Episoder
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Thelma Schoonmaker has, for over five decades, been Martin Scorseseâs cutting room collaborator. Having edited his first feature film in 1967, she has worked on every Scorsese movie since Raging Bull, including Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, Wolf Of Wall Street, right up to his most recent features The Irishman and Killers Of The Flower Moon. As the widow of the legendary British filmmaker Michael Powell, she has also played a key role in the restoration of classic Powell and Pressburger films including The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and A Matter Of Life And Death. Thelma Schoonmaker has won three Academy Awards, more than any other film editor.
Thelma tells John Wilson how enrolling on a six week film making course as a young graduate in New York led to her meeting and helping Martin Scorsese edit a short film he was making. He then asked her to edit his 1967 feature film debut, Who's That Knocking at My Door and their partnership began in earnest. She recalls how she and Scorsese were part of the editing team on Michael Wadleigh's music festival documentary, Woodstock for which she received her first an Oscar nomination for Best Film Editing - the first documentary ever to be nominated in that category. Thelma reveals the process of working with Scorsese in the cutting room and how, through him, she met her late husband Michael Powell, whose films with Emeric Pressburger, both she and Scorsese had so admired from childhood.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Archive and music used:The Red Shoes, Powell & Pressburger, 1948Who's That Knocking at My Door, Martin Scorsese, 1967I Can't Explain, The Who, Live at Woodstock, 1969See Me. Feel Me, The Who, Live at Woodstock, 1969Star Spangled Banner, Jimi Hendrix, Live at Woodstock, 1969Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese, 1980Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie-editing, BBC4, 30 August 2005Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ, Peter GabrielSunshine of Your Love, CreamIntermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, Pietro MascagniLove Is Strange, Mickey & SylviaLayla, Derek & The DominosA Matter of Life and Death, Powell & Pressburger, 1946Michael and Martin, BBC Radio 4, 30 June 2005
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A star of stage and screen, Bill Nighy has enjoyed a fifty year career and is now among Britainâs most prolific and much loved actors. Acclaimed for National Theatre roles in plays by David Hare and Tom Stoppard, his popular appeal lies with scene-stealing appearances in films including Pirates Of The Caribbean, Harry Potter and, most famously, Love Actually. Bill Nighy has won Bafta and Golden Globe awards and was Oscar nominated for his starring role in the 2022 historical drama Living. His most recent film is Joy in which he plays obstetrician Patrick Steptoe, one of the pioneers of fertility treatment.
Bill Nighy talks to John Wilson about some of the earliest influences on his career including a school drama teacher. He also recalls joining the Liverpool Everyman rep company in the 1970s and the influence of playwright David Hare who cast him in many of his works including Pravda, The Vertical Hour and Skylight.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
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Theatre, opera and film director Julie Taymor is regarded as one of the most imaginative directors and designers working today. Her stage version of the Lion King is the highest grossing show in Broadway history, having made nearly $2 billion, and it recently marked its 25th year in London. The Lion King Julie two Tony Awards, including for best director of a musical in 1997, making her the first woman to do so. Julie Taymor has told Shakespearean stories on stage and the big screen including Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins and The Tempest with Helen Mirren. Her film credits also include Frida, a biopic of painter Frida Kahlo, and the Beatles jukebox musical movie Across The Universe.
She tells John Wilson how seeing Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film, as a teenager, was a formative cultural experience. Kurosawa's ingenious approach to narrative opened her eyes for the first time about the possibilities of innovative storytelling. She also recalls how her travels around Indonesia and Bali after graduation, and in particular, witnessing a ceremony in the isolated Balinese village of Trunyan have had a profound impact on her work as a designer and director.
Julie reveals how she came up with the ground-breaking concept and some of the designs for the stage version of Disney's The Lion King. She also gives her opinion on some of the difficulties faced by the ill-fated Broadway musical Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark, on which she was co-writer and director until being replaced during its previews. The production, which featured music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge of U2, was ridden with technical and financial problems, and resulted in several legal disputes.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
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Novelist, playwright and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi's first screenplay, My Beautiful Launderette brought him Oscar and BAFTA nominations in 1985. Five years later his debut novel The Buddha Of Suburbia, set amidst the social divisions of mid 70âs Britain, became a bestseller and was adapted as a BBC television series. After eleven screenplays including My Son The Fanatic, Venus and The Mother, and nine novels, including Intimacy and the Black Album, his latest book is a memoir called Shattered. It records the year he spent in hospital after a fall on Boxing Day 2022 which has left him paralysed.
