Second only to Shakespeare, Chekhov is the most performed playwright in the world; but he was more a man of letters than a man of the theatre. How should his work be played? Oleg Efremov , the director of the Moscow Arts Theatre where Chekhov's plays were originally performed under the direction of the legendary Stanislavski, was in Oxford this summer with three of his actors to make masterclasses for the British American Drama Academy. Apart from the students, actors and directors from the RSC at Stratford came to see them, to listen, to learn and to watch them perform. Observing the text of Uncle Vanya emerge from the page into performance in its original language, theatre and film director, David Jones , identifies how much we can still learn from the theatre at which, 80 years ago, Chekhov's own wife created some of his most famous roles.
P.G. Wodehouse, perhaps best known and best loved of English comic novelists, is still something of a mystery. Affable and accessible to journalists, he was cripplingly shy and remained inscrutable about his private life. Bookmark traces his career, from an Edwardian middle class family to his experiences in a German internment camp, with the help of Tom Sharpe, Barrie Pitt, Lady Frances Donaldson, Sir Edward Cazalet and Lt Col Norman Murphy, a Wodehouse scholar who claims to have discovered the origins of Blandings Castle.
Nearly 130 years after Fyodor Dostoevsky left St Petersburg on his first journey to western Europe, his great-grandson, Dmitri, a tram driver from Leningrad (once again called St Petersburg), embarked on a similar trip - to acquire a second-hand Mercedes diesel. Director/Producer Paul Pawlikowski Editor Nigel Williams
Dennis Nilsen 's grisly murders were an unlikely subject for Brian Masters , a biographer of 18th-century gentlefolk. This film details how their relationship resulted in his prize-winning Killing for Company and examines, with Patrick McGrath and Beryl Bainbridge , whether evil and the disturbed personality are legitimate subjects for the serious writer.
Miss Pym's Day Out is a prime-time drama from Britain that ran on nationwide television in the UK for one season in 1991. The documentary-drama centers on English novelist, Barbara Pym (Patricia Routledge), who looks for inspiration as she battles a case of writer's block. She meets the love of her life, Henry Harvey (Himself), and she deals with her nagging sister, Hilary Walton (Herself), throughout the series. Both Harvey and Walton are the real-life sister and husband of the late Pym, joining an ensemble cast that mixes actors with real people.
Paul Pawlikowski's award-winning documentary on life behind Serbian lines in Bosnia. The film observes the roots of the extreme nationalism which has torn apart a country and provides a chilling examination of the dangerous power of ancient nationalist myths.
The first in a two-part biography of Philip Larkin traces his early life in Coventry, his Oxford days and his first postings as a librarian. Friends, fellow poets and biographer Andrew Motion help to provide an insight into the man.
Second part of Philip Larkin documentary.
A look at the background and work of Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire
Visionary of the future, inventor of the new science, creator of the most terrible Utopian's societies...prophet of the human fears.
Muriel Spark, one of the most brilliant and enigmatic of post-war writers, gives a rare interview at her home in Tuscany as the literature series returns. The author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Memento Mori talks to Alan Taylor about her Edinburgh childhood, her doomed marriage, the poverty she endured as a struggling writer, and the eventual publication of her first novel, The Comforters, when she was 39. Her unique style of fiction - full of wit but laced with supernatural events and dark, violent deaths - is demonstrated in extracts from her work in a television biography featuring contributions from fellow novelists David Lodge and Doris Lessing.
Clashes between biographers and their subjects are celebrated tonight in a documentary featuring the last filmed interview with Sir Kingsley Amis. The intensely private JD Salinger emerged from a quarter century of silence to denounce a biographer's work, while John le Carre's successfully suppressed an authorised biography. Interviewees include Martin Amis, Richard Holmes and Germaine Greer.
Best-selling writer Jilly Cooper is filmed at home in Gloucestershire and travelling around Europe as she reveals the truth behind her racy new novel, a tale of lust, passion and ambition in the world of international concert performers. Major Ronald Ferguson - giving his verdict on the authenticity of a Cooper seduction scene - is one of the guests commenting on her work.
Cult classic Skinhead told the violent story of a gang of hooligans led by anti-hero Joe Hawkins. On its publication in 1970, few predicted success for it on the bestseller lists. But it went on to sell more than a million copies in just two years and was considered sufficiently controversial to be banned from school playgrounds. Behind the enigma of its writer Jim Moffat, alias Richard Allen, lay a bizarre reality. Allen had no connection with the youth gangs he wrote about, compiling all his research from newspapers and television. The Irish-Canadian was part of a publishing explosion of New English Library works in the seventies in which hundreds of novels, pumped out in quick succession, sold up to 500,000 copies each. Allen died in 1993 but, with the help of his widow, Derry, and skinheads who treasure his books, the strands of his life are drawn together. Extracts from Allen's enduringly popular books are read by Ross Kemp (Grant Mitchell in EastEnders).
A portrait of author A.S. Byatt, whose prolific output includes the Booker Prize-winning novel Possession, a best-seller around the world. The return to her childhood haunts and schools takes her to the boiler room where she wrote her first romantic novel while friends from the fields of painting, science and natural history complete the picture of this admired writer.
First in a two-part documentary biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author of Waiting for Godot, shown to mark the 90th anniversary of his birthday in Dublin on Good Friday 1906. The traumas of Beckett's formative years are covered in this opening segment: his ill-fated love affair with his first cousin, the death of his father, and his decorated service with the French Resistance. Beckett had settled in France before the Second World War, met fellow Irishman James Joyce, and began writing. Patrick Magee's classic television performance in Krapp's Last Tape is interwoven with key landscapes and personalities from Beckett's life.
The two-part biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author that began yesterday concludes with the story of how Beckett finally began to connect with his audience, principally through Waiting for Godot, which established him as a writer of rare talent. His unique voice and vision brought him sudden international renown, and his work assumed legendary stature. His life, never recorded in interview, became a symbol of the pure, dedicated artist, immune to fame and fortune. This programme, the last in the current Bookmark series, includes an interview with the celebrated interpreter of Beckett's work, actor Billie Whitelaw.
The first of a two-part biography to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of science-fiction writer HG Wells, presented by former Labour leader Michael Foot. Tonight's programme deals with Wells's impoverished upbringing and the events that led to his writing The Time Machine.
Michael Foot's two-part biography of the novelist and pioneer of the science-fiction genre concludes with a study of his relationships with fellow writer Rebecca West and Russian baroness Moura Budberg, his meetings with Lenin and Stalin and his aspiration to become a global guru.
This one-off seasonal special edition of Bookmark is a drama-documentary telling the story of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of classic children's fable The Little Prince and fearless aviator, who mysteriously disappeared during the Second World War. Starring Bruno Ganz, Miranda Richardson. The film traces the tempestuous relationship de Saint-Exupery had with his wife Consuelo and how the death in childhood of Saint-Exupery's younger brother influenced the writing of The Little Prince. The dramatisation is interspersed with interviews featuring relatives and friends, who remember him fondly half a century after his death.
In the last programme of the series, biographer Olivier Todd , Camus's son and daughter, and many of his lovers, friends and associates collaborate forthe first time to tell the story of the elusive writer. The series returns next spring.
Documentary about the late poet Stevie Smith, author of the famous poem Not Waving But Drowning. Friends, neighbours and writers, combined with archive footage, form a picture of how London secretary Smith took the male-dominated literary world by storm.
