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Private Notes
'Mike is such an economical painter, he paints nothing but masterpieces,' says Lucian Freud. Michael Andrews is one of Britain's most important and accessible artists. This week the Whitechapel Art Gallery,
London, presents an exhibition of his recent work. Andrews has always been a reclusive figure, and has consistently refused to take part in any film. Now for the first time, he has agreed to talk to Omnibus. Producer Anna Benson Gyles Series producer Andrew Snell
John le Carre's novel The Russia House was hugely popular in the Soviet Union where he is celebrated as the only writer to capture the spirit of the country at a turning point in its history. Omnibus takes a look at what happened when Hollywood went to Moscow to make a film of the book, starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer. It was poignant meeting between real life and make-believe.
Sidney Lumet is one of America's most prolific film-makers. He believes cinema is a collaborative art, and prefers to remain in his native New York to becoming a Hollywood 'star' director. In his first major television interview, Lumet looks back over his career and discusses the obsession with crime, punishment, and justice which he has explored in such classics as Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon - and again in his latest film, Q&A, starring Nick Nolte.
From his childhood in the Welsh valleys to the star circuit in Hollywood, Tom Jones's career has been both a popular fantasy and a showbiz cliche. But has the image been bought at the expense of fulfilling the promise of his vocal talent?
On 31 December 1990, the woman called the greatest diva of the century paid a spectacular farewell to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden after more than 30 years at the pinnacle of fame. In this exclusive film, Omnibus presents a retrospective of her career, where Dame Joan and her husband, conductor Richard Bonynge, talk about their life together in opera and close friends and colleagues,
Luciano Pavarotti, Dame Kiri te Kanawa, and her biographer Norma Major, pay tribute to Dame Joan's career in opera. Sir Sidney Nolan and critic Bernard Levin give their assessment.
The programme covers Greenaway’s approach to film-making and narrative, showing how computer technology was used in PROSPERO’S BOOKS and how the film was built around Gielgud’s ability and reputation.
Documentary profile of the late Spanish cellist, considered by many to be the greatest of all time. Casals's extraordinary career spanned two centuries - he played for both Queen Victoria and John F Kennedy. In 1939 he left Spain in protest against Franco's regime and lived the rest of his life in self-imposed exile, dying in Puerto Rico in 1973 at the age of 97. Omnibus journeys to his native Catalonia in the company of Robert Baldock, as he gathers material for a new biography of the performer. The programme taps the source of his inspiration and talks to Marta, the young cello student Casals married when he was 80 and she was 21.
“Isolation, solitude, secret plotting. A novel is a secret a writer may keep for years before he lets it out of his room. Writers in hiding, writers in prison. Sometimes their secrets turn out to be dangerous to the state machine. For most writers in the West of course this danger is extremely remote. The cells we live in are strictly personal constructions.”
A profile of former Olympic ice-dance champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean. The pair won Olympic gold and huge international acclaim in 1984, dancing to Ravel's Bolero. More recently, Torvill and Dean have changed direction, pushing out the parameters of ice dance, exploring new possibilities and taking stylistic risks. Tonight's Omnibus examines their amateur successes, with extracts from Bolero and Mac and Mabel, looks at some more recent creations, and questions whether their mastery of the medium has elevated ice skating to an art form. To illustrate the innovative style of their latest work, Dean has choreographed a new piece, Ice Works, with music specially composed by Andy Sheppard.
For more than half a century, Martha Gellhorn has been writing fiction and reporting on war. An angry witness to the waste and injustice of military might, she has reported from some of the most tragic places on earth - Spain in the 1930s, Dachau, Vietnam, El Salvador. Last year, at the age of 81, she was in Panama, investigating the human cost of the American invasion. Tonight, in her first major interview for television, she talks about her career as a war correspondent and reads selections from her dispatches, and discusses her highly acclaimed fiction and travel writing.
Andrea Dworkin believes that pornography is the major cause of the abuse of women. "The basic message of pornography is that no matter what you do to a woman, no matter how much you hurt her, she will like it," claims the controversial American writer. A radical feminist and the author of Pornography: Men Possessing Women, she is engaged in a campaign to change social attitudes to the pornography industry. Former prostitutes and porno-models talk openly to her about their work in a multi-million dollar industry which Dworkin condemns as "technologised prostitution".
