Higher Channels

John Davies scans the schedules. (All times pm unless stated.) Pick of the week

Time to examine our language. BBC Radio kicks off a "Thousand Years of Spoken English" season with The Routes of English (Friday 4.00 R4, repeated Tuesday 1.30). Melvyn Bragg explores how language has been shaped by social change. Part one, based round Bragg's home town of Wigton, makes much of the town's own peculiar usages, some of which appear to be Romany-derived. Academic comment from Leeds University's Katie Wales.

FRIDAY October 15 The Routes of English. See pick of the week.

Night Waves (9.20 R3). Barcelona and its cultural rebirth. Further programmes from the city in the next few days include a Saturday Feature (10.00 R3) on what makes Catalonia different from the rest of Spain.

SaturDAY October 16 The Sutton Hoo Story (2.30 R4). Anglo-Saxon discoveries that changed archaeology.

Sounding the Century Lecture (6.45 R3). Israeli novelist Amos Oz on "How to cure a fanatic".

Correspondent (6.50 BBC2). "How the War Was Spun" is the first of three programmes under the title Kosovo: The Reckoning. This one, about the PR battle, is followed by 78 Days: An Audit of War (Sunday 7.20 BBC2) on the economic, human and environmental cost of Nato's action.

Storyville: I was a Slave Labourer (10.00 BBC2). Rudy Kennedy, survivor of forced labour under the Nazis, pursues companies that were complicit in Hitler's regime.

SUNDAY October 17 Britain's Slave Trade (8.00 C4). An "alternative" version of the battle for abolition.

Anno Domini (8.00 R2). The history of Christianity in Britain: start of 11-part series. Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure (9.00 BBC1). Travel series with the BBC's favourite Oxford-educated comedian follows in Hemingway's footsteps. This week, Spain; Africa and the Caribbean to follow.

MONDAY October 18 Millennium (7.10 BBC2). Based loosely on Felipe Fern ndez-Armesto's book of the same title, this is a determinedly episodic and non-western view of "1,000 years of history". Episode one (of ten) covers the 11th century in China, Japan, India, Moorish Spain, Jerusalem and northern Europe.

University Challenge (8.00 BBC2). Trinity, Cambridge, versus Keble, Oxford.

Staying Lost (9.00 C4). Series on Britain's runaway children begins in Nottingham.

TUESDAY October 19 War of the Century (9.00 BBC2). The Battle of Stalingrad recalled.

Women's Bits: PMT (9.00 C4). First of a season of programmes on women's health. The second is Thursday's Love Me Tender (8.00 C4), on endometriosis.

WEDNESDAY October 20 Thinking Allowed (4.00 R4). Anthony Giddens talks to Laurie Taylor.

The Great Swiss Donut (9.00 R4). The subatomic science of CERN.

Living Proof: Born Twice (9.30 BBC1). American surgeon Joe Bruner and his work treating spina bifida in the womb.

Faces in the Forest (10.00 National Geographic Channel). US-made film about cranial surgeon Larry Sargent and his work in Peru correcting facial deformities.

THURSDAY October 21 Melvyn Bragg - In Our Time (9.00 am R4). The individual in history, with Richard Wollheim and Jonathan Dollimore.

The Material World (4.30 R4). How volcanic ash could help the island of Montserrat.

Email: Davieses@aol.com. For extended guide and web links to programmes, visit The THES website at: www.thesis.co.uk