Hanif talks to John Wilson about the influence of his father, also a writer, who in part inspired his debut novel The Buddha Of Suburbia. He also talks about the influence of Freudian analysis on his writing and how he is coping with the effects of his life-changing accident.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
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Nile Rodgers is one of the most successful and influential figures in popular music. As a songwriter, producer and arranger he has enjoyed a 50 year career with his bands Chic and Sister Sledge, and collaborations with artists including Diana Ross, David Bowie, Duran Duran, Madonna, Daft Punk and Beyoncé.
Bringing his 1959 Fender Stratocaster guitar to the This Cultural Life studio, Nile tells John Wilson how the instrument has been the bedrock of almost every record that he worked on, and acquiring the nickname 'The Hitmaker'. He discusses his bohemian upbringing in 1950s New York with his mother and stepfather who were both drug users. He chooses as one of his most important influences his jazz guitar tutor Ted Dunbar who taught him not only about musical technique but also how to appreciate the artistry of a hit tune. âIt speaks to the souls of a million strangersâ he was told.
Nile Rodgers reminisces about his musical partner Bernard Edwards, with whom he set up the Chic Organisation after the pair first met on the club circuit playing with cover bands. He discusses their song writing techniques and the importance of what they called âdeep hidden meaningâ in lyrics. He also reflects on the untimely death of Bernard Edwards in 1996 shortly after he played a gig with Nile in Tokyo, and why he continues to pay musical tribute to his friend in his globally-touring stage show which includes the songs of Chic and other artists they worked with.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
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The novelist, biographer and critic Dame Margaret Drabble published her debut novel in 1963. She quickly went on to become a bestselling and critically acclaimed chronicler of the lives of modern women in a series of contemporary realist stories, often based on her own life and experiences. Her 19 novels include The Millstone, The Waterfall, The Ice Age and The Radiant Way, and her non-fiction includes books on Thomas Hardy, William Wordsworth and Arnold Bennett. She has also edited the Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Dame Margaret tells John Wilson about her upbringing in Sheffield and how winning a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, shaped her literary tastes. It was there that she heard the lectures of the academic F R Leavis and first discovered contemporary novels by Angus Wilson and Saul Bellow. She became an actress and worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company before her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, the story of the relationship between two sisters, was published in 1963. She recalls how her literary career began in the wings of the RSC and talks candidly about her often strained relationship with her older sister, the late novelist A S Byatt.Dame Margaret also discusses the influence of her friend, the Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
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For over more than five decades the Serbian conceptual and performance artist Marina AbramoviÄ has used her own body as her artistic medium, exploring the human condition in works that are often feats of endurance, exhaustion and pain. From her earliest works such as Rhythm 0, in which AbramoviÄ invited audiences to freely interact with her however they chose, to her long-durational work The Artist is Present, she has put herself in danger at the mercy of audiences all in the name of art.
AbramoviÄ talks to John Wilson about her unhappy childhood in the former Yugoslavia with strict parents who had both been war heroes. She recalls how at age 14, a dangerous game of Russian roulette led her to Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot and how the book and its author's life sparked her creative imagination. She also reveals how two films, Alain Resnais' enigmatic 1961 French New Wave classic Last Year at Marienbad, and Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 movie Teorema, starring Terence Stamp, have inspired aspects of her work. Producer: Edwina Pitman
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Having started out as a current affairs journalist, Peter Kosminsky made his name by telling contemporary social and political stories in the form of television drama. Warriors was about British soldiers in the peace-keeping force in Bosnia; The Government Inspector dramatised the events surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly; The State explored the radicalisation of British Islamists. Kosminsky is also acclaimed for his television adaptations of Hilary Mantelâs Wolf Hall trilogy. He has won six BAFTA Awards, including one for his outstanding contribution to British television.
