when looking for archaeological material? obviously the consultation ends in april. doctor michael lewis, head of treasure at the british museum! . thank you. a scheme to monitor the impact of light pollution has been launched by the campaign for rural england. we're being asked to count the number of stars we can spot with the naked eye on a clear night. john maguire has been to northumberland — home to one of the uk s "dark sky parks." we're heading out into the freezing night with the saunders family for some stargazing. david gets off to a strong start, identifying the plough and subsequently the northstar. find the right—hand side of the saucepan, and the two stars there, draw an imaginary line and continue along, and the next brightest star that you see... and with a little help from a smartphone, lola and maisie find orion‘s belt. the three in a line, the belt. no, there. is that orion‘s belt? yes, there.

look, there. why do you think guys you're so lucky, you can see the stars, and maybe other people can't see them ? because we live in the middle of nowhere! but what's the advantage of that on a night like tonight? there is no streetlights, so you can see... the black sky without the orange glow. it helps that it's a clear night and that we're in the northumberland countryside, away from the too—bright lights of newcastle. it's all lit up, isn't it? it's orange and it feels like it should be completely dark. but it isn't, but that's all streetlights and houses and the cars. is that mars? we're pointing at mars on this thing, yeah. is it higher? no, that's definitely mars. oh, yeah. fabulous. the following evening, we're in nearby hexham, to see the lights go on. these are among the 16,000 streetlights which the county council is replacing with low—energy led lamps. it has taken four years, cost £25 million, but will save 1.3 million a year and reduce

the county's carbon footprint. and there is another benefit. so, they have a special design, but we have to angle them correctly because you don't want them pointing up or sideways, or in people's windows. the light is more gentle and soft, much less harsh. we may not be able to control the clouds above us, but by aiming for dark skies, we can have skies filled with light — starlight. if you didn't know — it's groundhog day, made famous by the 1993 movie with bill murray and andie mcdowell, in which the same day keeps repeating itself. thousands have gathered in punxsutawney in pennsylviania for the annual tradition where resident groundhog, phil, predicts the weather for the rest of winter. is it early spring, stop the music,

this is my forecast. faithful followers, there is no shadow of me, i beautiful spring, it shall be. it's thought if phil spots his shadow, there'll besix6 more weeks of winter and bad weather — otherwise, it'll be an early spring. this year marks the 133rd groundhog day, dating back to 1887 and is celebrated every february 2nd. now it's time for a look at the weather with mel. winter rumbles on. wintry showers feeding in along the east coast and in the far north and west of scotland. away from that crisp, winter sunshine on offer but it does feel cold. the northerly wind not

helping the temperatures. as we head into this evening where we have had the showers we could have some icy stretches. further showers feeding into parts of north—west and scotland. it will be cold. under the clear skies temperatures will be falling away. in north east scotland that could be minus 13, —14 celsius and with the lying snow we could have —12 celsius so it will be cold, but a change is on the cards. through tomorrow we will see increasing amounts of cloud and outbreaks of rain and snow and even to lower levels as it works eastwards. as the day goes on the snow will be confined to higher ground. away from these areas it is fine and dry with some sunshine. hello this is bbc news. the headlines: freezing temperatures are continuing into the weekend after snow causes more travel chaos overnight. russian president, vladimir putin, says russia is suspending

the cold war—era intermediate—range nuclear forces treaty, after a similar move by the united states. england's minister for schools says pupils should be banned from taking smartphones into school. floods in australia's north—east state of queensland reach catastrophic levels. now on bbc news a special edition of talking movies. hello from new york, i'm tom brooks. for a special 20th anniversary edition of talking movies, i met top british actor and director, kenneth branagh, to discuss his latest film, all is true, and his a0 years in the film business. i greeted kenneth branagh as he arrived at a new york event

to mark the 20th anniversary of talking movies. this affable 58—year—old star was happy to mingle with the crowd, to pose for photographs. the audience was eager to find out what he had to say. applause. very good to see you. have a seat. thank you. well, a very warm welcome to talking movies on the occasion of our 20th anniversary. thank you and happy birthday. good. happy anniversary. we're enjoying it. good. i have been looking at your work. you have a very impressive body of work. there 37 films that you have appeared in as an actor... crikey. ..some 18 feature films that you have directed. you've earned five oscar nominations and you have won four baftas. and yourfilm credits include a great array of films, from hamlet, murder on the orient express, thor — a very varied group of films.

