BBC Two Daytime today announces it has commissioned a brand new series ‘Travels With Bradshaw.’

The series will be presented by Michael Portillo and is a TalkbackThames production.

In a series of epic train rides that criss-cross the length and breadth of Britain, Michael Portillo will chart the great British romance with the railways.

Passionate about trains, Portillo will follow in the footsteps of the cartographic legend George Bradshaw, who wrote the first national railway timetables and travel guides in the 1840s.

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As part of the BBC’s Violence Season, in last night’s Horizon, How Violent Are You? Michael Portillo investigated what makes ordinary people commit extreme acts of violence and explored the fine line between control and aggression.

I’m not sure Portillo was the best person for the job, given he’s not ‘ordinary’ – he’s a pillock, and an upper class pillock at that – but nonetheless, Horizon sent him off to Bolivia to take part in Tinku, an annual “violence ritual” where men, women and children beat seven colours out of each other.

This seems to be a ritual that’s replicated on the streets of the UK at about 3am on most weekends, so maybe he’d have been better going off to the middle of Camden on a Saturday night and saved us license payers the cost of shipping him off to the Bolivian Andes… Read more & comment »

Michael Portillo investigates what makes ordinary people commit extreme acts of violence, in the final Horizon of the series, and explores the fine line between control and aggression.

Michael looks at the environmental and psychological factors that can cause an individual to snap and to lose their self-control. He explores a much darker side of people’s nature and asks if anyone can be driven to deliberately kill. In a thought-provoking and sometimes uncomfortable journey, Michael discovers that each of us could be inherently more violent than we think.

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