which is where I grew up,

and there's a lovely part of it

where the tide can go out for half a mile,

sort of flat, with pools of water

and you know, that's certainly what I tried to recreate.

So what's actually going on in the picture?

As I see it, here is this sort of eccentric guy

and they've been out for dinner,

he's got money, he's got a maid, he's got a butler,

and he decides he just wants to go and dance on the beach.

He realises, of course, too late, that there is no music,

so he has to ask the butler to sing

and so, they waltz while the butler sings

and the two umbrellas shelter them.

And it's just one of those paintings that I think,

you know, on a rainy day, when life's not too good, you look at that

and you think, "You know, life can get better than this."

And have you ever danced on a beach yourself?

Yeah, but not like that!

PHIL LAUGHS

Jack is the son of a miner.

He took up painting at 21 and had no formal training.

In 2005, it was revealed

that Jack had used an artists' reference manual

to form his figures.

'At that time, I was relatively unknown.

'I had no access to models'

and I came across this manual in a bookshop and took it home

and I thought, "This is great,"

you know, "This is full of figures,"

and of course, when that became known publicly,

I did get a bit of flak for that

but what I do know for a fact is that Francis Bacon used the very same book

that I took The Singing Butler out of. Now,

I don't think that's bad company to keep, you know?

In actual fact, Jack prefers

a different version of the famous picture

where the woman's wearing a green dress instead of a red one

and it hangs here in the Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery.

Well, The Dancer In Emerald was a study for the finished version,

and I was playing around with colours

because I was trying to get what I thought would be the right colour

and I did the green, and then I did the red,

and I looked back at the green and I think,

"I actually like the green."

Whilst the buying public have always embraced Jack's work,

the art world has been less welcoming.

I often get drawn into this debate

about, you know, me and the establishment,

and the truth is that it's completely out of my hands.

There's nothing I can do, you know,

if they don't like my work, they don't like my work.

I would far rather be enjoyed by millions of people than a handful.

It may not be critically acclaimed,

but this painting has definitely captured the hearts and minds

of the public more than any other contemporary painting.

'How does it feel to have created a piece of work

'that so many people love?'

The overall feeling is one of immense pride

that I was able to, from a manual, construct this painting

and it's gone out there and been such a success.

It's such a shame Jack doesn't get the credit he deserves for his work.

As he said in the film, he doesn't worry about it.

So long as the public love his work, which they do, he's happy.

I found him a real inspiration, a real talent and a top bloke.

-It's nice when you meet people like that.

-It is.

Now, this is the River Cam and since the Middle Ages,

barges have used it to bring heavy goods into Cambridge,

including most of the stone used to build the colleges.

Dating back to the 13th century,

the university is one of the oldest in the world.

Cambridge is now made up of 31 colleges and 150 departments

and is at the forefront of scientific research.

It's a far cry from the city's roots as a trading centre

and route to Europe via the Cam.

Nowadays, it's the famous punts

which create most of the river traffic

and the river has become one of the city's main attractions

-and also a fantastic place for all types of wildlife.

-Found anything?

-No, not yet, but I'll keep looking.

-You do that.

Now, one species you'd be very hard to find a glimpse of

is the small and elusive vole.

Here's One Show wildlife expert Miranda Krestovnikoff.

One of my biggest wildlife inspirations as a child

was Wind In The Willows, with the adventures of Toad, Mole and Ratty.

But the biggest revelation as an adult

was the fact that Ratty wasn't actually a rat.

He was, in fact, a water vole.

There used to be millions of water voles in the UK, but now

they have the unenviable title of our fastest-declining mammal.

In the last 45 years, the population has decreased by more than 95%.

Because while stoats and weasels

are the villains in The Wind In The Willows,

in the real wild wood, Ratty has a much more deadly predator.

The mink is a non-native species to Britain

and it's the only predator

that can fit into the water vole's underground tunnels,

so for the poor water vole, there's no escape.

But here in Seaton in East Devon, Ratty is making a comeback.

The Environment Agency has been working for the last ten years

to get water voles back in rivers.

So far, a couple of thousand have been reintroduced around the country

and on this part of the River Axe,

150 are due to be released.

But it's taken years to get the habitat just right.

This is such a beautiful and tranquil spot. Was it always like this?

