DP1226 BBC 4 WINTER 11/24/03 4:22 PM Page 1 BBC FOUR WINTER SEASON 2004 DP1226 BBC 4 WINTER 11/24/03 4:22 PM Page 2 CONTENTS Welcome to a new season which sees BBC the UK in the previous year.And our line- POLITICS AND POWER 3 IN THE LINE OF FIRE 19 Four enter the murky world of politics, up of movie premières is stronger than The Alan Clark Diaries No Man's Land embarking on surprising and sometimes ever, including the 2002 Academy Award The Death of Indira Gandhi The Guinea Pig Club dangerous journeys across the globe and winner No Man’s Land, starring Simon Dinner with Portillo The Myth of Dunkirk tackling life’s harsher realities through a mix Callow and the late Katrin Cartlidge. of compelling documentary, performance FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE 7 CLASSICS REVISITED 23 and feature film. BBC Four’s very own Soul Weekender kicks Game Over – Kasparov and the Machine Maria Callas – Living and Dying for Art and Love off a typically diverse musical season, which The Three Sisters Historians of Genius – In Their Own Words The colourful and scandalous world of includes fresh documentaries on musical The Russian Ark Early Music British politics is vividly and hilariously giants from Gram Parsons to Maria Callas. Tetris – From Russia with Love brought to life in a major six-part And our mix of great plays includes Kristin adaptation of the infamous Alan Clark Scott Thomas’s wonderful performance MUSIC IN THE SOUL 27 OTHER WORLDS 11 Soul Weekender – Urban Soul diaries – with John Hurt brilliantly capturing in The Three Sisters and a quick TV transfer North Korea – A State of Mind Soul Weekender – The Story of Soul to Soul the political manoeuvrings and rakish charm for the National Theatre’s hit drama Holidays in the Danger Zone – The Violent Coast Gram Parsons – Fallen Angel of the controversial former Conservative Elmina’s Kitchen. Mediterranean Tales John Martyn MP.From UK politics to the world stage, BBC Four World Cinema Award BBC Four reveals the terrifying reality of And, of course, BBC Four’s unique mix of life in one of the world’s most dangerous talk and debate (including the second series TROUBLED MINDS 33 coastlines in Holidays in the Danger Zone – of Dinner with Portillo), analysis of world RELUCTANT GANGSTERS 15 Blue/Orange The Violent Coast and gains remarkable news, performance and award-winning Elmina's Kitchen The Son's Room access to the closed world of North Korea documentaries continues to flourish as the Ali Zaoua Universities Challenged The Trespasser in A State of Mind. channel approaches its second anniversary this winter. The channel continues its support for exceptional international film-making with Roly Keating the first ever BBC Four World Cinema Controller, BBC Four Award, where critics and viewers nominate their favourite international film released in DP1226 BBC 4 WINTER 11/24/03 4:23 PM Page 4 POLITICS AND POWER The Alan Clark Diaries John Hurt plays Alan Clark, the flamboyant, outspoken and controversial Conservative MP,in a new, six-part drama adaptation of the Alan Clark diaries for BBC Four.The series focuses on the infamous diaries during Clark’s political career from 1983 to his death in 1999. Multi award winning actor John Hurt, whose numerous definitive roles have included Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant and John Merrick in The Elephant Man says:“My reason for doing The Alan Clark Diaries is that I’ve always enjoyed playing individuals and you can’t get more individual than Alan Clark.” With his irreverent wit, aristocratic good looks and rakish charm,Alan Clark was one of the most colourful figures in modern politics. Love him – or love to hate him – his vibrant, unconventional style sent a blast of fresh air through the stuffy corridors of power, adding a dazzling touch of glamour to politics. Forever manoeuvring his way to the top, he never fulfilled his ambition to be in the Cabinet.Yet he was an influential figure on the political landscape and a man who, more often to the Government’s despair than to its delight, was never long out of the public eye. Hailed as a modern-day Pepys, Clark wormed his way into the public’s affection through his diaries and their withering, often hilarious observations of high Tories,low morals, political back biting and Cabinet inertia. Set in a pre New Labour world of rural castles and Albany chambers, the diaries are part swansong for a time when Conservatives ruled Britannia and Etonians ran the country, and part insight into the psychology of a man born with a whole silver canteen in his mouth. A strong supporting cast includes Jenny Agutter (Spooks) as Clark’s wife Jane,Victoria Smurfit (Trial And Retribution,About A Boy) as Clark’s secret mistress,‘X’, and Julia Davis (Human Remains) as Jenny Easterbrook, Clark’s frosty secretary. 