Lesley Garrett

This new special reveals the secrets of the long-running sitcom's extraordinary success. Helped by former cast and crew members, families of the stars no longer with us, and celebrity fans, we learn the secrets of this comedy classic and get to see previously unseen interviews and rare behind-the-scenes archive footage.

In an opera version of the famous literature classic, during World War I, an airplane pilot crashes his plane in the Sahara Desert, where he has a very unusual near-death experience.

This star-studded gala celebrates the centenary of the birth of legendary Broadway composer Richard Rodgers. Rodgers' contribution to musical theatre was extraordinary, including 900 published songs, 40 Broadway musicals and several film scores. Rodgers, together with lyricists Lorenz Hart and later Oscar Hammerstein II, wrote many of the best known musicals of the 20th Century, including Babes In Arms, Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. This performance at London's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, directed for the stage by Simon Callow, includes songs, dance, staged numbers and anecdotes featuring leading stars from both Broadway and London's West End. The cast comprises luminaries drawn from Oklahoma!, Kiss Me Kate, Chicago, The King and I and other recent productions as well as from television. This musical extravaganza features many of Rodgers' best-loved classics.

Concert in honor to the great Elizabeth Taylor

The English National Opera first mounted David Alden's production of Ariodante, one of Handel's greatest masterpieces, in 1993. It met with unanimous critical and popular acclaim, and this 1996 revival features many of the leading singers from the original production. Ariodante is Handel's 1735 setting of an episode from Ariosto, in which the King of Scotland's daughter is treacherously accused of infidelity to her promised husband. The range of feelings provoked as the characters develop is caught in music of quite extraordinary emotional power, even by Handel's own exalted standards.

The opera takes place on the doorstep of a tenement on the East Side of Manhattan on two brutally hot days in 1946. The story focuses on two plotlines: the romance between Rose Maurrant and her neighbor Sam Kaplan; and on the extramarital affair of Rose's mother, Anna, which is eventually discovered by Rose's irritable father, Frank. The show portrays the ordinary romances, squabbles and gossips of the neighbors, as the mounting tensions involving the Maurrant family eventually build into a tragedy of epic proportions. Broadcast on BBC Two on New Years Day, 1993, this production was performed by the English National Opera and conducted by James Holmes.

A chance to see director Jonathan Miller at work on his acclaimed staging of Gilbert and Sullivan's famous comic opera.

Jonathan Miller set his well-known production of The Mikado, staged for the English National Opera, in a British seaside resort of the 1920s. The result, complete with a chorus of gentlemen of Japan as cartoon-like British peers, emphatically underscores the Englishness of the satire. The occasional non sequiturs, like a bunch of gentry dressed for Ascot and singing in Japanese, are loonily fun, and no more absurd than the fantasyland Japan that Gilbert and Sullivan invented. The time frame, though, seems little more than an excuse for a smart black-and-white production design.