This month’s round-up of TV and radio Time Travels

Tuesday 26 September

BBC RADIO SCOTLAND Time Travels explores stories from Scotland’s past (available via the BBC iPlayer radio for those who don’t live north of the border) – and the producers seem to have a happy knack of finding unexpected tales.

As season two continues, these include the story of how Lucy Baldwin (1869–1945), the wife of prime minister Stanley, campaigned for women to have the right to pain relief during childbirth. In the days before the National Health Service, presenter Susan Morrison learns, pain relief in childbirth was a luxury, a treatment available only to those able to pay for it.

In the same show (26 September), we learn what happens when, following the discovery of a skeleton or skull, archaeologists call the police or the police call archaeologists.

On the show on Tuesday 10 October, Morrison sees the remarkable archives of the police surgeon Sir William Macewen, whose work took him to some of the toughest areas of Glasgow in the 1870s.

The show continues the theme of Victorian true crime by looking behind the scenes as the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh prepares to host the exhibition Rogues Gallery: Faces of Crime 1860–1917. How have those behind the show gone about putting faces to the accused mentioned in 19th-century justice records?

The Great War In Numbers Wednesday 4 October

YESTERDAY The conflict of 1914–18 was, contends this new series, ‘a war of numbers’. Certainly, some of the statistics are truly mind-boggling. In the first four weeks of the conflict, for example, 762,000 Britons enlisted, many of whom would perish in the so-called ‘pals’ battalions’.

This was mechanised war on a hitherto unimaginable scale, with 70 million men mobilised to fight in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. An idea of the sheer scale can be gleaned from the cost of bullets for one day of fighting in 1918: £ 3.8 million, or £ 237.5 million in today’s money.

Lucy Worsley’s Nights at the Opera October

BBC TWO In collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Royal Opera House, the BBC is highlighting the joys of opera this autumn across its networks. If these words make you flinch, Lucy Worsley’s two-parter may help. It finds the historian travelling to six different cities across Europe – Venice, Vienna, Milan, Bayreuth, Dresden and Paris – to consider how opera has played a key role in the history of these places. Worsley also introduces eight key works, discussing the composers behind them and exploring how these operas can help us understand the past. Sir Antonio Pappano, music director of the Royal Opera House, offers a musician’s perspective.

Gunpowder Late October (TBC)

BBC ONE With 5 November on the way, here’s a retelling of the plot to blow up parliament. The focus in the three-part drama is on Robert Catesby, who dreamt up the plan. Kit Harington (Game of Thrones) leads a starry cast that includes Peter Mullan, Mark Gatiss and Liv Tyler. ¨