BBC Press release for the programme: Still Folk Dancing ... After All These Years
Friday 10 December 9.00-10.00pm BBC FOUR

Becky and Rachel Unthank explore the folk dance traditions of England
Young Northumbrian folk singers and sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank take a journey around England from spring to autumn 2010 to experience living folk dance traditions in action.

Themselves Northumberland clog dancers, they explore a shared passion for dance that comes from a place, a people or a season and make some moving and unexpected discoveries.

On a journey through the back gardens and narrow streets of towns and villages from Newcastle to Penzance they discover the most surprising dances, ceremonies, rituals and drunken antics that mark the turning of the seasons and the passing of the year.

On their journey, The Unthanks learn about the evolving history of the dances, whether connected to the land and the cycles of fertility, or to working customs and practices in industrial towns. They talk to local historians and visit Cecil Sharp House to explore the 20th-century revival of these dances and their codification through Sharp and others.

There's also extraordinary film archive of the dances through the decades showing that, although the people have changed, the dances have remained often remarkably constant.

The Unthanks are a Mercury-nominated English folk group, but this programme sees the sisters going back to their Northumberland clog dancing roots. Along their travels, they observe and try other English dances including travellers' step dancing in Suffolk, to horn dancing with huge antlers in Abbots Bromley and stick dancing in Oxfordshire.

As the Unthanks complete their journey, they reflect on the curious but vibrant world of local dances which flies in the face of modernisation and sometimes of ridicule, to keep the traditions and the steps alive.
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BBC Press release for the programme: Come Clog Dancing - Treasures of English Folk Dance Saturday 11 December 7.00-8.00pm BBC FOUR

Conductor and BBC Radio 3 presenter Charles Hazlewood has just two weeks to get Newcastle city centre clog dancing.

There was a time when each district of Britain was defined by its own style of folk music and dance, which grew from industries, landscape and the people who'd settled there. Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire formed the Morris dancing stronghold, while Yorkshire resounded to the dances of longsworders and out-of-work ploughboys entertained East Anglian crowds with their molly dances.

Clog dancing ruled the mill towns of the 19th-century North East and, in this series, Charles's mission is to reclaim the region's national dance and the area's identity by reconnecting the people of Newcastle with their very own cultural and dance heritage.

Made by the creative talents behind The Choir and Faking It, Come Clog Dancing tells of one man's mission to bring a community together through discovering their region's lost heritage of dance, and to stage the biggest clog dancing event the UK has ever seen.
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This programme is followed at 8pm by the Folk at the BBC pt2 60's/70's