As constraints grow on the environment and rural landscape, county councils are under pressure to keep tighter control on the planning process. Ear To The Ground (Monday, 8.30 p.m., RT╔1) asks if people can continue to build where they wish - or is a home with a view something that will be part of most people's dreams but never a reality?
Many people are thinking again about the the houses they live in. Floors, fabric and furniture that reflect a healthier lifestyle are being installed.
Some have decided to design and build an environmentally-friendly home. From multi-bedroomed, pre-packaged log houses to humble, straw-bale bungalows and budgets from £4,000 (€5,079) to £400,000, doctors, engineers, singers, shopkeepers and webmasters are doing it for themselves. LΘargas (Tuesday, 7 p.m., RT╔1) looks inside some of these unusual homes.
Until last year, Marconi was cheered by the City as its shares soared in value. Today, it has become notorious as one of the worst disasters in British corporate history as The Money Programme (Wednesday, 7.30 p.m., BBC2) reports.
The scale of the disaster became apparent on September 4th, 2001, when after months of reassurance that things would get better, its chief executive, Lord Simpson, was forced to admit that Marconi had lost hundreds of millions of pounds in just three months, and thousands of jobs would have to go.
The appropriately named Mr Peter Baker is managing director of British Bakeries, a £400 million sterling (€650 million) business making 2.3 million loaves of bread daily, including Mother's Pride and Hovis.
But faced with massive competition from cheap supermarket bread, Mr Baker is determined to modernise his company and its products.
He's got rid of the old Hovis image, changed the management and is sending his workers on "motivational" courses.
Mr Baker wants to know if his changes are working and goes Back To The Floor (Tuesday, 10 p.m., BBC2) in one of his Newcastle bakeries.
sokelly@irish-times.ie
