Saturday 19th November 2011
| The Story of Film: an Odyssey |
With Ronald Reagan in the White House and Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, the 1980s was a decade of protest in the movies. American independent director John Sayles talks exclusively about these years.
In Beijing, Chinese cinema was blossoming before the Tian'anmen crackdown. In the Soviet Union, the past wells up in astonishing films, and in Poland the master director Krzysztof Kieslowski emerges.
| Short Work |
A documentary exploring the real life experience of short performers who are trying to make their way in the entertainment industry.
Rachel Denning is 24 years old and 4' 1". She is a drama school graduate and wants to get straight acting parts in films or television, but she is still waiting for her first break after three years.
Ben Goff, 21 years old and 4' 0", is the son of Rusty, famous for his role as an Oompa Loompa in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. He has been trained at Italia Conti theatre school, but will this make a difference?
Stand-up comedian Gareth Morinan is 4' 11". He has recently given up his day job in the civil service and is launching himself as a stand up comic at the Edinburgh Festival for the first time. How will his act go down?
Against the backdrop of the new generation of short actors, the programme talks to Warwick Davis, who has has been in the business for 45 years. Have things changed since his day? Warwick's big break came about after the film Willow. Now he is starring in his own sitcom, Life's Too Short, where for the first time he can wear his own clothes.
Meredith Eaton, star of Boston Legal, has managed to make her way in the business, but what realistically is the extent of her acting ambitions in Hollywood? Boardwalk Empire star Nic Novicki, who is diversifying as a producer and comedian, has experienced first hand the glass ceiling for short actors.
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Sunday 20th November 2011
| Frank Skinner on George Formby |
George Formby was a huge star of stage and film. In his heyday he was as big as the Beatles, earning vast sums of money on stage and starring in films which broke box office records. Formby's trademark ukulele still inspires millions of dedicated fans, including comedian and performer Frank Skinner, who believes Formby was the greatest entertainer of his time.
Playing the ukulele and performing the songs that keep the Formby legend alive today, Skinner follows the music hall star's extraordinary rise to fame and fortune, explores his worldwide popularity and reveals the ruthless exploitation that surrounded his sudden and tragic death.
| World Cinema Awards |
Jonathan Ross hosts the annual review of the best international movies from the BFI in London. The acclaimed French actor Isabelle Huppert will be honoured, while Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In is among the contenders for film of the year. A special report from 'Trollywood' details how Scandanavia has become a major film producer following the success of controversial director Lars Von Trier and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Guests include Sofie Grabol from The Killing, writer and director David Hare, Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha and Remains of the Day author Kazuo Ishiguro.
| Bronson |
(2009) British Connection: Tom Hardy stars in this disturbing, stylised biopic recounting the ignoble, incarcerated life of Britain's most violent prisoner. Brutal violence/strong language.
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Monday 21st November 2011
| Stephen Fry on the Phone |
Stephen Fry traces the evolution of the mobile phone, from hefty executive bricks that required a separate briefcase to carry the battery to the smart little devices complete with personal assistant we have today.
There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people on the planet: Stephen Fry talks to the backroom boys who made it all possible and hears how the technology succeeded, in ways that the geeks had not necessarily intended.
In the first episode, Stephen Fry meets the men who first dreamt of creating a cellular network. Back in the sixties, two Bell Labs engineers in the US thought perhaps a maximum of 50,000 people might use a cellular phone network. Now, there are billions of phones in the world, all of them dependent on the networks based on their design. It was an enormous technical challenge that took decades to complete; but the main problems were political. Motorola, for example, argued that phone calls were a frivolous waste of radio spectrum compared to more worthy causes like television.
| The New Global Economics: the Shift |
In the second of a two part series, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, examines the changes in the global financial system that need still to take place if the world is to fully recover from the worst economic crisis since the depression. In an ever-changing and uncertain world, there are no easy paths forward from here. Martin Wolf speaks to Larry Summers, former US Treasury Secretary, Mark Malloch Brown, former UN Deputy Secretary General and Min Zhu, Deputy Managing Director of the IMF among others about the stark choices facing the world at the moment and what is at stake for future generations.
| Britain's Greatest Codebreaker |
Alan Turing is the genius British mathematician who was instrumental in breaking the German Naval Enigma Code during World War II, arguably saving millions of lives. He was also the visionary scientist who gave birth to the computer age, pioneered artificial intelligence, and was the first to investigate the mathematical underpinnings of the living world.
