The first recording today opens with a very moody trailer for Silent Witness.
Then, a repeat of Life on Mars series 2, episode 6 which I looked at on its first broadcast.
Media Centre Description: Drama series about Sam Tyler, a detective who suffers a near-fatal car crash and wakes up in what seems to be 1973. As heroin hits the streets of Manchester for the first time, CID and DCI Hunt want culprits for the smuggling, the dealing and ensuing violence. As Sam tries to get to the source of the influx of this deadly drug, he finds himself intractably drawn to a beautiful young woman who was witness to a heroin-related shooting.
Recorded from BBC FOUR on Tuesday 21st August 2007 21:58
BBC Genome: BBC FOUR Tuesday 21st August 2007 22:00
After this, trails for Stephen Fry: Secret Life of a Manic Depressive and The Secret Life of the Motorway.
Then, the recording ends after 7 minutes of an episode of Lead Balloon.
The next recording is The Bourne Supremacy, another edited recording.
Joan Allen is a new character, Pamela Landy, who we meet running a covert operation.
But unknown to her and her team, there’s someone else there, setting explosives to kill the power, but also, suspiciously, planting a fingerprint at the scene. He kills the two people Landy’s team are following and steals the money and files that were part of the deal.
Bourne and Marie are in India. He’s been having dreams about something he almost remembers, something to do with Conklin (Chris Cooper from the first film). But he’s staying alert, and spots a suspicious character who looks a lot like a young Karl Urban. Bourne’s instincts are good, as the man is showing people Bourne’s picture and asking if they know him.
Bourne drives to the beach to pick up Marie, and tell her their cover has been blown.
There’s a car chase, and just as Marie is telling Bourne that he does have a choice, she’s shot in the head by the bad guy, and the car crashes off a bridge into a river. I’m guessing Franke Potente wasn’t available for the whole movie. Or the writers didn’t want their super spy to be weighed down by a girl.
Back in Germany, police take the planted fingerprint from the detonator and run it through their hi-tech fingerprint scanner which looks suspiciously like an HP PDA. They really were everywhere.
Landy’s team run the print, and get blocked, although it rather helpfully gives them the name of the top secret covert project in question – Treadstone.
Karl Urban meets his Russian handler, giving him that bad news that Bourne is still alive.
Landy flies to Langley to talk to Ward Abbot (Brian Cox, returning from the previous film) about Treadstone. He doesn’t want to tell her anything but eventually has to, providing a useful infodump for those who can’t remember or never saw the first film. We learn that the reason she wants to know about Treadstone is that the fingerprint they found was Jason Bourne’s. And they think Bourne killed their man and the man selling the secrets.
Ooh, we’re in London now. Of course the CIA would have headquarters in Canary Wharf. Probably a few floors below Torchwood, in the old L!ve TV studios, I reckon. It’s a shame the film doesn’t spend more time in London, as I think the only purpose of this scene is to flag up Bourne’s passport in Naples, so they can detain him.
Landy briefs her people.
Seven years ago, $20 million of CIA funds disappeared during a wire transfer through Moscow. In the investigation that followed, we were contacted by a Russian politician, Vladimir Nesky. Nesky claimed we had a leak, and that we’d been ripped off by one of our own. And where were we? We never found out. We were negotiating a meet with Mr. Nesky when he was killed. By who? His wife. The case had gone cold until a month ago when we found a source, another Russian in Berlin, who claimed to have access to the Nesky murder files. We thought we had another bite at the apple. Turns out the assassin was one of our own. Jason Bourne.
She’s traced a Swiss bank account to Conklin, and thinks Bourne was also involved, and came out of hiding to kill her agents to stop them getting their hands on the information.
Bourne is being interviewed by a local CIA agent who doesn’t know who he is. Bourne sits silently, ignoring everything. But the agent gets a call telling him how important and dangerous he is, so he pulls his gun, and Bourne explodes into action, putting down both men in the room almost immediately. Then he clones the mobile SIM from the agent’s phone, and leaves. He steals a car, and is able to listen when they phone the agent back. From this he learns that they think he killed people in Berlin, and that Landy is going to Berlin.