2 www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour 3 DP1226 BBC 4 WINTER 11/24/03 4:23 PM Page 6 The Death of Indira Gandhi Dinner with Portillo Indira Gandhi rose at dawn on 31 October 1984. She had Michael Portillo hosts another round of his dinner parties at which the hottest topics of national returned to New Delhi late the night before, fearing that a car and international importance are dissected over a four-course meal in a new season of six crash involving her grandchildren had been an attempt on their programmes. Asylum, privacy, hospitals, foreign policy and the war on terrorism are all likely lives. Indira herself was in grave danger, and she knew it. topics for debate. That morning, she chose a saffron sari – ironically, the colour of martyrdom in Sikhism – and walked down the garden path to her Each week, he is joined by seven guests whose special experience and knowledge give rise to offices. Within minutes she was dead, gunned down by informed debate and sometimes vitriolic and outrageous arguments. her own bodyguards. Portillo is not averse to chewing the fat with arch-rivals, parliamentary opponents, combative This film is about the assassination of one of the great figures in scribes of the national press, political lobbyists and international statesmen and women. In his global politics and provides a forensic account of the last days of first series, invitations were accepted by Benazir Bhutto and Garret Fitzgerald, Jonathan Aitken Indira, using archive, interviews and reconstruction. and George Galloway, Rosie Boycott, Frederick Forsyth and Christopher Hitchens. “The great thing for me was to try and make it feel like a proper dinner party,” says Portillo. “We hold it in a public building in London – not a studio. It’s a round table, so everyone’s looking at each other so they forget they are being filmed. And it becomes extremely natural, and you see it the way it happened.” 4 www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour POLITICS AND POWER 5 DP1226 BBC 4 WINTER 11/24/03 4:23 PM Page 8 FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE Game Over – Kasparov and the Machine Game Over – Kasparov and the Machine is a hi-tech thriller set in the fascinating world of chess. In May 1997, Garry Kasparov, widely regarded as the greatest chess player of all time, played against Deep Blue, a 1.5-ton IBM super-computer, in a chess tournament and scientific experiment.To win the match, the computer did what many thought impossible at the time – it appeared to think like a human. Directed by multi award winning film-maker Vikram Jayanti, this feature-length Storyville documentary leads viewers into the paranoid mindscape of a legendary chess genius, as Kasparov battles to come to terms with the machine from IBM. 6 www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour 7 DP1226 BBC 4 WINTER 11/24/03 4:23 PM Page 10 The Three Sisters The Russian Ark Tetris – From Russia with Love Kristin Scott Thomas, Robert Bathurst, James Fleet and Famously shot in an unprecedented single 90-minute take – the Tetris, the fiendishly addictive computer game, took the world Douglas Hodge head the cast of Christopher Hampton’s longest Steadicam shot ever committed to film – Aleksandr by storm in the early nineties. acclaimed adaptation of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Sokurov’s The Russian Ark celebrates the last two centuries of art and history in Russia. An unseen contemporary film-maker The story of its development and global success is as gripping Directed by award-winner Michael Blakemore and filmed at wanders through St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum. As he as the game itself. Tetris – From Russia with Love charts how a the London Playhouse Theatre, The Three Sisters is set in a begins his visit, he is transported into the past and meets a deceptively simple puzzle game, devised by a computer provincial town in Russia and follows the Prozorov sisters, 19th-century foreign diplomat. Together, they wander through programmer at Moscow’s Academy of Science in 1985, who reflect on their childhood and look forward to their the museum, which features fantastic works of art, and they became one of the biggest-selling computer games ever made. reintroduction into Moscow society. see and hear historical figures such as Tsar Nicholas II. It is a tale of high stakes, intimidation and legal feuds, with some The play is a funny and moving study of character and Written by Boris Khaimsky and Anatoli Nikiforov and released of the biggest companies in the capitalist West pitted against relationship. This fascinating drama explores the dynamics in 2002, The Russian Ark receives its UK television première as each other in the fight to secure the rights from Soviet Russia.