Start the Week

It is 40 years since Sir David Attenborough told the story of Life on Earth, from its very first spark 4 billion years ago to the abundance of plants and animals today. He tells Andrew Marr how more pieces of the puzzle have fallen into place over the last four decades. The German ornithologist Michael Quetting spent a year hand rearing seven goslings: caring for them as they hatched, helping them learn to swim, and teaching them to fly alongside his aircraft. The project is part of an ambitious scientific research programme to understand birds in flight and use them to gather weather data for us.Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, looks beyond the earth to ask about potential life among the stars. He sees the future of humanity as bound to the future of science, and believes that space explorers in the next century will be electronic and not organic.A hundred years after Holst wrote The Planets, leading composers are again trying to capture the essence of our solar system in music. But this time they are working in collaboration with scientists. The geologist Dr Philippa Mason has helped bring deeper insight to Venus: a planet once thought to be a lush tropical swamp world, but in reality a crushing, violent inferno.(Producer: Katy Hickman).

The Vietnam War was a 30-year conflict in which three million people died and the reputations of successive US presidents were wrecked. Max Hastings tells Andrew Marr about the extraordinary political meddling, strategic failure and lack of compassion that characterises that war.The historian Helen Parr was seven years old in 1982 when her uncle was killed in the Falklands War. She brings to life his experiences in the Parachute Regiment, often known as the Paras, an elite fighting force founded in 1940.The former head of the British Army Richard Dannatt, looks at the present health of the military - and considers the difficulties that lie ahead.While the Defence Editor of The Times newspaper, Deborah Haynes, scrutinises the defence budget and criticises the prevailing media and public narrative of the soldier as hero or victim.Producer: Katy Hickman.

Andrew Marr presents a special edition of Start the Week at the Edinburgh Festivals, weaving together ancient stories and contemporary fiction - from Scotland to Iceland via ancient Greece.He speaks to award-winning writers Pat Barker, Sjón and James Robertson and the singer-songwriter Karine Polwart. Karine also performs live.Producer: Katy Hickman.

Britain has imported its culture from Europe for generations. Andrew Marr presents a special edition from Hatchlands Park in Surrey, home to the Cobbe Collection of musical instruments including pianos owned by Chopin, Mahler and Marie Antoinette.Frederic Chopin had a pan-European career. He swapped his native Poland for Paris, fled to Mallorca in search of sunshine and inspiration, and toured Britain twice, complaining bitterly about the 'crafty' locals and 'dreadful' British weather. But he had a huge impact on the musical scenes he left behind. Paul Kildea charts Chopin's journey across Europe. Sitting at the keys of Chopin's own piano, Kildea explains how this visionary composer shaped Romanticism.European composers and performers in Britain faced a tougher reception in the wake of two world wars. In her new book, Singing in the Age of Anxiety, Laura Tunbridge depicts the contradictions of a generation that viewed Wagner as a cultural high-point - but decried all things German as enemy propaganda. At the same time radio and gramophones dramatically altered the way people heard and responded to music. The digital world offers vast new audiences, but also brings new challenges to those in the arts. Munira Mirza is Director of HENI Talks, an online platform that aims to share cultural information and understanding with much wider audiences. By combining leading experts and world-famous works such as the Mona Lisa, she wants to take art outside the gallery. As former Deputy Mayor for Culture in London, Mirza envisages a future in which we have a truly international cultural scene.Producer: Hannah Sander.

Tina Brown was an Englishwoman barely out of her twenties when she arrived in New York. She transformed herself into a star magazine editor, at the helm of Vanity Fair and later the New Yorker. She tells Amol Rajan how the backstabbing and status-driven world of American politics allows figures like Donald Trump to triumph.Didier Eribon is one of France's leading philosophers and the biographer of Foucault. But he has only just "come out" as working class. In his memoir Returning to Reims he asks why social status is still toxic in Europe today. And he gives a damning account of how the French working class shifted their loyalty from the Communist Party to Marine Le Pen's National Front.Frida Kahlo is a communist icon. As one of the world's most marketable faces she has even appeared on Theresa May's bracelet. Kahlo had a keen sense of her own image from an early age, and painted endless self-portraits. But she was also ashamed of her body and the accident that had left her unable to bear a child. As a blockbuster exhibition opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum, author Miranda France unpicks Kahlo's slippery reputation.A governess arrives at a grand country house and is terrified by the sexual freedom she encounters, in Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw. Timothy Sheader directs a new production for Regent's Park Theatre and the English National Opera. He explains how a ghost story about a boy seduced by a powerful working man enabled Britten to address the shame and criminality of homosexuality in 1950s Britain.Producer: Hannah Sander.

