Original Wing Chun

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Original Wing Chun is one hour documentary that looks at the root of the Wing Chun art looking at old and rare footages of Yip Man and Bruce Lee at his early stages. Wing Chun also romanized as Ving Tsun or Wing Tsun is a Chinese martial art that specializes in close-range combat.

Wing Chun was originally passed down from teacher to student orally rather than through written documentation, making it difficult to confirm or clarify the differing accounts of its creation. Some have sought to apply the methods of higher criticism to the oral histories of Wing Chun and other Chinese martial arts.

Others have attempted to discern the origins of Wing Chun by determining the specific purpose of its techniques. Mentions of the art start to appear in independent third-party documentation during the era of the Wing Chun master Leung Jan, making its subsequent history and divergence into various branches more amenable to documentary verification.

The common legend involves the young woman Yim Wing Chun (Wing Chun literally means beautiful springtime or praising spring) at the time after the destruction of the Southern Shaolin and its associated temples by the Qing government. After Wing Chun rebuffs the local warlord’s marriage offer, he says he’ll rescind his proposal if she can beat him in a martial art match.

She asks a Buddhist nun- Ng Mui, who was one of the Shaolin Sect survivors, to teach her boxing; this still nameless style enables Yim Wing Chun to defeat the warlord. She thereafter marries Leung Bac-Chou and teaches him the style, which he names after her.

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Marathon Challenge

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How do you run 26.2 miles if you have trouble making it around the block? With good coach­ing, discipline, and lots of group support, as NOVA shows when it follows 13 generally sedentary people through a training regimen designed to prepare them for an ultimate test of stamina and endurance. Created in cooperation with the Boston Athletic Association®, which granted NOVA unprec­edented access to the 111th Boston Marathon®, and Tufts University, “Marathon Challenge” takes viewers on a unique adventure inside the human body, tracking the physiological changes that exercise can bring about.

Former Olympian and three-time Boston Marathon winner Uta Pippig offers advice and inspiration to NOVA’s runners throughout their training. And veteran Tufts University coach Donald Megerle guides them week-by-week through an onslaught of physical and psychological challenges. NOVA’s runners range in age from 22 to 60, and they come to the endeavor with a wide range of medical histories and backgrounds. They share one thing in common: none has ever run a marathon before.

Team NOVA includes Betsey, a hospital administrator who became substantially overweight while recovering from surgery; Jonathan, a hard-charging CEO and father of five whose marriage is breaking apart; Sama, a reformed smoker mourning the recent death of her mother to a hit-and-run driver; Larry, a social worker and 14-year survivor of a serious heart attack; Xenia, a woman turning 40 and struggling with being an “aging sedentary physician”; and Steve, a Harley-riding former NFL linebacker who sees the marathon as a novel challenge for someone used to running only a few yards before tackling an opponent.

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The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

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The Ending

In the early 1980s, legendary Billy Mitchell set a Donkey Kong record that stood for almost 25 years.

This documentary follows the assault on the record by Steve Wiebe, an earnest teacher from Washington who took up the game while unemployed.

The top scores are monitored by a cadre of players and fans associated with Walter Day, an Iowan who runs Funspot, an annual tournament.

Wiebe breaks Mitchell’s record in public at Funspot, and Mitchell promptly mails a video tape of himself setting a new record. So Wiebe travels to Florida hoping Mitchell will face him for the 2007 Guinness World Records. Will the mind-game-playing Mitchell engage; who will end up holding the record?

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Baby Faced Bodybuilders

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Part 1


Part 2

Most of us go to the gym to lose weight and subtly tone our bodies – if we go at all. And most of us think bodybuilders look gross and unnatural. So why is it that some teenagers are dedicating their lives to this extreme sport?

This surprising, energetic and gripping documentary follows teenagers whose bodybuilding obsession is so extreme it’s becoming a clinical problem. We delve into the minds of three young bodybuilders and discover how they got to the point where they wanted to be weirdly big.

Danny is preparing for his first big competition by transforming his body in a matter of weeks. He is ‘bigorexic’ – psychologically obsessed with being big – and it has taken over his life. Meanwhile 15- year-old Chapelle excitedly plans a trip to meet her heroine Avril, a female bodybuilding legend.

We reveal how an obsession with bodybuilding can rule your life. And we talk to their families and friends to find out what they think of it all.

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Strictly Baby Fight Club

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The Cutting Edge strand enters the competitive and sometimes obsessive world of child Thai boxing, focusing on four families who are investing everything into making their kids the best young fighters in Britain.

Children as young as four or five are becoming the latest recruits to organized fighting, where some people’s attitude is that if you’re good enough to fight, you’re old enough.

The programme follows five primary school children: Miah and her twin brother Kian, Thai, Connor and Sohan.

The documentary looks at the extraordinary fitness regimes undertaken by some of the children, and hears from the parents who are passionate about the positive effects that Thai boxing has had both on the kids themselves, and on their relationships with them.

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Once Brothers

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Drazen Petrovic and Vlade Divac were two friends who grew up together sharing the common bond of basketball. Together, they lifted the Yugoslavian National team to unimaginable heights.

After conquering Europe, they both went to America where they became the first two foreign players to attain NBA stardom. But with the fall of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991, Yugoslavia split up. A war broke out between Petrovic’s Croatia and Divac’s Serbia.

Long buried ethnic tensions surfaced. And these two men, once brothers, were now on opposite sides of a deadly civil war. As Petrovic and Divac continued to face each other on the basketball courts of the NBA, no words passed between the two.

Then, on the fateful night of June 7, 1993, Drazen Petrovic was killed in an auto accident. Once Brothers will tell the gripping tale of these two men, how circumstances beyond their control tore apart their friendship, and whether Divac has ever come to terms with the death of a friend before they had a chance to reconcile.

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FIFA’s Dirty Secrets

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The half-hour programme saw investigative journalist Andrew Jennings look into allegations of corruption with FIFA, the world’s governing body of association football.

Within the programme he alleged that three members of FIFA’s executive committee had been given bribes by International Sports and Leisure, a marketing partner of FIFA.

The three men – Nicolas Leoz, Issa Hayatou and Ricardo Teixeira – were reportedly involved with a sports marketing firm responsible for broadcasting rights and took money from them.

Jennings further alleged that a fourth current official has been involved in ticket touting. Both of these matters had not been properly investigated by Sepp Blatter, the President of FIFA. It also made a series of claims about the bidding process for hosting the FIFA World Cup.

The documentary was broadcast only three days before the result of the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups were announced. This led to fears from some people that it could ruin England’s chances of hosting the former tournament, with some accusing the BBC of being unpatriotic; however, the BBC defended these claims.

Russia ultimately won the right to host the FIFA World Cup in 2018, with Qatar emerging victorious for the 2022 tournament. The question of whether the documentary was a crucial factor in England losing the contest was brought up by a number of key figures after the result was announced.

Hayatou, who is the vice-president of FIFA, denied all accusations of involvement in the scheme and claimed money was in fact paid to the Confederation of African Football (CAF). He threatened to sue the BBC for the making of the documentary. The programme received 52 complaints from viewers.

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