John Simpson

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the BBC's John Simpson goes back to examine his reports and consider why history did not turn out quite the way he expected.

18 years after his last film, (The Troubles We've Seen), Marcel Ophuls emerges from retirement as one of our last masters, the most corrosive, the funniest as well. And the most forceful. The director of The Sorrow and the Pity shares with us stories of his exceptionally rich life in this light-hearted yet bitter escapade though the century and the movies. Son of the great Max Ophuls, he is generous in his admiration. We also meet Jeanne Moreau, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and of course François Truffaut. There are no great filmmakers without a memory, so here is the memory shop of Marcel Ophuls.

John Simpson looks back at his extraordinary 60-year career at the BBC - reporting on the biggest global stories of the era. In a frank, personal and revealing documentary, he reflects on the changing world he has witnessed: the revolution in Iran that seemed destined to fail, his brutal kidnapping in Beirut, the fall of the Berlin Wall, two wars in Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan and a mind-altering trip up the Amazon.

Shooting Stars is a British television comedy panel game broadcast on BBC Two as a pilot in 1993, then as 3 full series from 1995 to 1997, then on BBC Choice from January to December 2002 with 2 series before returning to BBC Two for another 3 series from 2008 until its cancellation in 2011. Created and hosted by double-act Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, it uses the panel show format but with the comedians' often slapstick, surreal and anarchic humour does not rely on rules in order to function, with the pair apparently ignoring existing rules or inventing new ones as and when the mood takes them.

Graham Norton's Bigger Picture is a British comedy panel chat show launched on BBC One in 2005, in which presenter Graham Norton informally and satirically discusses the week's news with a panel of invited celebrity guests. The show begins with the celebrities being shown in mocked-up photographs of themselves in scenes involving other celebrities, and ends with the guests introducing other mocked up photographs that humorously explain the recent behaviour of other celebrities.

A topical magazine-style daily television programme broadcast live on BBC One.

Presented by Victoria Coren, it was companion to the Oxford English Dictionary's Wordhunt, in which the writers of the dictionary asked the public for help in finding the origins and first known citations of a number of words and phrases. The OED panel consisted of John Simpson, the Chief Editor of the OED; Peter Gilliver, who was also the captain of the Oxford University Press team in University Challenge - the Professionals; and Tania Styles, who also appeared in "dictionary corner" in Countdown.