Huw Wheldon
A documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, responsible for creating some of the most memorable television and radio music in British popular culture, including "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and Doctor Who (1963).
Interviews with and performance footage of conductor Sir John Barbirolli
A partly dramatised account of the life of Sir Edward Elgar classical composer. Huw Wheldon narrates the life story over backdrops of beautiful mountain scenery, especially memorable is the image of young Elgar riding his horse around Malvern Hills.
Pop Goes the Easel was Ken Russell’s first full-length documentary for the BBC’s arts series Monitor. It focused on 4 British Pop Artists - Peter Blake, Peter Philips, Pauline Boty and Derek Boshier.
Peter Blake explores his passion for pop icons, Peter Phillips is featured with his cool companions, Derek Boshier voices his concerns with the American influence on British life and culture, and Pauline Boty, Britain's great female pop art painter who was to die only four years later, performs in a short dramatic dream piece.
Ken Russell's third Monitor documentary from 1962 is both a development from and inversion of the first, Lonely Shore. In that, an alien presence surveys a stretch of coastline strewn with assorted objects from early 1960s British lifestyles and tries (and mostly fails) to divine their meaning or purpose. The Preservation Man is also set in a series of object-strewn settings, but here they're part of the artist Bruce Lacey's collection of random junk, and their original function is irrelevant. Sensibly, Russell and commentator Huw Wheldon keep analysis to a minimum, preferring to use the film as an excuse to spend quarter of an hour in Lacey's amiable company.
A study of Antoni Gaudí's architecture (especially the Church of the Holy Trinity in Barcelona), his sources of inspiration and his influence on Picasso. (BFI)
Mrs Wilhelmina Sterling shows her vast collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings, pottery and other artefacts at her home in Battersea.
Portrait of Spike Milligan, then part of The Goon Show examining his views on comedy,
