SUNDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2021

SUN 19:00 The Chronicles of Erne (m000fv4r)
Series 1

Spring

The landscape begins to emerge from winter and retired school teacher Pat Lunny takes a boat trip to his usual haunts around the islands on Lower Lough Erne, just above his hometown of Enniskillen.

Across the lough on White North Island, Amy Burns from RSPBNI moves highland cattle to some of the charity's other island reserves.

At Ely Lodge, Dublin-born painter Lorna Smyth begins a year-long project of painting landscapes around Lough Erne. She explains her process of taking sketches to form a 'collage of memories' which she then converts to oil paintings in her home studio.

As the Erne gears up for better weather, Enniskillen Royal Boat Club members take part in the Head of the Erne rowing race while on the Broad Lough, retired engineers Robert Navan and Mike Kingston search for sunken Catalinas.

In the woodlands of Castle Archdale, nature writer Dara McAnulty enjoys spring with his family and at Drumgallon Row, while members of the community group the Erne put a new skin on their traditional hand-built Irish currach called the Menapian.


SUN 19:30 This Cultural Life (m0011v72)
Series 1

Kenneth Branagh

Actor and film-maker Sir Kenneth Branagh talks to John Wilson about the key influences and inspirations that have shaped his own work. In a wide-ranging conversation, he reveals some of his formative artistic experiences and discusses his creative process.

Branagh discusses his working-class upbringing in late 1960s Northern Ireland at the start of the Troubles, as explored in his most personal film to date, Belfast. He traces the beginnings of his passion for Shakespeare back to the discovery of LP recordings of Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, and reveals his admiration for Alan Bleasdale's 1980s television series Boys from the Blackstuff. He also discusses his participation in the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics.

This Cultural Life is a BBC Radio 4 podcast.


SUN 20:00 BBC Proms (b04w0vg3)
2014

Kiss Me, Kate at the Proms

John Wilson and his orchestra are joined by a spectacular ensemble of singers and dancers from Broadway and the West End for a unique performance of the classic musical Kiss Me, Kate.

Hits including Another Op'nin, Another Show, Wunderbar and Too Darn Hot combine to create a dazzling evening of music, dance and theatre to mark 50 years since the death of its celebrated composer and lyricist Cole Porter.

This hilarious take on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew is performed in its glorious 1948 original orchestration, a highlight of the 2014 BBC Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall. Starring Ben Davis, Alexandra Silber, Tony Yazbeck and Louise Dearman.


SUN 22:15 Arena (m0011v76)
B. Catling: Where Does It All Come From?

An eye-popping insight into the extraordinary, late-flourishing career of maverick artist, teacher and performer Brian Catling RA, whose unique vision and imagination are celebrated through a shifting narrative of newly restored archive material, exclusive interviews and specially shot footage.

Brian Catling was born in 1948, a foundling adopted and raised in tenements on the Old Kent Road in postwar south London. He is an internationally exhibited and lauded sculptor and, as B. Catling, the author of The Vorrh Trilogy, a vast work of untrammelled imagination, and the novel Earwig, which provided the inspiration for Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s 2021 film of the same name. Catling is also a professor at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford, a royal academician and a Cholmondeley Award-winning poet. He is also the erstwhile impresario of the legendarily disreputable Cabaret Melancholique and an occasional sinister cinematic presence, both in front of and behind the camera.

Where Does It All Come From is a window into Catling’s world that, like Catling himself, defies categorisation. It is shaped through a stitching-together of rediscovered archive material with newly shot interviews, fragments of previously unseen filmworks, interjections and interactions, ghosts and revenants. Important locations in Catling’s life and work – south London and Whitechapel, museums, churches, dives, Gozo, Leipzig, Copenhagen – are interwoven with imaginary landscapes and revisited, explored or recreated. Interviews and long-lost performances are remade and repurposed, seances held, dead or vagrant voices resuscitated. Characters, symbols and strange beings – some of whom then reveal their role and purpose – are glimpsed or merely spoken of, sometimes without explanation. At times, fiction hijacks fact to reveal other, deeper truths.

We see Catling at work, in the past and the present, in public performance, on stage, conjuring uncanny presences in galleries, abandoned rooms and in his studio. His histories are told, including childhood obsessions with outsiders and monsters, the early days of art school and labouring jobs at Truman’s Brewery, becoming an artist, a sculptor and maker of installations, and his decision to retreat from the London art world.

A host of writers, artists, musicians, curators and former students, including actor Ray Winstone recollecting a terrifying encounter in London’s Whitechapel, are also called upon to bear witness to a creative spirit who defies definition and is capable of endless self-reinvention.


SUN 23:25 Romancing the Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture (b00ydp2y)
Masons of God

Alastair Sooke reveals the astonishing range of our medieval sculpture, from the imposing masterpieces of our Gothic cathedrals to the playful misericords underneath church stalls.

He shows how the sculpture of the era casts a new light on medieval Britain, a far more sophisticated, fun-loving and maverick place than we in the modern world commonly believe. But despite the technical and emotional power of these works, the notion of a 'sculptor' did not even exist; most carving of the time was done by teams of itinerant masons and artisans working for the Church. The names of some, like William Berkeley, are known but most are lost to history.

This first golden age came to an end with Henry VIII's Reformation of the Church, unleashing a wave of destruction from which it would take centuries to recover.


SUN 00:25 Romancing the Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture (b00yml9v)
Mavericks of Empire

By the middle of the 18th century, Britain was in possession of a vast empire. It required a new way of seeing ourselves and so we turned to the statues of ancient Greece and Rome to project the secular power and glory of the British Empire.

The message was clear: Britain was the new Rome, our generals and politicians on a par with the heroes of the ancient world. The flood of funds, both public and private, into sculptural projects unleashed a new golden age, yet it was also a remarkably unorthodox one. The greatest sculptors of the 18th and 19th centuries were those mavericks who bucked prevailing trends - geniuses like John Flaxman, Francis Chantrey and Alfred Gilbert.

Alastair Sooke tells the story of these mavericks and reveals the extraordinary technical breakthroughs behind their key works: carving in marble with a pointer machine and the primal power of the lost-wax technique.


SUN 01:25 Romancing the Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture (b00yvsjd)
Children of the Revolution

'Sculpture has changed more in the last hundred years,' says Alastair Sooke, 'than in the previous thirty thousand.' The third and last episode of the series tells the dramatic story of a century of innovation, scandal, shock and creativity.

It begins with the moment at the turn of the 20th century when young sculptors ceased visiting the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and looked instead at the 'primitive' works of Africa and the Pacific islands. The result was an artistic revolution spearheaded by Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein that would climax in the anti-sculptural gestures of Gilbert & George and Damien Hirst.

Yet for all the provocation and occasional excesses of conceptualism, sculpture has never enjoyed such popularity. From the memorials of World War One to the landmarks of Antony Gormley and Rachel Whiteread, sculpture remains the art form that speaks most directly and powerfully to the nation.

The programme climaxes with a series of encounters between Alastair and leading sculptors Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley and Anthony Caro.


SUN 02:25 This Cultural Life (m0011v72)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:30 today]


SUN 02:55 The Chronicles of Erne (m000fv4r)
[Repeat of broadcast at 19:00 today]