Gospel influences many musical styles, including blues, funk and rock. In this programme, great gospel veterans The Five Blind Boys of Alabama are seen in performance and talk about their music.
The Mystery of Dr Martinu
This Ken Russell’s biopic about Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) takes the form of a psychological detective story. Using a kaleidoscope of images and references, Russell searches out the Czech composer’s influences and obsessions, and traces his quest for a true voice. He conjures up Martinu’s inner-life and dreams and dramatises episodes with his wife and colleagues in Czechoslovakia, Paris and the USA. Patrick Ryecart features as Martinu and Hannah King as Slava.
Opus 20
Steve Martin
Comedian Steve Martin is a major box office draw. This programme looks at the development of his career in American entertainment and focuses on his work as the screenwriter and star of L. A. Story, a romantic comedy with a surrealistic Hollywood backdrop. Interviewed during filming, Martin is seen at work on the set, as well as in clips from his films, television appearances and stand-up routines.
Charles Dickens
This programme explores the world of the great novelist Charles Dickens, through the eyes of his biographer Peter Ackroyd. Weaving through the many phases of Dickens’ life, this film shows the recurrent influence of his childhood on his obsessive vision of darkness and light. The mercurial actor John Sessions assumes the role of the writer in a virtuoso performance recalling Dickens’ celebrated Public Readings.
Roy Lichtenstein
Filmed in New York, this profile centres on a rare interview with the influential American artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97), who became famous in the 1960s for his enormously enlarged frames from comic strips. It surveys the work he went on to produce, which confirmed his position as one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists, and shows him at work on a painting. The late Leo Castelli, the dealer who launched Lichtenstein’s career, is among the contributors to the programme.
Irish Rock Music
Ireland’s output of both influential writers and famous rock musicians is quite disproportionate to the size of the country. This focus on Irish rock music searches for the roots of that creative talent and discovers the importance of the rich tradition of story-telling and mythology that it still very much alive there today. Van Morrison, Sinead O’Connor, Bono of U2, Shane McGowan, Clannad and others contribute their music and their thoughts to the programme.
John Updike
This profile of the celebrated American author focuses on his quartet of novels about a character called Rabbit, an ex-basketball star who lives in a small Pennsylvanian town, modelled on Reading, where Updike lived as a child. Through an in-depth interview, sequences filmed with Updike at his old stamping grounds, and dramatisations from the Rabbit books, this programme defines the major themes and social issues in his work, relating them to his own past and his strongly-held beliefs.
A Footnote in History
Filmed in East Berlin after the dismantling of the Wall, when bitter controverse raged in the press concerning the role writers had played in the German Democratic Republic, this programme considers the experiences of four writers from different generations – Christa Wolf, Christoph Hein, Helga Königsdorf and Bert Papenfuss.
Soitting Image
The Spitting Image puppets feature in this exploration of the way in which caricature affects public figures and people’s perception of them. Talking from their own experience, luminaries drawn from the political arena, the media and the world of sport comment on the positive and negative aspects of the puppets. The originators of Spitting Image, Roger Law and Peter Fluck, producer John Lloyd, and writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, talk about their brain-child.