did you always think that you might have a career in the movies when you were a young boy? by no means — no means. i come from a working class belfast family. my parents were not remotely connected with show biz. i did not know anything — anything — about how you could even get anywhere near what was going on behind that screen. whether it was...we went to the pictures a lot as a family. i'm 58, so i started going to the pictures in the 60s, to things like chitty chitty bang bang and the sound of music, and a million years bc and those kinds of movies with the family. the beatles films, i remember, made a big impact. my film education, if you like, was seeing often black—and—white movies on a saturday morning, or saturday afternoon, so that's where i knew about laurel and hardy and charlie chaplin and buster keaton, and saw lots of classic hollywood movies. to be anywhere near them

professionally, was like — you might as well have been talking about going to venus. it was not until i started doing some school plays and then somebody said you could be an actor and i'd. . .what! how? what? what do you do? and there are things called drama schools — i did not know anything about this. and then i started the process. what convinced you though that you could act? was there a moment when you were a schoolboy and you did a performance and you thought maybe i do have something here? i never thought that. i don't know that i feel it now but i know it really, really makes me happy. so it was that thing of, you know when you sometimes — whatever it is, whether it is running, dancing, i don't know, maths... audience chuckles. ..but when you find the thing — not for me, but for some people. audience laughs. but when you just are sort of simpatico with the thing itself, the activity and so when i... the idea of losing yourself in a character, or of researching a character, or of discovering

the information behind a story, historical or fictional or whatever, that investigation, that kind of sherlock holmesary around the creation of something and then this thing, like now, the live event, the anything—can—happen kind of experience, and when what you planned, what you hoped for, what occurred in the moment between you and the atmosphere of that audience, sort of was at its most sort of beautiful and found, it was electrifying to be part of. it does not happen every time but i knew when i felt it, or experienced it a little, that i wanted to pursue it a lot. you made your name, in many ways, by doing adaptations of shakespeare, henry v made a big impact at the time and today you have a new film in which you play william shakespeare. it's called all is true. what actually happens in the film, how does it unfold? all is true is about the last three years in the life

of william shakespeare. he retired to stratford after his theatre burnt down, the globe theatre burnt down during the first performance of his final play, henry viii, or alternative title all is true, and we take the approach that he sort of did in that and other plays, a shakespearean approach, if you like, he knew some facts about the life of henry viii but otherwise he speculated wildly about what went on in the story of that king's life. he did — he made stuff up. there are numerous facts, more facts than we sometimes think about the last three years in his life. he did retire to stratford. he went back to a family that he had left. he was still married to anne hathaway, who was eight years older than him. she's played in the film byjudi dench. and he has to come to terms with being an absentee husband and father. so why are you come home? no more stories left to write? susanna, i've lived so long in imaginary worlds, i think i've lost sight of what is real. it is reflective and it is

meditative and it is ruminative, and it is about someone coming to the evening of their life, wondering, well, what do i do and how do i process the time when i was away? what do my family think about me? what does this all mean and add up to? it is a chance to look at how what we think of as genius operates in the human realm. how do we discern what is actually true in the story because there is a lot going on. it is called all is true but it is not all true really is it? well, it is fiction based largely on fact. everything you see has some actual factual solidity or the gap, the jump that we made was between... so for instance, his only son died in 1596, he was 11 years old, and we don't know what he died of, we don't know what the cause death was.

but we do know that, at the time, plague ravaged stratford, as it did much of england, and fires ravaged stratford. and so the general impression was that he died of the plague. however, if you look at the parish records, back to fact, there were two child deaths in the summer of 1596 — very, very unusual — as opposed to the dozens and dozens and dozens that died across many other months in those plague years. so we raised the question mark of whether it was indeed plague that took him away or whether there was anything else in the biography of the shakespeare family that could have meant it happened in some other way. so we speculate on that and this film tries to somehow tap into that kind of thing, with facts where we have them, and imaginative leaps where we can intuit them from the work of the man himself. you both act... applause. thank you.

