BBC KNOWLEDGE CRIME PROFILES

Real life crime profiles and documentaries to follow BBC Entertainment’s Crime & Justice Season.

After each drama in the Crime & Justice Season on BBC Entertainment (see separate article), BBC Knowledge will reveal real life crime profiles and documentaries starting with The Science of Crime on July 19 at 22h30. With the introduction of forensic science, the battle between the police and the perpetrators of crimes has become ever more tactical. Each side has developed more sophisticated ways of committing, and solving crimes. Forensics allows police to use a tiny skin sample, a blood splatter, a clothing fibre - all invisible to the naked eye - to identify a culprit.

But are these techniques as infallible as they first seem? How can the innocent sometimes be found guilty? How do the criminals sometimes walk away unpunished? This 13 part series focuses on the history of forensic science, from its early introduction to the latest cutting-edge techniques. Each episode looks at a specific method and the famous and seemingly unsolvable crimes it has helped to crack, bringing some of the most evil minds to justice.

Following on straight after The Science of Crime on July 19 at 23h25 is a 26-part series examining the 20th Century’s most damaging and outrageous assassination attempts. Infamous Assassinations looks at the assassination of John F Kennedy to the gunning down of Mahatma Gandhi, the tragic shooting of John Lennon to the brutal bombing of one of Hitler's henchmen. The series brings viewers as close to the killers as the cameramen themselves - which sometimes means just a few feet. Using rare archive footage and reconstructions, each episode focuses on a different story, from attacks on royalty, politicians and guerrilla leaders to media personalities who all, for one reason or another, stepped in the way of an assassin determined to bring their life to an end. Many of their motives have remained shrouded in mystery. Until now...

Best known to television viewers as dogsbody servant Baldrick in Blackadder and presenter of Time Team, Tony Robinson goes on a fascinating and sometimes bizarre journey to discover the origins of UK laws in Tony Robinson’s Crime & Punishment (starts July 20 at 22h30). Tony takes a historical journey, taking in trials by boiling water, the decapitation of a king, through to the emergence of modern democracy. It’s a journey that starts 2000 years ago and remains unfinished today. Tony finds out how the Normans created the first surveillance society, how today’s compensation culture was started by the Anglo Saxons and how a man whose body is kept in a London cupboard inspired the system to stop stringing people up and start banging them up instead. Throughout his historical journey Tony variously plays the accused, judge, jury and executioner and discovers the often strange circumstances from which the main tenets of modern UK law emerged.

Starting on July 22 at 22h30, Eyewitness is a groundbreaking three-part series which explores the fallibility of human memory in witness testimony by creating eyewitnesses and looking at real-life cases crucial to the eyewitness story. Through a combination of drama, observational documentary, secret filming and interviews, Eyewitness shows the difference between what witnesses say they saw and what actually happened. Ten volunteers are turned into significant witnesses when two elaborate crimes are staged and secretly filmed to which they find themselves bystanders. As key witnesses, they enter the police system and reveal to us – and themselves – how fragile memory is. Using modern scientific interviewing techniques and cross-referencing collaborative evidence, the police piece together what they thought had happened, but how close to the truth do they come?

Award-winning broadcaster Louis Theroux wraps up the season on BBC Knowledge with his latest compelling documentary Louis Theroux: A Place for Paedophiles on August 6 at 22h30. Louis meets patients and therapists at California’s Coalinga Mental Hospital which houses more than 500 convicted paedophiles. Most inmates have already served lengthy prison sentences but have been deemed unsafe for release. Instead they have been sent here for an indefinite time. They have only two choices: accept the fact they will never live as free men in society again, or submit to a programme of rehabilitation and therapy run by the hospital’s psychologists.

So keep BBC Entertainment and BBC Knowledge under surveillance from July 12 for some truly arresting programming. BBC Entertainment saw a 41% slot uplift during the Crime & Justice season in June 2009.