One-third of the earth's surface is classified as desert. The writer William Atkins has travelled to eight of the world's hottest, driest places. He tells Andrew Marr about these forbidding, inhuman landscapes. The Arabian Desert lies mostly in Saudi Arabia but crosses borders from Egypt to Qatar, UAE to Oman. The economic analyst Jane Kinninmont looks at how this shared landscape affects regional politics and culture.In the 1950s deserts were the preferred places for Britain and America to test their nuclear bombs in secret. The science journalist Fred Pearce explores the human ingenuity - and human error - that has fuelled the atomic age. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Psychedelic drugs are once again being trialled to treat a range of psychological conditions. The writer Mike Pollan tells Kirsty Wark about the science of LSD and magic mushrooms: from the 1940s to the 1960s they promised to shed light not only on the deep mysteries of consciousness, but also to offer relief from addiction and mental illness. Banned since the 1970s, there is now a resurgence of research into these mind-altering substances.While some psychiatrists were getting their patients to experiment with psychedelics in the 1950s, far more were administering electroconvulsive therapy - both have a controversial history. ECT involves sending an electric current through the brain to trigger an epileptic seizure. It gained a reputation as a barbaric treatment, after the film One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. But the psychiatrist Dr Tammy Burmeister believes that it's time people understood the therapeutic potential from this procedure.The poet Andrew Motion's latest book Essex Clay is an attempt to return to heartfelt memories of childhood. He looks back at his mother's riding accident, which left her 'floating herself among the nebulae and gas clouds of her vast unconsciousness' and her subsequent slow death. The book revolves around loss and memory and retrieval. The evolution of the human brain is one of the wonders of nature, but the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith asks what if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? He wonders how the octopus - a solitary creature - became so smart. He traces the story from single-celled organism 3.8 billion years ago to the development of cephalopod consciousness, casting new light on the octopus mind. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy's latest book weaves together the lives of the misfits and outcasts from India's bustling streets. Roy is famous as an advocate for the most vulnerable and dehumanised in Indian society. She tells Andrew Marr how her main character Anjum builds a small paradise for the dispossessed in a graveyard in Delhi. Ivan Mishukov walked out of his Moscow flat aged four and spent two years living on the city streets, where he found a home among a pack of wild dogs. Playwright Hattie Naylor used this true and extraordinary story as the basis for a play and now a film, Lek and the Dogs. She explores how the human world failed to look after the child, but how his kindness won the trust and protection of street dogs.Damian Le Bas grew up surrounded by Gypsy history from his great grandmother. He sets out on the road to discover Travellers' stopping places and to understand how the romanticised stories of the past were replaced by the critical, outcast image of present-day Gypsies.The columnist and Conservative Peer Daniel Finkelstein appears to be the ultimate establishment insider. But his parents were refugees who were forced to move across Europe because of antisemitism. He believes their desire for rootedness and belonging underlines his own politics.Producer: Katy HickmanPicture: Arundhati Roy (credit Mayank Austen Soofi).

In a special edition at Hay Festival, Tom Sutcliffe explores success and failure, from Homer's epic poetry to global pandemics. The historian David Christian looks at the birth and development of the universe. He weaves together science, arts and humanities in his vast tale of human existence.Emily Wilson is the first woman to translate, The Odyssey, the great adventure story of classical literature.The historian Antony Beevor reconstructs the tragedy of Arnhem, the Battle for the Bridges in 1944. He questions whether the British military strategy was doomed from the start.Success and failure are woven through Dr Jonathan D Quick's study of epidemics. He asks whether politics and science can come together to prevent the deaths of millions of people.Producer: Katy Hickman.

Giant factories are at the centre of Joshua Freeman's history of mass production. From the textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution to the car plants of 20th century America and today's colossal sweat shops in Asia, Freeman tells Amol Rajan how factories have reflected both the hopes and fears of social change.The poems in Jane Commane's collection, Assembly Line, are set in a Midlands where ghosts haunt the deserted factory floor and the landscape is littered with 'heartsick towns'.The architecture critic Rowan Moore looks at the changing landscape of work in the 21st century, from huge impersonal distribution centres to the pleasure palaces of tech giants.The economist Mariana Mazzucato is calling for a reform of capitalism, to replace taking with making. She argues that the global economy has become a parasitic system in which value-extraction is more highly rewarded than value-creation. Producer: Katy Hickman.