TV & radio guide - Friday

In Search of the Black Madonna (11.00 am R4). Bonnie Greer wonders about the power of "Black Madonna" icons in Europe from medieval times on. First of two programmes.
Culture Fix (11.30 am BBC Knowledge, also 1.30, 4.30, 7.30, 10.30). On kitsch.
The Message (4.30 R4). Do focus groups kill vision?
Life Story (8.05 World Service, repeated Sat 2.05 am). The finds in the 600-million-year-old Burgess Shale of Canada. Second programme (of four) on the fossil evidence of evolution, with Martin Redfern. Listen to » Life Story online.
Great Expectations (9.00 UK Drama). A reshowing for Tony Marchant’s dark 1999 adaptation of the Dickens classic.
» Conquistadors (9.00 BBC2; 9.30 in Wales). "All the World is Human". Final programme in Michael Wood’s watchable series starts with Cabeza de Vaca’s unsuccessful expedition to Florida, but returns to Spain to recount the 1550 debate in Valladolid between Las Casas and Sepulveda on the rights of native peoples in the New World – in Wood’s words, the first stirrings of the idea of "the globalisation of justice".
» Night Waves (9.30 R3). Contrasting Shakespeare productions reviewed. Plus the first of a series of foreign fiction recommendations, beginning with Christopher Hope on Ivan Bunin, Russian short story writer.
» Meetings with Remarkable Trees (9.50 BBC2; 10.20 in Wales). The Dorchester plane. (That’s the London hotel, not the Dorset town.) Last in series.
The Last Neanderthal (10.00 National Geographic). Human origins again.