Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, has established herself as a leading chronicler of the black experience in America and as one of the country’s finest novelists. She talks in interview about her highly-acclaimed novel, Beloved. Based on a true story, it tells how a mother murders her baby rather than have it taken into slavery. Morrison talks about the problems of dealing with such painful material.

Raymond Chandler

Chandler’s lonely, wise-cracking hero, Philip Marlowe, has become the very epitome of the fictional private eye. This film special, shot in California and London, includes interviews with contemporary thriller writers, Chandler’s biographer, Robert Mitchum – who has played Marlowe in two films – and others who knew or worked with him. It evokes his enduring portrait of Los Angeles and tells the story of his extraordinary life through dramatised excerpts from his letters.

Saul Bellow

In this programme, the Nobel Prize-winning author gives a rare television interview and talks in depth about his novel, The Dean’s December. An attack on the physical and spiritual decline of modern city life, the book was inspired by Bellow’s experience of his native Chicago.

Helmut Newton

Newton’s distinctive style of photography is considered seductive by some and scandalous by others. This film shows him at work in Los Angeles, Berlin and Monte-Carlo. He is mischievous and provocative as he talks about his life and his art. Some of the famous subjects of his portraits – Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling, Sigourney Weaver, Karl Lagerfeld – contribute to the programme.

Patrick Heron

One the most exciting British painters to emerge in the twentieth century, Patrick Heron (1920-99) was a splendid raconteur, eloquent on the subjects of modern art and colour, his constant Obsession and joy. He spent most of his life in Cornwall, where he was filmed for this rogramme at his studio,painting a major new work during the course of a Single afternoon. He also takes viewers on a lively tour of a retrospective exhibition of his paintings at London’s Barbican Gallery.