Jill Nicholls
Tom Stoppard is perhaps the world’s leading, funniest and cleverest playwright. Ever since he hit the ground running in the 1960s with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, there has always been a streak of melancholy beneath the sparkling surface of his work. Now with his latest play, Leopoldstadt, he comes full circle and faces up to the pain and loss in his past. In this programme, he tells Alan Yentob his extraordinary story.
The Man Who Saw Too Much tells the story of 106-year-old Boris Pahor, believed to be the oldest known survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. He was sent to Dachau, Dora, Harzungen, Bergen-Belsen and Natzweiler – one of the Nazis' least known but most deadly camps. Twenty years after the war, Pahor wrote an extraordinary book about his experiences called Necropolis - City of the Dead. Pahor’s harrowing descriptions are illustrated with remarkable drawings by fellow prisoners, creating a unique record of conditions in the Nazi death camps. His testimony, along with details from a shocking report into the camp by British intelligence officer Captain Yurka Galitzine and the chilling testimony by SS commandant Josef Kramer, infamous as the Beast of Belsen, combine to tell an extraordinary story.
On the brink of the Depression in 1929, Georgia O'Keeffe - America's first great modernist painter - headed west. In the bright light of the New Mexico desert, she forged an independent life and found the solitude she needed for her truly original art. The photographs taken of her by her older lover scandalized the public. Her flower forms were seen as a shocking and vibrant display of femininity, her bones and skulls as surreal and disturbing. Now, 30 years after her death, to coincide with a major Tate Modern show, imagine - tells the story of Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the most inspiring artists ever.
In Jeff Koons: Diary of a Seducer, imagine... enters the world of one of the most successful, controversial and downright odd artists of our time. His gigantic balloon dogs and even bigger flower puppies have become iconic. His rows of virgin vacuum cleaners are frozen in time. Michael Jackson sits with his pet chimp Bubbles. But the artist who celebrates the commonplace and has put sex and the banal on a pedestal has mined some dark territory. Is it playtime or parental guidance recommended? As Jeff Koons' first retrospective takes over the Whitney Museum in New York and the Pompidou in Paris, imagine... asks what lies beneath the shiny surfaces.
The incredible story of a mysterious nanny who died in 2009 leaving behind a secret hoard - thousands of stunning photographs. Never seen in her lifetime, they were found by chance in a Chicago storage locker and auctioned off cheaply. Now Vivian Maier has gone viral and her magical pictures sell for thousands of dollars. Vivian was a tough street photographer, a secret poet of suburbia. In life she was a recluse, a hoarder, spinning tall tales about her French roots. Presented by Alan Yentob, the film includes stories from those who knew her and those who revealed her astonishing work.
Beautiful story about effervescent ninety-year-old children's book author and illustrator Judith Kerr - (a true delight) - recounting her childhood escape from Hitler and eventual return to Berlin.
This intriguing documentary shuttles from New York to France to Chicago as it traces the life story of the late Vivian Maier, a career nanny whose previously unknown cache of 100,000 photographs has earned her a posthumous reputation as one of America’s most accomplished and insightful street photographers.
Pioneer photographer, forefather of cinema, showman, murderer - Eadweard Muybridge was a Victorian enigma. He was born and died in Kingston upon Thames, but did his most famous work in California - freezing time and starting it up again, so that for the first time people could see how a racing horse's legs moved. He went on to animate the movements of naked ladies, wrestlers, athletes, elephants, cockatoos and his own naked body, projecting his images publicly with a machine he invented and astounding audiences worldwide with the first flickerings of cinema. Alan Yentob follows in Muybridge's footsteps as he makes - and often changes - his name, and sets off to kill his young wife's lover. With Andy Serkis as Muybridge
Could New Orleans's days as a great musical powerhouse be coming to an end? As Alan Yentob traces the city's vast musical heritage, he meets musicians who have lived and worked there all their lives and are determined to return despite the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. With contributions from Paul McCartney, Dr John, Jools Holland and Elvis Costello.