please, feel free to go see the film and disagree with me entirely. audience laughs. you both act and direct at the same time. how difficult is it to do that? does it take a particular skill to direct yourself? well, it is when the process becomes something that sort of bleeds one into the other. it was not something... you asked earlier about sort of when you knew and when it came to directing, i didn't ever never really knew nor could i legitimately, i thought, consider having a directing career. again, itjust seemed so far away, and so difficult to understand, but what i was driven by was the desire to tell stories and a love of the medium. and by the time i got to my first film, henry v, an amount of experience of watching other people. so what i used to do really from the first movie experience

was just ask people all the time, always, always ask questions — why are you doing that? who's the person at the side? why are they doing that with...oh, that's the focus puller. and the marks and the tape is... generally starting to put together why they did that, what was the dolly track. i kept asking questions and suddenly, before you know it really, you are not deciding i'm going to be a director but there's this story that had to be told and i did it this way and i guess i am in it as well but i am directing — there was no — itjust sort of happened that way, one bled into the other. with henry v, is there a specific sequence, something you directed which you feel particularly proud of? which you feel really worked well? the first read—through was sort of a magic moment where an actor who i revere — now gathered, gone to the great green room in the sky — paul scofield, read the first speech from the script and it was a kind of a magical, magical experience. thus comes the english with full power upon us,

and more than carefully it us concerns to answer royally in our defences... i'm 27 years old, schofield is a legend, and he walks... he's like a man as if he's walked out of mount rushmore. he's carved. the face is just magnificent. one of the greatest performances in movie history in the man for all seasons. i'm 27 years old and found it very hard to speak in front of him because i was so in awe of him. and i knew i had to be of some use to him, and i knew he took it seriously — he took the gig, it was a big deal for him to take the gig — and we were rehearsing and we're talking about the character king charles v! of france, and he was struggling with the character. i thought, i don't know what to say and then i dared to say the following as he asked me about what's he is feeling at his point. well, i'm not sure, sir, but, if it is of any use, it is said that charles —

who suffered at some point during his life from mental illness — at one point believed that he was made of glass. he said, that's enough. and suddenly, this performance was transformed and that is all he needed. so for him, whatever that did it did the thing. you saw it. in the chair, he suddenly moved, and this kind of burden that the character felt, this remoteness that the character felt, this sadness, you suddenly started to see his body move and the performance was so beautiful from that point onwards and he was very, very grateful for this titbit which had suited him. and, princes, look you strongly arm to meet him. for he is bred out of that bloody strain, that haunted us

in our familiar paths. witness our too—much—memorable shame, when cressy battle fatally was struck. so i was proud of that and i was proud of the battle sequence in the movie, which was much inspired by orson welles' chimes at midnight. but all's not done. yet keep the french the field! cheering. you have worked with a lot of very illustrious actors, and i wondered what your views were on actors — you worked with ian mckellen and judi dench in all is true, you have worked with kate winslet and emma thompson, and i came across a interesting quote, i hope it's from you, i looked it up online... well it must be true then. audience laughs. it is about actors, and you say "actors are like kids — when they are good they are very, very good; when they are bad, they are very naughty." who did you have in mind when you were saying that? i think that was a confessional remark there, i think.

i think there is... there is a certain kind of bravery required for acting, that some people find bogus, because they assume actors just love getting up and showing off and having attention and all the rest of it, because that is what they see actors lucky enough to work experiencing, perhaps. but i think the exposure, the emotional exposure that can come with it, means that people can be sort of raw and vulnerable, and i think that, and insecure and frightened sometimes, like everyone else in life can be — but because they are in heightened, extreme versions of that, and being asked to reveal that kind of thing in front of the camera or on stage, i think it can mean that with that capacity can sometimes go a kind of... a dangerous, sometimes dangerous as self—involvement, and other times

incredible generosity. you are very accomplished as an actor, but do you suffer from angst over the work you do? are you up all night learning your lines sometimes? i try to leave the work at the office, as it were, and try and walk the dog, and have some air blow around the experience, but sometimes there is a sort of bleed... i did a show called conspiracy to hbo, where i played heydrich, who is one of the executors of the final solution, they had zyklon b — and i remember stanley tucci, who played eichmann, had this chilling line — as he talks about as though we were just at a planning meeting for some sort of marketing campaign, he says, "we found this quite useful place in upper silesia, it is called auschwitz," and he goes through the details, and he says, "i think we can get up to speed, i think we can do 11,000 an hour..."

he talks like that, and that piece which was reconstructed from accounts of the meeting itself, was so all pervasive that i was... that was the job where i was sort of unmanned by the connection with the dark material. in that case i so struggled to find in the case of heydrich, if i was encountering a man without a soul. and in trying to get near that, it threw me, to be so close to, was removing my faith in, as it were, the essential goodness of human beings. that was horrible. completely different subject,

one of the things i have noticed is that you make very different kinds of films. you make arthouse films like say, all is true or hamlet, and then you make the big commercial blockbusters, like thor, which made $450 million around the world, a film like cinderella did really well as well. why not stick to just one kind of film? i think from that same kid who was with that family in belfast, i felt there was... there need not be a distinction between what you might call high and low art. i come from a very class ridden country, and i don't care for art reinforcing those kinds of barriers. that is not to say that you dilute complex art to try and make it populist, nor that you try and make pretentious commercial work — but that you approach them all seriously, in as much