Peter talks to John Wilson about the huge influence of his parents. He recalls how his left wing father and his mother who had been a kindertransport child, shaped his interest social justice from the perspective of the outsider, the refugee and the disenfranchised.Seeing Ken Loach's 1975 BBC television drama Days of Hope was a another turning point, and revealed to the 18 year old Kosminsky, the huge emotional power of the medium of television drama. He also explains how a letter from a British soldier in response to his 1999 drama Warriors led to his acclaimed and controversial Channel 4 series The Promise, 11 years later.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
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Marlon James made his name in 2014 with A Brief History Of Seven Killings, a novel which interweaves various narratives over several decades, starting with the attempted assassination of reggae superstar Bob Marley in 1976. Having won the Booker and the American Book Award, and becoming an international bestselling author, he moved into the fantasy genre with his next two novels Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King. A professor of English, Marlon James teaches creative writing at a university in Minnesota, USA, where he lives.
Marlon tells John Wilson about hearing Jamaican dub poet Jean Binta-Breeze's work Riddym-Ravings on the radio when he was a teenager. The use of patois and rhyme to tell a serious story changed the lexicon he felt he could write in. The music of rock band Nirvana and its lead singer Kurt Cobain was also a huge influence on the young Marlon James who was at the time confused about his sexuality and living with undiagnosed depression. James also chooses the novel Sula by Toni Morrison, which contains a scene that changed the way he approached life and made him realise he only had to be in service to himself.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
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The New Zealand born opera singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is one of the world's greatest sopranos. She enjoyed a 50 year career singing lead roles in opera houses around the globe, and on dozens of studio recordings. Since retiring in 2017 she has focussed on leading her Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation which supports young opera singers from her home country.
Dame Kiri talks to John Wilson about her early life in Gisborne and Auckland, New Zealand. Of MÄori heritage, she was adopted as a baby and cites both her parents as a huge influence on her choice of career and work ethic. As a teenager she loved musical theatre, her favourite being Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story which she was later to record in an operatic version conducted by Bernstein himself. Moving to London in 1966 to study at the Royal Opera Centre, her education in opera began in earnest under her teacher Vera RĂłzsa. Her breakthrough role came in 1971 when she was cast as the Countess Almaviva in the Royal Opera House's production of The Marriage of Figaro. Her Metropolitan Opera House debut followed three years later when she was asked at the last minute to replace the soprano singing Desdemona in Verdi's Otello for the opening performance. Dame Kiri discusses the fame and attention she attracted when in 1981 she performed at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, watched live by 600 million people. After over 60 years of performing, she also talks about her decision to finally retire in 2017.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Archive used:Omnibus : Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, BBC1, 10 May 1985BBC Sound Archive, Kiri Te Kanawa interview with Andrew Sakley, 1966Soprano Sundays, BBC2, 21 Dec 1975Le Nozze di Figaro, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, 1971Otello, Metropolitan Opera New York, 1974BBC Sound Archive, The marriage service in St. Paul's Cathedral of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, 29 July 1981Top Of The Pops, BBC1, 24 October 1991Parkinson, BBC1, 18 March 1981Going Live, BBC1, October 1991Wogan BBC1, 25 Dec 1984
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Lee Child created his tough guy protagonist Jack Reacher, a former military policeman who roams America fighting crime, in 1997. Writing a book a year since his debut Killing Floor, Lee Child established himself as one of the most acclaimed and popular novelists in his genre, and has now sold over 100 million copies worldwide. The Reacher books have been adapted for a film starring Tom Cruise and, more recently, an Amazon Prime television series. Lee Childâs latest publication, Safe Enough, is a collection of short stories.
Talking to John Wilson, Child recalls his upbringing in Birmingham and how his childhood passion for reading was fuelled by frequent visits to the local library. For This Cultural Life, he chooses a Ladybird book which told the Biblical story of David and Goliath as an early inspiration, acknowledging that the giant figure of Goliath probably inspired the physique of 6â5â tall Reacher. He also remembers the impact of a book called My American Home which depicted an array of houses and apartments throughout America, the country in which Child would later live and set his novels.