Russian ballet star Irek
Mukhamedov has been called the Nureyev of his generation. But unlike Nureyev, who had to defect to dance with the Royal Ballet, Mukhamedov made history by simply leaving the Bolshoi in Moscow and taking up a London contract with the Royal. The charismatic Tartar is bringing the flamboyant Russian tradition to bear on the more restrained English classical tradition. And taking the British stage by storm. Omnibus documents
Mukhamedov's first year at the Royal, and examines how his bravura athleticism has been absorbed into the English tradition. Mukhamedov is filmed in class, in rehearsal, at home with his wife and baby, and dancing in specially shot extracts from Manon, Giselle and Winter Dreams, the ballet recently created for him by Sir Kenneth MacMillan.
In the opinion of a Sotheby's expert, Eric Hebborn is the greatest art forger of all time. From his Italian retreat he has waged a 30-year war on the art market. He claims that his forgeries of great master drawings can be found in galleries across the world. Tonight's film shows Hebborn, now 57, at work. He talks about his work and career, and about the serious intention in his work to raise questions about the aesthetic value of art.
Northern Ireland's comedians are daring to make fun of Ulster's sectarian divide. Finding time to laugh at themselves and their problems may be seen as bad taste but it is also, it seems, a necessary safety valve. Omnibus takes a trip round
Belfast and its environs in the company of Belfast-born comedian Frank Carson and local acts like the satirical group the Hole in the Wall Gang, Ulster's very own housewife-superstar
May McFettridge, and impressionist John McBlane.
The American artist and film-maker Joseph Cornell (1903-72) remains the dark horse of modern art, an enigmatic and reclusive cult figure who found fame through the so-called "Cornell Box". In a series of glass-fronted boxes he arranged a number of unrelated objects - everything from toys and photographs to driftwood and pebbles from the beach - to create a three-dimensional fantasy. One of his boxes was sold recently for nearly $500,000. This first TV documentary about Cornell assesses his life and work - with the help of admirers Tony Curtis and Susan Sontag - and paints an illuminating portrait of the hidden world of the man whose modest studio became a place of pilgrimage for the likes of Andy Warhol, John Lennon, and Max Ernst. He lived in the basement of a house he shared with his mother and brother (a victim of cerebral palsy).
This year has been the Royal Shakespeare Company's 30th season, and the first under its new artistic director, Adrian Noble. Omnibus documents the year at Stratford, with comments from Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons, Ian McKellen, and the RSC's first artistic director, Sir Peter Hall.
Prince is the legendary genius of contemporary pop music. His talents as a prolific songwriter, musician, record producer and dynamic live performer have been acknowledged by fans, critics and contemporaries worldwide. Tonight's Omnibus was filmed in Minneapolis and at Prince's own Paisley Park studios. The programme includes exclusive footage, never seen before, of Prince in rehearsals, performing at special after-concert parties and benefits, and provides an insight into the working methods of a unique talent.
A celebration of the saucy humour - some say comic genius, others sexist smut - of the man who no longer has a TV show in his own land but is seen regularly on television in nearly 100 other countries. Omnibus examines Hill's career and his innovation in the field of television comedy. With contributions from unexpected fans such as Mickey Rooney, Burt Reynolds, Michael Caine, and writer John Mortimer. Contributions also from Eugene Chaplin, Walter Cronkite, John Street, Philip Jones, Dennis Kirkland, Henry McGee, Bob Todd, Bellla Emberg, Ronnie Aldrich, Sue Upton and Louise English.
Prince is the legendary genius of contemporary pop music. His talents as a prolific songwriter, musician, record producer and dynamic live performer have been acknowledged by fans, critics and contemporaries worldwide. Tonight's Omnibus was filmed in Minneapolis and at Prince's own Paisley Park studios. The programme includes exclusive footage, never seen before, of Prince in rehearsals, performing at special after-concert parties and benefits, and provides an insight into the working methods of a unique talent.
A celebration of the saucy humour - some say comic genius, others sexist smut - of the man who no longer has a TV show in his own land but is seen regularly on television in nearly 100 other countries. Omnibus examines Hill's career and his innovation in the field of television comedy. With contributions from unexpected fans such as Mickey Rooney , Burt Reynolds , Michael Caine and writer John Mortimer.
Contributions also from Eugene Chaplin, Walter Cronkite, John Street, Philip Jones, Dennis Kirkland, Henry McGee, Bob Todd, Bellla Emberg, Ronnie Aldrich, Sue Upton and Louise English.
Eric Hebborn - Portrait of a Master Forger