In Amsterdam, they pick up Nicky, Julia Styles, who ran the Treadstone office in Paris in the last film. They want her in Berlin.
In Munich, Bourne finds another Treadstone agent. I think he’s the one who killed Conklin at the end of the first movie. There’s another crunchy fight.
Bourne gets to Berlin and finds out which hotel Landy is staying in. With that information he’s able to follow her to the CIA office, at which he calls her while watching her through a sniper rifle. He asks why, if Treadstone is closed, are they still after him. She says it’s because he killed two people in Berlin. This seems to trigger memories for him. He can see that Nicky is there with them. He tells her he wants to come in. “Okay. How do you want to do it?” “I need someone I know to bring me in.” “Who? There was a girl in Paris. She’s part of the program. She used to handle logistics. Alexanderstrasse. Thirty minutes under the world clock. Send her alone. Give her your phone.” Landy asks “What if I can’t find her?” “She’s standing right next to you.”
Bourne is able to get Nicky and talk to her. She tells him why they’re after him. He tells her he was in India, not Berlin. But he’s remembering an actual mission in Berlin – something to do with the Russian, Neski. He thinks it was his first mission. But Nicky says there’s no such mission in his file.
Bourne does some research on Neski.
A CIA agent has a theory. He doesn’t think the way the explosives were set, where Bourne’s fingerprint was found, makes sense. He shows Abbott what he’s found. “what if somebody were trying to cover their tracks by blaming Conklin and Bourne? What if Bourne didn’t have anything to do with this?” Abbott nods sagely. Then stabs the agent. Yikes! I didn’t see this coming.
Bourne visits the hotel where he remembers his first mission. We see a flashback of him going there to kill Neski, but finding that his wife is there too, so he kills them both and makes it look like the wife killed him then herself. The hotel staff recognise Bourne from a wanted flyer, and police descend on the room, so there’s another chase before Bourne gets away. Landy recognises the room as the one where Neski was killed. Not by his wife, as thought, but by Bourne.
Abbott phones his man in Russia – he’s the one who was running Karl Urban. They were both part of the stolen $20m
Bourne is in Abbot’s room, he heard that conversation. So Abbott explains the plan. Bourne records the conversation and leaves him alive. When Landy finds him he tells her. “I’m a patriot. I serve my country.” “So what do we do now?” “I’m not sorry.” Then he kills himself.
Landy gets Bourne’s tape.
Bourne goes to Moscow. Karl Urban is told to go after him. He manages to shoot him in the shoulder.
There’s a very long and violent car chase. Karl Urban doesn’t come out of it on top.
The man who was running Karl Urban is arrested.
Bourne finds the girl he was looking for. Neski’s daughter. He tells her what he did, that her mother didn’t kill her father, as she’s believed her whole life. “It changes things. That knowledge, doesn’t it? What you love gets taken from you. You want to know the truth. I’m sorry.”
Bourne phones Landy. What the heck is happening with her hair? “I hear you’re still looking for me.” “Bourne?” “What do you want?” “I wanted to thank you. For the tape. I got what we needed. It’s all tied off, it’s over. I guess I owe you an apology.” “Is that official?” “No, off the record. You know how it is.” “Goodbye.” “Wait, wait. David Webb. That’s your real name. You were born 4/15/71 in Nixon, Missouri. Why don’t you come in and we’ll talk about it? Bourne?” “Get some rest, Pam. You look tired.”
Media Centre Description: Spy thriller sequel based on the Robert Ludlum books. Bourne is once again forced to take up his former life as a trained assassin when a CIA operation to purchase classified Russian documents goes wrong.
Recorded from ITV2 +1 on Tuesday 21st August 2007 21:58
The last recording today starts with the end of a film, Kolya.
There’s a trail for Stephen Fry: Secret Life of a Manic Depressive and the BBC Proms.
Then, the first episode of Secret Life of the Motorway – Falling in Love. Narrated by Philip Glenister, it’s a very entertaining look at the beginnings of the UK Motorway system.
I’m fairly sure that, unless this is green screen, this interview took place in one of the BBC buildings at White City. Possibly the Broadcast Centre (where I worked at the time) or the White City building next door. That definitely does look like the Westway that passes right by it.