Turing is one of the great original thinkers of the 20th century, who foresaw the digital world in which we now live. In the eyes of many scientists today Turing sits alongside Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin at the table of scientific greats.
Turing's achievements went unrecognised during his lifetime. Instead he ended up being treated as a common criminal, for being homosexual at a time when homosexual acts were a crime.
In 1952, he was convicted of 'gross indecency' with another man and was forced to undergo so-called 'organo-therapy' or chemical castration.
Two years later, he killed himself with cyanide, aged just 41. Alan Turing was driven to a terrible despair and early death by the nation he'd done so much to save.
In the last 18 months of his short life, Turing visited a psychiatrist, Dr Franz Greenbaum, who tried to help him. This film brings Turing's ideas to life by dramatising this relationship and these sessions, based on historical records, Turing's writings, and accounts of those who knew him.
The film includes the testimony of people who knew and remember Turing.
Plus, contemporary experts from the world of technology and high science, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, bring Turing's exciting impact up to the present day, explaining why, in many ways, modern technology has only just begun to explore the potential of Turing's ideas.
| Mark Lawson talks to Alice Cooper |
Mark Lawson talks to Alice Cooper, dubbed the 'world's most beloved heavy metal entertainer', about his life and 45-year career. In this fascinating interview Alice shares his memories of his Detroit childhood, the perils of addiction and his desire for the Alice persona to remain a 'true American character' that will live on beyond his own lifetime.
Cooper made his name in a 1967 group called The Nazz before unleashing the surreal, shock rock world of Alice Cooper to legions of fans. Famed for his darkly comic theatrics, Cooper has gone on to record 30 albums and has been nominated for three Grammy awards. In recent years he has moved effortlessly from performing on stage to screen, including acting roles in Freddy's Dead and the Tim Burton film Dark Shadows.
Identity
Channel 5, 11.00pm - 12.45am
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Tuesday 22nd November 2011
| Ian Hislop: When Bankers Were Good |
Ian Hislop presents an entertaining and provocative film about the colourful Victorian financiers whose spectacular philanthropy shows that banking wasn't always associated with greed or self-serving financial recklessness.
Victorian bankers achieved wealth on a scale never envisaged by previous generations, but many of them were far from comfortable about their new-found riches, which caused them intense soul-searching amidst furious national debate about the moral purpose of money and its potential to corrupt.
Like so many other Victorian bankers, Samuel Gurney was a Quaker. Banking and its rewards seemed at odds with a faith that valued modest simplicity, but Gurney's wealth helped the work of his sister, prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, who is immortalised on today's five-pound note.
Self-made millionaire George Peabody was a merchant banker who made an enormous donation to London housing. 150 years on, his housing estates still provide accommodation to 50,000 Londoners.
Angela Burdett-Coutts became an overnight celebrity after she inherited the enormous Coutts fortune. With her love of small dogs and her vast stash, she could have been the Paris Hilton of her day. Instead, she went on to become a great philanthropist.
Perhaps the richest of them all was Natty Rothschild, who tried not just to ensure that his personal wealth did good, but that his bank's did too.
Deploying his customary mix of light touch and big ideas, Ian champions these extraordinary and generous individuals. Along the way, he meets Dr Giles Fraser, until his recent, dramatic resignation canon chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, chairman of the FSA Lord Turner, philanthropic financier the current Lord Rothschild, historian A N Wilson and chief rabbi Lord Sacks.
| Deadline: The New York Times |
Documentary which goes inside the newsroom at one of the most venerable publishing institutions in the world, the New York Times. Director Andrew Rossi gained unprecedented access to America's pre-eminent news factory during one of its most tumultuous years, as the film follows its struggle to survive in a year where Wikileaks emerged as a household name and other newspapers folded. Led by people such as David Carr - a firebrand journalist and former crack addict - can the foot soldiers of this bastion of old media keep up with the torrent of information that is the world wide web?