as you would like to make a great, popular comedy the best it possibly it can be, or a so—called highfalutin shakespeare play or mozart opera the best that it can be in it different way. has your personal vision ever been compromised when you have made a big budget film? well... audience laughs. you have got to be careful about the vision thing, you know. it isjust... if someone writes a cheque for 120 squillion dollars, and these big movies cost a lot of money, i was in one of the harry potter films and i remember going on to the set and got given the crew list, which was an interesting document, to see how many names. they were something like 1500 names on the crew of harry potter, it was the biggest collection of folk i have ever been involved with in the movie business. that is a lot of money,

that is a lot of people. in theory that is probably 1500 smart people, creative people. in all their varying ways, large and small, there will be some kind of contribution. and you will want to, if you are clever enough, you will want to include that as you guide the thing, as you steer the ship. sometimes those contributions can be clashing, and sometimes they can be noisy, and sometimes they can be not always expressed in ways that give you pleasure. so i think, you have to acknowledge that... all is true is very low—budget, very short schedule, but there are people like ian mckellen, judi dench, numerous other actors and technicians who worked on it, and they all had something to say. on the big films, people in big positions have big things to say, and you have got to not get too worked up, you've got to listen and not think you are giving something up.

you do have to park your ego at the door sometimes. and you find that way to bend with the wind, and if there is a better idea you want to hear it, and in my experience it is better to have the better idea than we've got to have my idea. you learn to try and be a bit smart like that. i mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that you had earned five oscar nominations. will you not feel complete as an actor and director until you actually win an oscar trophy? laughs. i think i have had so many blessings, so many blessings and prizes — and the big prize, it sounds like a cliched answer, but the big prize is an audience. it always is. i discovered a long time ago, it you have got to mark your own scorecard. we are so lucky that we are in an industry, partly for commercial reasons, but partly for genuine reasons

of artistic and creative appreciation, that we have this incredible focus on the work that we do. my brother used to say to me, he is a wonderful fellow who worked in all sorts of different areas of business, and he said people would ask him, "are you jealous of your brother?" he said no, but he said what i do sometimes think would be nice is that you are in a business where you come on at the end of a play and people award you, and you have all these awards that fly around and everything, and there is all that attention, and people in other areas of life don't have that attention. if we get the attention of an audience, that is the prize you want, that is really the prize you want. and then maybe, and it is true of a film like all is true — whatever, should you care to see it, you may think about it, and what the world may think about it, for me the film is a very personalfilm, it was kind of a miracle to get it made, and it is a film of such creative importance to me, that i am

so thrilled just to have made it, and to be... and the making of it and the re—engagement with shakespeare and the attempt to tell this story as we do, produced such profound creative satisfaction, that that is definitely prize enough. we have to stop — thank you so much for the interview, you are very generous. thank you. thank you audience. cheering and applause. do you want to be a writer, and speak to others and for others? speak first for yourself. search within. consider the contents of your own soul. your humanity.

and if you are honest with yourself, then whatever you write, all is true. good afternoon. it feels very wintry especially with scenes like this. it will be turning milder in the coming week. further wintry showers down the east coast and for the far north and west of scotland. away from that, crisp, winter sunshine on offer. the northerly winds are not helping the temperatures. where we have seen the slow melting by day, by night there is the risk of icy patches. wintry showers feeding into the far north—west and scotland but under clear skies it will be cold. mine —14 perhaps for part of north east scotland. where we have the lying snow in the south it could be -12 lying snow in the south it could be —12 celsius. an atlantic weather

system starts to edge in introducing cloud, outbreaks of snow and even to lower levels working their way into parts of north—west england and into scotland. gradually clearing away and the snow being confined to higher ground. something brighter but it still feels cold away from the far south—west where temperatures start to recover. this is bbc news — i'm lukwesa burak. the headlines at 3pm.: russian president, vladimir putin, says russia is suspending the cold war—era intermediate—range nuclear forces treaty. translation: our american partners have announced they are suspending their participation in the deal. and we are also suspending our participation. freezing temperatures are continuing into the weekend — after snow causes more travel chaos overnight. england's minister for schools says pupils should be banned from taking smartphones into school. this is the scene live in caracas

where supporters of venezuela's self—declared interim president juan guaido are gathering for nationwide demonstrations. also coming up this hour: the government proposes changes to the rules