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Private Notes
A fascinating look at the colourful career of architect Frank Gehry who despite being well into his eighties remains one of the world's most celebrated and famously provocative creative forces. From the iconic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to LA's Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gehry's buildings both intrigue and ignite. For Frank, rules are there to be broken.
Alan Yentob explores Gehry's remarkable journey from poor outsider in Toronto to global 'starchitect' and follows the construction of a characteristically audacious new Gehry building in Sydney - his first in Australia.
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.
Summer 2015: 3. Beware of Mr Baker
imagine... presents Beware of Mr Baker. In this award-winning documentary, Cream drummer Ginger Baker reflects on his sixty-year career. It began in the jazz clubs of Soho and led to sellout stadium concerts, via the back streets of Lagos. The film's director Jay Bulger catches up with the irascible instrumentalist at his ranch in South Africa to talk drums, drugs and everything in-between. Has the young director bitten off more than he can chew?
Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison is America's first lady of literature. Her books encompass black American history but live and breathe in the present, rich in vivid characters, haunted by ghosts. Born poor in Ohio in 1931, she now lives in New York. She tells Alan Yentob how her father hated whites so much he wouldn't let them in the house. Her masterpiece, Beloved, shows the horrors of slavery perhaps better than any other artwork. She talks as she writes - with warmth and wit. Contributors include Angela Davis (whose biography she edited) and singer Jessye Norman.
Richard Flanagan: Life After Death chronicles the life and work of 2014's Man Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan. The grandson of illiterates, a school drop-out, a river guide, builder's labourer, and a passionate campaigner for conservation, Flanagan journeys with Alan Yentob through his native Tasmania, visiting the places that have inspired his novels, and on to Thailand, to see first-hand the site of the Death Railway - the brutal setting of his award-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