John Cox was an engineer on the Preston by-pass, the first piece of motorway built in Britain. There’s a sad note at the end, as he died while the programme was being made.
John Baxter tells the story of the opening of the motorway. “There were lots and lots of people wanting to get onto it. I was right at the front of the little bit of slip road by the barrier, and the official cortage went past with all the VIPs and so on, and the chap who was sitting next to me said, come on, get going now, come on, so off we went. So I sort of claimed that I was the first person to drive on the motorway. I don’t know whether that’s true or not.”
Piers Brendon: “There was no speed limit at all. Speed, speed, that was the excitement, really, of what the motorway brought to driving.” Although the programme also talks about all the cars which really weren’t up to driving so fast, and the huge numbers of breakdowns that happened in the early days. John Cox remembers doing an end-to-end run in his Ford Zephyr at an average speed of 83mph.
Margaret Calvert, along with her colleague Jock Kinneir, was responsible for designing the signage on the motorway. “I remember the formula that I used was ultramarine plus azure blue plus zinc white. Designer’s colours.” After the success with the motorway signs, and their clarity and consistent use of colour and typography, Kinneir and Calvert would go on to redesign all the road signs in Britain.
I keep hoping for a glimpse of Hemel Hempstead on these maps, but I think, at the time the M1 was being built, Hemel was still a “New Town” still growing from its beginnings as a small town with lots of satellite villages. Still, there’s Watford, St. Albans and Luton.
Perhaps the most astonishing fact about the M1: “In all, only five houses and three bungalows were demolished to make way for the M1.”
They talk to Martin Jordan, an Irish labourer who worked on the motorways as a “navvy” which, I also learn from this programme, comes from the term “inland navigator”. I once played a navvy on stage in a play all about my home town. My Irish accent was… passable. But I did have range – my next scene, after a very quick 30 second costume change into a dinner jacket, had me playing a 1950s BBC announcer. My accent for that one was slightly easier for me.
Richard Allsop has an absolutely fantastic job title. “Transport Mathematician”
The programme buts a myth about the farmhouse which has the two carriageways of the M62 going either side of it. “It’s a shame, really, because there used to be a myth around, for many years after the motorway being constructed, that the farmer living in the house wouldn’t move and refused to move, and therefore we divided the carriageways and put it round it. That, in essence, sadly, is not true.” “In fact, the motorway was built around the farmhouse because the land on which it was standing was unstable and had to be shored up. It was cheaper to build two roads around it.”
We even hear from Joyce Wild, whose family were living there at the time.
Next, it’s Spaghetti Junction. I remember growing up seeing these kinds of pictures of it, thinking how incredibly complicated it was (and it genuinely was) but when I actually drove round it (or more likely, at the time, was driven around it) feeling slightly underwhelmed because it’s just a perfectly ordinary set of interchanges, all designed like every other interchange, so as long as you know where you’re going, it doesn’t seem complicated at all.
The Saunders’ main memory of its construction was of all the mud. “Oh, the dirt. The kids came in with the dirt and, you know, you pushed your pram through it and if it was a wet day, you still had to push it back into the hall because you couldn’t leave it outside and it was just a nightmare. The dirt was just a nightmare.”
Chief Engineer Roy Foot talks about having to accommodate the canals in the building work. “It was a great canal system in Birmingham and we had to provide a column arrangement so that you could still tow a barge with a horse. I nearly went mad when they settled it, but anyway, we had to do that to rearrange the column so that they could get their horse round there. It was an interesting job, certainly.”
Here’s someone else’s upload of this programme. Apologies for the aspect ratio.
Media Centre Description: Three-part documentary which celebrates the birth of motorways and hails the achievements of those behind the ‘road revolution’. This edition charts the beginning of Britain’s love affair with motorways, meeting the engineers and builders who designed and built the first motorway, through to those who toiled to complete the most complex road intersection in the country – Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction.
Recorded from BBC FOUR on Wednesday 22nd August 2007 01:08
BBC Genome: BBC FOUR Wednesday 22nd August 2007 01:10
After this, there’s a trail for Consenting Adults and then the recording stops after a few minutes of a repeat of Mark Lawson talks to Stephen Fry.