He also discusses how working for 18 years as a Granada television producer, overseeing the transmission of dramas including Brideshead Revisited, helped forge his understanding of storytelling. His work as a union shop steward, which brought him into conflict with management and eventually led to him being made redundant, was the catalyst for his new career as a crime novelist in the late 1990s. His debut Reacher novel, a violent tale of vengeance and rough justice was, he admits, written out of anger following his dismissal from Granada. Lee Child also chooses the 1990 movie Dances With Wolves, directed by and starring Kevin Costner, as another influence on the creation of his fictional hero Jack Reacher.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Archive used:Reading from Worth Dying For by Lee Child, The Knight Errant: Lee Child - A Culture Show Special, BBC2, 20 Dec 2012Clip from Brideshead Revisited, Granada Television, ITV, 12 October 1981Clip from Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner, 1990Clip from Jack Reacher, Christopher McQuarrie, 2012
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The grandfather of British Pop Art, Sir Peter Blake is one of most influential and popular artists of his generation. A Royal Academician with work in the national collection, including Tate and the National Portrait Gallery, he is renowned for paintings and collages that borrow imagery from advertising, cinema and music. Having created The Beatlesâ Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band sleeve in 1967 he became the go-to album designer for other musical artists including The Who, Paul Weller, Madness and Oasis. He was knighted for services to art in 2002.
Sir Peter tells John Wilson how, after a working class upbringing in Dartford, Kent, he won a place at the Royal College of Art alongside fellow students Bridget Riley and Frank Auerbach. He recalls being influenced by early American pop artists including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and how he began making art inspired by everyday popular imagery. He chooses Dylan Thomas's 1954 radio play Under Milk Wood as a work which captivated his imagination and later inspired a series of his artworks based on the characters, and also cites Max Miller, the music hall artist known as 'the Cheeky Chappie'; as a creative influence. Sir Peter remembers how he made the iconic Sgt Pepper sleeve using waxwork dummies and life size cut-out figures depicting well-known people chosen by Peter and The Beatles themselves.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Archive used:Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, performed by Richard Burton, BBC Third Programme, 25 Jan 1954Max Miller, introduced by Wilfred Pickles at the Festival of Variety, BBC Light Programme, 6 May 1951Max Miller archive from Celebration, The Cheeky Chappie, BBC Radio 4, 3 July 1974Monitor: 89: Pop Goes The Easel, BBC1, 25 March 1962Peter Blake: Work in Progress, BBC2, 21 February 1983Newsnight, BBC2, 7 February 1983Ian Dury, Peter the Painter
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Director and actor Simon McBurney, one of the founders of the ground breaking theatre company Complicité, reveals his creative inspirations and influences. For over four decades McBurney has created innovative and experimental works, from immersive staging to the reinvention of classic texts. His works include A Disappearing Number, The Encounter and Mnemonic, a landmark production which has been recently revived at The National Theatre.
Simon McBurney tells John Wilson about his childhood in Cambridge where his father, an archaeologist, helped foster an early fascination with time and memory. For This Cultural Life he chooses the 1969 Ken Loach film Kes as a formative influence, offering an insight to a childhood very different to his own middle class upbringing. He recalls seeing the band The Clash whilst at Cambridge University, an experience that had a profound impact on his own creativity and political engagement through the arts. He also chooses the writer and critic John Berger as an inspirational figure, and recalls collaborating with Berger on the immersive Artangel project The Vertical Line in 1999. Simon McBurney also describes how the experience of meeting indigenous Amazonian people inspired his 2016 Complicité show The Encounter.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Archive clips from:Kes, Ken Loach, 1969The Clash Live at Rock Against Racism, Victoria Park, 1978The Dead Class, Tadeusz Kantor, 1976Friday Night...Saturday Morning: Cambridge Footlights, BBC1, Nov 1979Ways of Seeing, Episode 1, BBC2, Jan 1972The Vertical Line, ComplicitĂ©, BBC Radio 4, 1999The Encounter, ComplicitĂ©, Barbican Theatre, May 2018Face to Face, BBC2, Oct 1995Mission: Impossible â Rogue Nation, Christopher McQuarrie, 2015
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One of the worldâs greatest novelists, Salman Rushdie has won many prestigious international literary awards and was knighted for services to literature in 2007. He won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnightâs Children, a novel that was also twice voted as the best of all-time Booker winners. In 1989 Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared that Rushdieâs fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was blasphemous and pronounced a death sentence against its author. For over a decade he lived in hiding with close security, a period of his life that he wrote about in the 2012 memoir Joseph Anton. His most recent book Knife details the horrific stabbing he survived in 2022.