No. Ten years ago, this was a steep-sided, boring borrow pit

but the East Devon District Council and other partners locally

have transformed it into this wonderful wildlife haven.

You can see all these fantastic reed beds around the side,

lots of tree growth. It's a great site for all sorts of wildlife.

And also, a great place for the water voles.

Well, that's the key thing, you see.

We need to be creating these kind of habitats

to enable water voles to survive and to spread out.

OK, we've got one coming out now, right on cue.

Fabulous! Look at that!

I will let you, cos I know they bite. I've handled them before,

and I know they could take a chunk out of your hand.

-You have to be a bit careful with them.

-That's Ratty.

There's this urge, I just want to stroke it.

-You want to stroke it, don't you?

-But I know it'll take my finger off

-if I do that. They are so cute.

-They're a smashing-looking animal,

got to admit. Very different to a rat.

-You notice the nose is quite snubby, rather than pointy.

-Yes.

The tail is furry, dark,

rather than sort of pink and fleshy, which a rat's tail is like,

so they're quite a handsome-looking animal, I think.

Look at those teeth as well! They're ready for food.

Most of this vegetation you see around here, they will eat,

even the bark and leaves of trees,

they'll climb up in winter months for nourishment,

so they're not too fussy.

But before the water voles can be released,

it's essential that the neighbourhood is cleared of mink.

Dotted around the area are 80 of these rafts.

Any animal setting foot on them

will leave evidence of their presence in the soft clay.

We've got some very convincing footprints on these ones.

Can you talk me through what we've got?

Well, the large ones appear to be otter

and to help, we made this tracks overlay.

That makes it so much clearer, because it's quite hard,

when you're looking at just this bit of clay with a print in it

to identify exactly what it is, but that's definite confirmation.

And have you got anything else on that one?

A bit less clear is what I think is a mink track here.

-That's a pretty good match for the mink.

-For the mink there.

The mink print there.

The rafts are checked regularly

and, fortunately, these mink prints were found miles away,

so the coast is clear for the water voles to be rehoused,

firstly in temporary accommodation.

Now, inside is a bit of straw

and bits of carrot and apple,

just to keep them fed for the first couple of days,

and after that, they will actually gnaw through the bottom of the box,

which is just cardboard, and then work their way

through the mud of the riverbank and then just out into the water

but after that, they're on their own.

The water voles due for release today were all bred in captivity.

There's a mix of family groups,

brothers and sisters, old and young,

but each water vole is micro-chipped so their movements can be monitored.

So I'm just going to let him go now.

There you go, chap. And they're gone.

Now that the threat from the mink has begun to subside

and the habitat has been restored to suit the water voles,

numbers are increasing across the country.

And I'm sure Toad and Mole will be very happy

to have Ratty back on the riverbank again.

Well, after seeing the teeth on them voles, I'm glad we didn't catch any.

But they are cute, you have to admit that, Tuffers.

Religion has always played a part in the story of Cambridge.

The university originally was a cluster of monasteries

and there are over 13 churches within the city boundaries.

And behind us is Great St Mary's

and it's been part of Cambridge for over 800 years.

Cambridge legend has it that during the Black Death,

there weren't enough priests to bury the dead,

so one of the reasons they founded a new college was to boost numbers

and they called it Corpus Christi, which means "the body of Christ",

and it still exists today.

You're a fountain of knowledge.

But Britain hasn't always welcomed priests with open arms.

Here's Dan Snow.

Today, Britain is home to hundreds of faiths.

In the last census, done in 2001,

they recorded more than 170 religions

rubbing shoulders on our little island.

Excuse me, madam, can I ask you a quick question? What's your religion?

-Church of England.

-Church of England?

-We're Sikh.

-Pentecostal Church.

-Um, Jewish.

-I'm Catholic.

-Muslim.

-I'm Buddhist.

-Hindu.

Nowadays, we take it for granted

that we're free to worship whichever religion we please,

but it hasn't always been that way.

During the reign of Elizabeth I,

being a Catholic priest was a treasonable offence

and even hiding one was a risky business.

The penalty if you were caught was the most grisly death -

you were hanged, drawn and quartered.

Defiant priests had to keep on the move to evade capture.

They'd travel from safe house to safe house around the country

with the Queen's priest hunters hot on their tail.