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Wednesday 23rd November 2011
| Selling the Sixties |
Documentary about Madison Avenue, home of the American advertising business, a semi-mythical place where the dreams of a new, affluent society were spun in the early 1960s. These were the 'days of heaven', when the country felt to many like a land of plenty and a land of hope - politics was reinvigorated thanks to a product known as new, improved JFK, consumerism was on the up and the challenges of Vietnam, feminism and the counter-culture still lay in the future.
Includes contributions from advertising legend George Lois and writer Gay Talese.
| Your Money and How They Spend It |
Nick Robinson examines how governments collect and spend public money. In the first of a two-part series, he reveals the endless pressure on politicians to spend more, and how hard they find it to resist. He looks at who gets what - and why - and shows how easy it is for money to be wasted.
Featuring frank interviews with Westminster officials and encounters with voters around Britain, the programme provides a fresh insight into what caused the current financial climate, and how tricky it is for governments to balance the books.
| Searching for Summertime |
An intriguing investigation into the extraordinary life of Gershwin's classic composition, Summertime. One of the most covered songs in the world, it has been recorded in almost every style of music - from jazz to opera, rock to reggae, soul to samba. Its musical adaptability is breathtaking, but Summertime also resonates on a deep emotional level too. This visually and sonically engaging film explores the composition's magical properties, examining how this song has, with stealth, captured the imagination of the world.
From its complex birth in 1935 as a lullaby in Gershwin's all-black opera Porgy and Bess, this film traces the hidden history of Summertime, focusing on key recordings, including those by Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Mahalia Jackson, Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald. It reveals how musicians have projected their own dreams and desires onto the song, re-imagining Summertime throughout the 20th century as a civil rights prayer, a hippie lullaby, an ode to seduction and a modern freedom song.
Back in the 1930s, Gershwin never dreamt of the global impact Summertime would have. But as this film shows, it has magically tapped into something deep inside us all - nostalgia and innocence, sadness and joy, and our intrinsic desire for freedom. Full of evocative archive footage as well as a myriad versions of Summertime - from the celebrated to the obscure - Searching For Summertime tells the surprising and illuminating tale behind this world-famous song.
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Thursday 24th November 2011
Nowhere Boy Special
Film 4, 8.50pm -9.00pm
Sam Taylor Wood, Kristin Scott Thomas and Aaron Johnson talk about the Film4 production that tells the story of John Lennon's teenage years.
Nowhere Boy
Film 4, 9.00pm - 10.50pm
(2009) British Connection: Biopic, starring Aaron Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey, explores the early years of John Lennon's life. Sex/strong language.
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Friday 25th November 2011
| Prince: a Purple Reign |
Documentary film which explores how Prince - showman, artist, enigma - revolutionised the perception of black music in the 1980s with worldwide hits such as 1999, Kiss, Raspberry Beret and Alphabet Street. He became a global sensation with the release of the Oscar-winning, semi-autobiographical movie Purple Rain in 1984, embarking on an incredible journey of musical self-discovery that continues to this day.
From the psychedelic Around the World in a Day to his masterpiece album Sign O' the Times and experiments with hip hop and jazz, Prince remains one of most ambitious and prolific songwriters of his generation. He tested the boundaries of taste and decency with explicit sexual lyrics and stage shows during his early career and in the 1990s fought for ownership of his name and control of his music, played out in a public battle with his former label, Warners. Still in demand as one of the most flamboyant live performers around, Prince remains a controversial and elusive creative force - as much a mystery as ever.
Contributors include Revolution guitarist Dez Dickerson, Paisley Park label president Alan Leeds, hip hop legend Chuck D and Prince 'Mastermind' and UK soul star Beverley Knight.
| Secretary |
(2002) A shy woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) takes a job with lawyer James Spader and finds they both believe in office discipline. Adults only, sadomasochism/self-harm scenes/strong language.
