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The Century That Made Us

In the 18th century, Britain became a modern nation. For the first time, Britons began to inhabit a world in which the present day is recognisable.

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From high ideals to low life, from lofty concepts of human perfectibility and democracy to the everyday enjoyments of gourmet cookbooks and men's fashion, 18th century people shared many of the grand visions and everyday pleasures to which people still aspire and enjoy today.

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In this new season, 91Èȱ¬ FOUR investigates, interrogates and celebrates the richness and excitement of this extraordinary, world-changing century.

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It discovers how a handful of Scottish thinkers changed forever the way people thought about what it was to be human; hears about the scientists mapping the new frontiers of knowledge; and recalls the squabbling artists at war with each other over the creation of a truly British way of painting.

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The season includes some of the century's best-known names, from Dr Johnson to Beau Brummell, but uncovers lesser-known figures too.

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The season kicks off with the moment when two opposing visions of Britain's potential future faced each other across a great political divide.

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On the one side stood Bonnie Prince Charlie, a Stuart, a Catholic, a doomed romantic defender of an ancient way of life. Ranged against him was the Hanoverian Duke of Cumberland, emblem of a modernising Protestant world whose methods were as brutal as his success was inevitable.

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That's the traditional view of the events of 1745, but a new documentary, The Butcher And The Bonnie Prince, takes a fresh look at these two reputations and at the Jacobite struggle itself, exploring its legacy not just for those whose lives were changed forever by it, but also for two modern nations, Scotland and England, whose contemporary perceptions of each other are still shaped by its consequences.

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In Crowded With Genius – How Scotland Invented The Modern Mind Andrew Marr investigates an extraordinary period in the 18th century when one of the poorest countries in Europe was taking the lead in intellectual life, turning concepts of society, religion and deference on their head and laying the mental foundations for the modern world.

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With money to spend on lavish houses furnished with opulent interiors, a new merchant class was making its presence felt in the 18th century, fuelling the growth of large tracts of London.

91Èȱ¬ FOUR Winter/Spring 2006

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In Princes Of The East End (working title), presenter Dan Cruickshank enters a glamorous sphere where merchants from the City and East London, who were rising to new heights through trade and commerce, were conspicuously buying in to the trappings and lifestyle traditionally associated with the aristocracy.

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The programme examines the explosion in building in this quarter of London and the palaces built, which were also used as working offices and showrooms.

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Roving gourmand Clarissa Dickson-Wright presents Hannah Glasse, a fascinating portrait of the woman who made a key contribution to modern food.

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Using Glasse's celebrated cookbook The Art Of Cookery Made Plain And Easy, Clarissa cooks up a feast of flavours and colours, weaving together the threads of 18th century life both in and out of the kitchen.

91Èȱ¬ FOUR Winter/Spring 2006

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Historian Ben Woolley discusses the attitudes to science, experimentation and even death that 18th century painting so perfectly captured in Joseph Wright of Derby's An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump.

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Castrato examines the mystical status and anatomical mysteries surrounding the emasculated "third sex" singers who were the undisputed superstars of 18th-century musical culture.

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The rise and fall of their intoxicatingly androgynous virtuoso voices, from the church pews to the operatic stage, and their sudden fall from grace at the turn of the century, is one of music's greatest untold stories.

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