The Catholic families that gave them shelter

had to think of more and more ingenious ways to keep them hidden.

I'm off to Baddesley Clinton, a stately home in Warwickshire.

In the late 1500s, two Catholic sisters lived here.

They turned it into a secret meeting place for priests,

complete with its own collection of priest hiding places

or priest holes.

-Hello.

-Dan.

'Alice Hogge, an expert on the period, is going to show me around.'

-Excellent moat.

-Oh, I love a moat.

'One of the priest holes is in the attic.'

Why go to such extraordinary lengths?

Why not hide in a cupboard or under the bed or something?

We know the lengths the searchers themselves went to find priest.

They'd come in with carpenters and builders,

go through the house and measure it

and work out if a space seemed to be false, and if so,

they'd just break the wall through, so you really need a safe place.

-We've got one up here that you might want to have a look at.

-Oh, yeah.

-If you just want to get up the ladder up there.

-Look at this.

-It's right up in the roof of the house.

-Absolutely.

'In the 1500s, this hole would have been completely sealed up

'and only accessible from another part of the eaves.'

Who would have built somewhere like this?

We think these ones were built by a carpenter called Nicholas Owen.

By day, he'd come into your house and he'd, I don't know,

build you a new staircase or put in a bathroom or something,

and then by night, he'd be building places like this.

There's another one you might want to come and see,

which is actually right down in the kitchen of the house.

OK, so this is the most famous hiding place within this house.

On the 19th October 1591, so that's 14 years before the Gunpowder Plot,

the house was raided

and seven priests had to go down there and hide.

'One of them, Father Gerard, wrote an account of the experience.'

Late mediaeval autobiography.

-That'll keep me from getting bored down there.

-Good luck.

-Thank you.

It's quite narrow.

I'm going holing, priest holing.

Yeah.

So here I am, squashed in here.

It's about two foot high.

The floor is pretty wet and minging.

OK, here's the passage from the book.

"It was about five o'clock the following morning.

"Suddenly, I heard a great uproar outside the main door.

"It was the priest hunters.

"With swords drawn, they were battering at the door

"to force an entrance.

"Father Southwell guessed what it was all about

"and slipped off his vestments and stripped the altar bare.

"Nothing was left to betray the presence of a priest.

"Outside, the ruffians were bawling and yelling

"but the servants held the door fast.

"This gave us enough time to stow ourselves and all our belongings

"into a very cleverly built sort of cave.

"At last, these leopards were let in.

"They tore madly through the whole house, searched everywhere.

"They took four hours over the work,

"but fortunately, they chanced on nothing.

"So we were saved that day."

DOOR SLAMS

It's quite chilling reading that account written hundreds of years ago

about their experiences hiding down in this exact tunnel here,

in this priest hole here. It's extraordinary.

Well, Cambridge knows all about the power of words.

The university library holds

one of the greatest collections of books and manuscripts in the world

and some of the great literary figures, such as Tennyson

and Wordsworth, have pored over them whilst studying here.

But there's another city which rivals Cambridge's literary status

and you have to whisper its name around these parts.

The One Show's renaissance man, Gyles Brandreth,

and Oxford graduate, explains all.

This city has generated

some exquisite examples of the English language.

Welcome to Oxford, the City of Dreaming Spires.

BUZZING

That's my cliche alarm going off again! 23rd cliche of the day.

Another turn-up for the books.

BUZZING Oh, goodness!

There are around half a million words in the Oxford English Dictionary -

enough, you'd have thought, for every single one of us

to find original ways to express ourselves, but no.

To be honest... BUZZ

..at this point of time... BUZZ

..we're all guilty of resorting to cliches,

those infuriatingly irritating, overused turns of phrase

that pollute our conversation like a rash.

BUZZ Like wildfire.

BUZZ Oh, kill the buzz!

BEEPING

So which cliches most get up Oxford's well-educated nose?

"To be fair". I just hate it.

-Touch base.

-Someone asking to go for a bite to eat.

Dumb blondes.

-Yeah.

-It's just not true.

This is where the cliche was born,

on the printing press.

In the early 19th century,

there was a new type of printing that came in which was much faster,

much more efficient than the old style.

The English called it "stereotype".

The French called it "cliche" from the sound of the printing press

producing these innumerable copies of newspapers and things.

