From the formation of The Smiths in 1982 to the group’s break-up in the summer of 1987, singer Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr crafted witty, passionate and intelligent songs of love and life. This programme, made shortly before they went their separate ways, examines their musical influences and the identity they created for The Smiths, as well as including many of the band’s hits, such as Shoplifters of the World Unite and Death of a Disco Dancer.
Terence Conran
Terence Conran opened the first Habitat store in the early 1960s and single-handedly changed the face ot home style. In this programme he talks about his life, elaborates on his missionary vision of “good design for all” and shows viewers round his own home. The film demonstrates how a typical 1950s living room was transformed by Conran’s innovative ideas, and a Habitat product is followed from conception to completion.
Jackson Pollock
Pollock (1912-56) was always controversial: hisfamous ‘drip’ paintings earned him notoriety and abuse, an added pressure on his life-long struggle with alcoholism. Despite his personal torments, he produced a body of work which helped forge the first great American art movement – Abstract Expressionism. This portrait mixes the reminiscences of his contemporaries with archive film and the testimony of his work to explore the legends which ding to him.
Colin Mccabe on British Television Today
Colin McCabe looks at the quality and impact of British television in the 1960s and considers ways in which the best traditions and standards of the medium can be preserved. His specially-prepared lecture is amply illustrated with memorable clips.
Paul Bowles
A compulsive traveller for much of his life, the American writer and composer Paul Bowles (1910-99) confirmed his position as an outsider, both in his life and in his writing, in choosing Morocco as his home some fifty years ago. This film journeys through North Africa to explore Bowles’s powerful novels and the inspiration he discovered there. Bowles gives a major television interview in the programme, which includes dramatisations from his work.
Toni Harrison’s V
Richard Eyre combines a striking visualisation of Harrison’s poem V with film of a public reading given by the poet to create a unique piece of television entertainment. Described by Bernard Levin in The Times as “one of the most powerful, profound and haunting poems of modern times”, V opens with Harrison’s meditation on his parents’ vandalised tombstone and expands to a panoramic view of the divisions and aspirations within British society today.
Les Nuits Revolutionnaires
This 7-part drama series is based on the life and works of the French writer Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, nicknamed The Owl, because it was his custom to walk the streets of Paris at night during the Revolution. He recorded events, but so embroidered with his imagination that they form only a background to his fantastic stories. Charles Brabant’s dramatisation of Restif’s writing brings to life the characters he encountered and the turbulent arena of the city’s shadowy backwaters. To this is added the drama of The Owl’s own nocturnal life. Michel Aumont as Restif heads a fine cast of French actors, and magnificent sets reconstruct, in faithful detail, quartiers of eighteenth-century Paris.
Henrik Ibsen
T. S. Elliot
Richard Strauss – Romanticism and Resignation
At the end of his life, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) occupied an ambiguous role in the Third Reich – a successful public figure, but one whose cultural ideals clashed with those enforced by Hitler’s regime. This film explores the compromises of his old age, telling the story of the doyen of the late-Romantic style as he became increasingly embittered with his political masters. It includes rare footage from his family’s archive and extracts from a film about him made in 1949.