Talking to John Wilson, Salman Rushdie recalls his childhood in Bombay, and the folk tales and religious fables he grew up with. He chooses Indian independence and partition in 1947 as one of the defining moments of his creative life, a period that formed the historical backdrop to Midnightâs Children. He discusses how, having first moved to England as a schoolboy and then to New York after the fatwa, the subject of migration has recurred throughout much of his work, including The Satanic Verses. Rushdie also explains how "surrealism, fabulism and mythical storytellingâ are such an influence on his work, with particular reference to his 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet which was inspired by the ancient Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. As Rushdie says, "truth in art can be arrived at through many doorsâ.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Archive used:
BBC News, 12 Aug 2022Newsnight, BBC2, 12 Aug 2022BBC Sound archive, India: Transfer of Power, 15 August 1947Nehru: Man of Two Worlds, BBC1, 27 Feb 1962Midnight's Children, Book at Bedtime, BBC Radio 4, 27 August 1997Advert, Fresh Cream Cakes, 1979BBC News, 14 Feb 1989 The World At One, BBC Radio 4, 14 Feb 1989 BBC News, 28 May 1989 Today, BBC Radio 4, 27 April 1990 Clip from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 9, episode 3
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John Wilson's guest is the pioneering American artist, author and educator Judy Chicago. Having run the first ever feminist art course in California, she established herself as a powerful advocate of women artists in the early 1970s. She is best known for a ground-breaking installation piece called The Dinner Party, a monumental work which was made with the help of a team of ceramists and needle-workers over five years and first displayed in 1979. Now enjoying her sixth decade as an artist, Judy Chicago is regarded as a trailblazing figure in the art world.
Judy recalls studying at the Art Institute of Chicago's children's classes at the age of five, and afterwards wandering around the galleries upstairs where she was particularly drawn to the Impressionists. It was here that she first decided to become an artist. As a young woman she moved to the west coast to pursue her dream. Although she found the art scene there "inhospitable" to women, she was inspired by a group of male artists including Ed Rucha, Larry Bell and Bill Al Bengton, associated with the LA-based Ferus gallery.
Judy also cites discovering Christine de Pisan, the Italian-born French medieval poet at the court of King Charles VI of France, as a turning point in her own research and art practice. Like Judy herself, de Pisan had faced obstacles because of her gender and sought to challenge contemporary attitudes towards women by creating an allegorical City of Ladies. She is one of the women represented in Judy Chicago's landmark work The Dinner Party.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Archive used:Omnibus: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, BBC1, 13 January 1981Rebel Women: The Great Art Fight Back, BBC4, 10 July 2020
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Oscar-winning director, screenwriter and novelist Neil Jordan made his name with the 1984 movie The Company Of Wolves, adapted from an Angela Carter short story. His 1986 film Mona Lisa earned BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for its star Bob Hoskins. Jordan scored an even bigger critical and commercial hit worldwide with The Crying Game, which had six Academy Award nominations including best screenplay which was won by Neil Jordan himself. His 20 feature films made over 40 years also include an adaptation of Ann Riceâs novel Interview With the Vampire, Irish revolutionary drama Michael Collins and The End Of The Affair, adapted from the Graham Greene novel.
Neil Jordan talks to John Wilson about his upbringing in a Dublin suburb, the son of a school teacher father who encouraged an early love of storytelling. After working as a labourer, and in a Dublin theatre for a while, he met filmmaker John Boorman (Point Blank, Deliverance, The Emerald Forest) who, in 1980, was shooting his Arthurian legend film Excalibur at film studios in Ireland. Boorman invited Neil Jordan to direct a documentary about the making of Excalibur, an experience which started his filmmaking career. Jordan also chooses the 1943 Jean Genet novel Notre Dame des Fleurs - Our Lady Of The Flowers - as a formative influence on his screenwriting. He recalls the struggles to make The Crying Game and how the filmâs producer Harvey Weinstein objected to the inclusion of a trans character, a supporting role for which Jaye Davidson was nominated as best actor at the 1992 Academy Awards.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Archive used:Clip from A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone, 1964Clip from Excalibur, John Boorman, 1981Clip from The Crying Game, Neil Jordan, 1992Neil Jordan accepts his Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, 1992Clip from The Crying Game, Neil Jordan, 1992Clip from Michael Collins, Neil Jordan, 1996
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Zadie Smith grew up in north west London and studied English at Cambridge University. After a publisherâs bidding war when she was just 21, her debut novel White Teeth became a huge critical and commercial hit on publication in 2000 and won several awards including the Orange Prize, now known as the Womenâs Prize for Fiction, and the Whitbread first novel award. Since then, with books including On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the worldâs most successful and popular living novelists, renowned for her witty dialogue and explorations of cultural identity, class and sexuality. Her most recent book The Fraud is her first historical novel.