-So it made a sort of "cliche, cliche, cliche" sound?

-Yes.

No-one keeps a closer eye on our language

than the Oxford University Press.

They patrol our verbal landscape 24 hours a day

thanks to a mighty computer known as Corpus.

The Oxford English Corpus is a huge electronic database

of English from around the world.

It contains more than two billion words

and we can search that to find out how common a word or a phrase is.

If there's one example of a particular expression on there,

that's not terribly significant.

If there's tens of thousands of examples of a phrase,

maybe that phrase is a bit of a cliche.

How do you decide when a useful phrase turns into a well-worn cliche?

I think, really, that's something of a personal judgement.

For example, the Dreaming Spires of Oxford,

which I very much hope you're not going to use in this piece...

We've already done so! We've already done so!

Guilty, guilty! Oh, dearie me!

BUZZING We opened with the Dreaming Spires of Oxford.

This is a film full of cliches.

Look! You're a dictionary man. You actually work on a computer

but we've actually put out first editions of Dr Johnson on the table.

-We can't escape cliches. That's what we're all about!

-That's right.

So, pop pickers, we asked Corpus

to compute this year's chart-topping cliches especially for The One Show.

And here they are.

MUSIC: "Pick Of The Pops" theme

At five...

"A level playing field."

At four...

"Few and far between."

At three...

"The fact of the matter."

At two...

"Back on track."

And still at number one for the third year running...

"At the end of the day."

But with all due respect... BUZZ

..and when all's said and done... BUZZ

..some cliches do have an ancient and distinguished pedigree.

Shakespeare, our greatest ever English writer, he gave us cliches.

We've got so many cliches that have come from Shakespeare.

"In my mind's eye",

"more things in heaven and earth",

"the rest is history", you can just go on for ever.

There's the old joke that Hamlet is just made up of quotations.

What's your verdict on the cliche? Good, bad, or indifferent?

Well, they're fine in the right place.

In everyday speech, they're very useful.

They add to the efficiency of communication.

If you're on a beach with a tsunami rolling up the sand,

you want to yell, "Run for your life".

But if you put it in a film script, it's going to sound dreadful.

Of course, not all cliches are verbal ones.

If this is Oxford, then Brandreth had better be filmed in a punt.

At the end of the day... BUZZ

..don't cliches add something

to the ebb and flow of our rich and complex language?

Know what I mean?

BUZZ Oh, there it goes again!

All's well that ends well.

-Does Gyles know everything, Angellica?

-Yes, everything.

-Who told you?

-Gyles did!

Anyway, he's not going to be very happy with us

because we've used every cliche under the sun.

No, I'm always riding me bike, wearing me boater,

it's got nothing to do with being in Cambridge.

When it comes to discovering great ideas,

this city has generated more than its fair share.

Crick and Watson discovered the secret of life

by sketching out the structure of DNA in a local pub.

Their double helix formation

is arguably the most iconic scientific symbol of our time.

Building on work by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins,

their discovery in 1953

enabled scientists to understand how DNA replicates

and how hereditary information is coded on it.

This set the stage for the rapid advances in molecular biology,

which continue to this day.

Along with Wilkins,

Crick and Watson were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962,

a prize another Cambridge graduate surely deserves.

Isaac Newton studied at Trinity College,

where he discovered the fundamentals of light and gravity.

And more importantly, on a common called Parker's Piece,

a bunch of lads got together in 1848

and laid down the set of rules

which would later form the basis of a sport called football.

Some of the best ideas, however, come from nature.

Mike Dilger went to see how scientists have been getting inspiration

from some very clever birds.

Owls - some of nature's greatest hunters.

Their hearing is ten times more sensitive than ours,

so they can hear a scuttling mouse from 30 feet away

and they can catch it unawares in pitch darkness,

all because of a very quiet weapon.

And like the Harris hawk, the barn owl that Jimmy's holding

is designed to fly as silently as possible

so it can creep up on its prey,

but to find out just how quiet,

we're going to put them both to a flight test.

Let's go, Jimmy.

Jimmy promises he can fly a Harris hawk and a barn owl

just inches above my head

and I've got to guess which is which

just from the sound of their wing beats.

OK, Jimmy, ready for the first bird.

