Game of Thrones meets Bake Off as Mel Giedroyc and Gemma Whelan discuss their involvement in New Songs 4 New Shows, a gala evening showcasing four new musicals currently in development, directed by West End grandee Maria Friedman.

The Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively discusses her latest collection of short stories, The Purple Swamp Hen & Other Stories.

After J.K. Rowling sends copies of her Harry Potter novels to a girl in Aleppo, Syria, fellow children's writer Michael Morpurgo discusses the importance of books in war zones.

Billy Bob Thornton reprises his role as the foul-mouthed, whisky-fuelled 'Father Christmas' in Bad Santa 2. Mark Eccleston reviews.

Presenter Kirsty Lang

Producer Marilyn Rust.

The fearsome Vikings discover a new trick, Colin and Malcolm struggle with an empty trolley and the helpful bees stumble into a fairy tale.

It is Christmas in Dibley, and vicar Geraldine is about to pay a heavy price for Christian kindness. To avoid hurting anyone's feelings, she agrees to attend not one, not two, but three Christmas lunches.

What follows is a Christmas nightmare lunch with her verger Alice and her less clever sister, a brussels sprouts-eating competition, and Jim Trott telling the least funny 'knock, knock' joke in the world.

Take a trip to the Museum of Imagination and join new characters Colin and Malcolm, the flight attendants who can't stop eating from the trolley, Tony, who lives down the back of a sofa and old favourites the fearsome Vikings and the inhabitants of the remote Scottish island of North Barrasay.

BBC Children in Need celebrates its 40th anniversary with a very special evening of live television. Hosted by Mel Giedroyc, Stephen Mangan, Alex Scott and Chris Ramsey, the show includes appearances by this year's Strictly dancers, Beverley Knight, Shawn Mendes and the cast of West End musical Six. There are comedy sketches from the casts of King Gary and The Goes Wrong Show, and we get to know the nation’s favourite bear like never before in a star-studded sketch, Pudsey Bear: Behind the Bandana. The Repair Shop team give one very special girl a surprise to treasure forever, and Alex Jones and Ade Adepitan bring us the finale of The One Show's rickshaw challenge. And some special films reveal the incredible and inspiring stories of the brave children who are supported by some of the thousands of Children in Need projects around the UK.

Alex Scott and Chris Ramsey present highlights of the annual night of fundraising for Children in Need projects across the UK.

As the show celebrates its 40th birthday, expect music performances, inspiring stories, comedy sketches and entertainment from some of the BBC’s biggest shows, including a Strictly special and the return of the Children in Need choir, and some of the UK’s biggest stars reveal the truth about the nation’s favourite bear in Pudsey Bear: Behind the Bandana.

Reinvention is the key as the series concludes with the era that saw the biggest lifestyle changes of all to the home - the 1990s and 2000s. BBC Two was making over homes by chucking out the chintz, turning gardens into outside rooms and kitchens into pukka Jamie Oliver zones. But it didn't stop there. Soon there was a craze for decluttering and minimal living linked to the crazed flipping of homes in the mortgage-mad Noughties. Inevitably, a slew of programmes about buying and selling property, homes in the country and living abroad followed.

The stars of this new era of makeover television, including Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, Diarmuid Gavin and Charlie Dimmock, are all on hand to try and explain how this bewilderingly fast reinvention of the very idea of home happened - and why it couldn't last.

Narrated by Mel Giedroyc.

From Fanny Cradock's petits fours to Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's boudoirs, BBC Two has for the last 50 years been a guide to shifting lifestyle trends in contemporary Britain. In its mission to keep us informed, educated and entertained in all things domestic, the channel has gone mad for makeovers, finessed our food and planted ideas in our back gardens.

This series takes a nostalgic and amusing trawl through the archives to see how BBC Two fared as tastemaker to the nation. And, piquantly narrated by Bake Off's Mel Giedroyc, it begins with the biggest lifestyle revolution of them all, the 1960s, when the shock and the schlock of the new marched hand in brightly coloured hand.

Featuring Alan Titchmarsh, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, Antony Worrall Thompson and Esther Rantzen.

The series tracking 50 years of lifestyle and homemaking programmes on BBC Two heads into the 1980s. This was the decade when more people would own their homes, when more money was spent on them and more time in them than ever before.

And at the heart of this was a changing role for women, who were joining the workforce in greater numbers, throwing off the shackles of being traditional housewives. It was a time of dizzying domestic change: Ken Hom caused a culinary revolution through his time-saving wok; Jilly Goolden got us drinking wine around the kitchen table; and Keith Floyd took the drudgery out of cooking by making it into entertainment - and as a result got men at the stove for the first time. Not for nothing was no-nonsense dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse, who brought men and dogs alike to heel, one of the icons of the decade.

Narrated by Bake Off's very own no-nonsense Mel Giedroyc.

Keeping track of lifestyle trends in the decade that style forgot was one of BBC Two's bigger challenges, as the deliciously arch narration of Bake Off's Mel Giedroyc reminds us in this amusing romp through the channel's archive.

This, after all, was an era of dodgy fashion, stodgy food and bodged politics that had us running to escape into a world of stripped pine, country kitchens and Laura Ashley. But the programme shows that the 1970s also resemble our own times - from house price inflation and soaring energy costs through to worries about the threat to 'real' food and environmental sustainability.

The helpful bees find themselves in space, Sticky Martin struggles to release a bird of prey and there is a special delivery in the Museum of Imagination.