Zadie Smith talks to John Wilson about her upbringing in Willesden, North West London, with her Jamaican born mother and white English father. She chooses C S Lewisâ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as an early formative influence and remembers how its themes of danger, power and betrayal were intoxicating to her as a young reader. Zadie talks about the creative influence of her husband, the poet Nick Laird, and of the cultural impact of a trip she made to west Africa in 2007 which inspired much of her 2016 novel Swing Time. She also reflects on her role as an essayist who in recent years, has increasingly written about global political and social issues.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Readings from:Swing Time, Zadie Smith, 2016White Teeth, Zadie Smith, 2000
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Renowned for the autobiographical candour of her lyrics, Lily Allen has sung about the pitfalls of fame, drugs, broken relationships and motherhood. She was nominated for a Grammy Award for her debut album Alright Still and after the release of Itâs Not Me, Itâs You in 2010 won a Brit Award and three Ivor Novello Awards, including Songwriter of the Year. In 2021 she embarked on a stage acting career starring in 2.22 A Ghost Story, for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award. More recently, with her childhood friend Miquita Oliver, she launched her BBC podcast series Miss Me.
Talking to John Wilson, Lily recalls a sometimes sad and troubled childhood. Her father, the actor and comedian Keith Allen, had left the family home when she was four, and her film producer mother Alison Owen was often away working. She chooses as her first formative experiences a school concert in which she performed the song Baby Mine from the Disney movie Dumbo and captivated the audience. She recalls how the first started writing and recording her own songs, and built up a fanbase with the on-line platform MySpace. She chooses, as key musical influences the 1979 song Up The Junction by Squeeze, and the 2004 album A Grand Donât Come For Free by Mike Skinner, otherwise known as The Streets. Lily Allen also reflects on the pressures of juggling life in the spotlight with motherhood, and how theatre acting has offered her a new creative challenge.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
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The work of composer and conductor John Adams blends the rhythmic vitality of Minimalism with late-Romantic orchestral harmonies. He emerged alongside Philip Glass, Steve Reich and other musical minimalists in the early 1970s, and his reputation grew with symphonic work and operas that tackle recent history including Nixon In China, the Death Of Klinghoffer and Dr Atomic. He is the winner of five Grammy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and is one of Americaâs greatest and most performed living composers.
Born and raised in New England, Adams learned the clarinet from his father and played in marching bands and community orchestras during his formative years. He began composing at the age of ten and heard his first orchestral pieces performed while still a teenager. He tells John Wilson about the huge influence the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and his televised Young People's Concerts had on him. He also reveals how jazz band leader and composer Duke Ellington influenced how he writes for the orchestra, and how Charles Dickens inspired him to embrace accessibly in his compositions.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Extract from Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concert, What Does Music Mean? CBS, 18 January 1958, © The Leonard Bernstein Office
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Irish novelist Anne Enright is the author of seven novels, including The Gathering, winner of the Booker Prize in 2007. Her 2012 novel The Forgotten Waltz won the Andre Carnegie Medal for Fiction and her novel The Green Road won The Irish Novel of the Year in 2015, the same year that she was appointed as the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her latest novel The Wren, The Wren has been shortlisted for the Womenâs Prize for Fiction 2024.
Anne tells John Wilson how her childhood home in the suburbs of Dublin, and holidays spent at the Pollock Holes in Kilkee inform her writing. She recalls her book-devouring household and first reading Ulysses while on a cycling holiday at the age of 14. The play Top Girls by Caryl Churchill was also a creative influence, particularly in the way Churchill wrote dialogue for women who were at the time, so underrepresented on stage. Anne also cites the influence of the writer Angela Carter, both as a writer of contemporary fiction and as her tutor and mentor at the University of East Anglia.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Archive and readings used:
Extract from The Gathering, read by Anne EnrightExtract from The Wren, The Wren, read by Charlotte PykeExtract from Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, BBC, 1992
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