OK, here we go.

HE LAUGHS

I definitely heard wings flying overhead.

I reckon that's the Harris hawk

and if I were a mouse or a vole, I'd be running for cover

but I'm going to wait for the second bird to be absolutely sure.

OK.

-Has it gone yet?

-Yep.

I didn't hear a flipping thing!

I'm presuming it flew over my head.

If it did, that's the barn owl.

This silent flight got engineers thinking,

"Could owl technology help aeroplanes fly more quietly too?"

At the University of Southampton,

Dr Kenji Takeda is part of an aeronautical team investigating this.

The owl's amazing. Basically, it's the only animal that has evolved

to be completely silent to its prey

and it's looking at those aspects

that allows us to see how we can apply that on an airliner.

Apart from the engines, most of the noise aeroplanes make

is caused by wind rushing over the wings.

This is the speed a barn owl would fly through the air

while it's quartering a field, looking for mice and voles.

And look at the wind resistance it has to cope with whilst it's hunting!

'Because planes fly much quicker,

'there is even more wind and turbulence.'

You're at 30 miles an hour now

and an aeroplane's probably coming in at about four times that speed.

You can see what effect the turbulence

has at the back of the wings - the ribbons are totally snarled up.

'It's turbulent air that creates noise

'and in a smaller wind tunnel Kenji and the team realise that

'the shape of the plane's wing makes it even noisier.'

As that noise crosses this sharp edge at the back,

it gets louder and is radiated towards the ground.

OK, so how does that compare to a barn owl's wing,

which we've got here?

If we look at the trailing edge, it's subtly different.

You can see these little fringes

where it's got these very fine feathers.

When the noise passes over that, it doesn't get radiated to the ground.

So the voles don't hear the barn owl coming?

That's right, it's almost silent.

'So these frilly feathers are one of the secrets

'to the owl's incredibly quiet flight

'and, amazingly, by putting owl-like frills on model plane wings,

'the team have found they can significantly reduce landing noise,

'so in the next five years we should see similar

'bristles on commercial airlines.'

Hopefully people near airports

will sleep easier as a result of these bristles.

That's right, they'll appreciate the owl's technology.

'But owls have one more trick

'that could help reduce noise close to airports

'and Kenji and the team are testing this in a flight simulator.

'Owls land on their prey very steeply, at about 25 degrees,

'so the voles can't hear them until the very last second.'

It probably comes in a lot more smoothly than I'm doing right now!

-Er, yeah!

-I'm hopeless at this!

-The owls have had a bit more practice.

'Planes, by comparison, come in to land at a very shallow three degrees,

'meaning they're very low and noisy when approaching the airport.'

The idea is if we could come in as steeply as an owl, we'd be further

away from the houses underneath us so we'd be a lot quieter.

In fact, we'd almost be silent.

'But can Captain Dilger achieve a smooth owl-like landing?'

That's it, so just aim for the runway, that's looking pretty good.

TYRES SCREECH Boing!

-Now put the brakes on.

-Yeah, welcome to Heathrow.

Thank you very much! God, that was hopeless!

THEY LAUGH

-Well, I wouldn't have Mike Dilger fly me anywhere after that.

-I agree!

That's the end of our Cambridge tour and I think it's been a hoot!

-Get it? Owls? Hoot?

-No!

-No?

-Bye.

-Bye.

'Next week on The One Show Best Of Britain, I head to the stunning

'landscape of the Lake District for a picnic with John Sergeant.'

I love this spread you've put on, John!

It's a very typical Lake District picnic and how do we know that?

We know that because it's raining. ANGELINA LAUGHS

'Miranda Krestovnikoff dives into the Northumberland seas

'to get up close and personal with our favourite underwater mammals.'

-Ooh, I can feel something tugging at my fins!

-SHE LAUGHS

'Phil and I take a tour around Blenheim Palace,

'birthplace of Winston Churchill, and you'll get another chance to see

'how The One Show put my senses to the test when they made me

'spend the night in a haunted mansion.'

-Are you OK?

-I heard something in there.

(I think something's here with me.)

Have I gone the right way?

I've gone the wrong way.

'And find out why Dan Snow stepped back in time

'and took to horseback to...

'slice a cabbage?! You'll have to watch to find out.

'Join us on Monday.'