Schalcken the Painter

Profile of Orson Welles, looking at his life and career in theatre, radio and particularly film.

An epic story of adventure, starring some of the most magnificent and courageous creatures alive, awaits you in EARTH. Disneynature brings you a remarkable story of three animal families on a journey across our planet – polar bears, elephants and humpback whales.

Nicholas Baum goes on a journey to Den Bosch, Hieronymus Bosch's town, and gives his explanation about what he thinks the painter's works originally meant.

Omnibus was an arts-based BBC television documentary series, broadcast mainly on BBC1 in the United Kingdom. The programme was the successor to the long-running arts-based series 'Monitor'. It ran from 1967 until 2003, usually being transmitted on Sunday evenings. During its 35-year history, the programme won 12 Bafta awards. Among the series' best remembered documentaries are Cracked Actor, a profile of David Bowie, and Rene Magritte, a graduate film by David Wheatley, 'Madonna: Behind the American dream', a film produced by Nadia Hagger, and a profile of the British film director Ridley Scott. For a season in 1982, the series was in a magazine format presented by Barry Norman. The series was replaced by 'Imagine' hosted by Alan Yentob.

Series of single made-for-television dramas.

When Cariani the painter falls in love with the beautiful girl who receives mysterious visitors in the rooms below, he is drawn into a web of danger and deceit.

Judith arrives at Bluebeard's dark castle hoping her love can convince him to reveal the secrets behind the locked interior doors.

In medieval France, young lawyer Richard Courtois leaves Paris for the simpler life in the country. However, he is soon drawn into amorous and political intrigues. At the same time, he is pushed to defend a pig, owned by the mysterious gypsy Samira. The pig has been arrested for the murder of a young boy.

Screenplay was a drama anthology television series, broadcast on BBC between 1986 and 1993. Numerous episodes were produced including one named "Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Islands" starring Robbie Coltrane as English writer Samuel Johnson who in the autumn of 1773, visits the Hebrides off the north-west coast of Scotland. That episode was directed by John Byrne and co-starred John Sessions and Celia Imrie.

John Izzard meets with J. R. R. Tolkien at his home, walking with him through the Oxford locations that he loves while hearing the author's own views about his wildly successful fantasy novels.

Documentary looking at Orson Welles and the production of the film CITIZEN KANE fifty years ago, considering the furore that accompanied it and the real life press baron William Randolph Hearst upon whom Kane is based, and his efforts to halt the film, destroy the negative and persecution of people involved with its production and showing. It includes BBC interviews with Welles made in 1960 and 1982, and film historian Robert Carringer looks at the scenes that never made it to the screen. American film critic Pauline Kael also analyses the film's enduring appeal. Extracts from "The RKO Story" (producer: Rosemary Wilton) and "Yesterday's Whitness" (producers: Christopher Cook and Stephen Peet).

"Who else but Whistler made us see that fog was beautiful or love the night?" asked Oscar Wilde, sometime friend of the irascible artist who is the subject of this Omnibus episode. James McNeill Whistler was a turn-of-the-century Bohemian, who escaped from his New England background to discover the louche life in Paris and London. His later style, impressionistic to the point of abstraction, pre-empted modernism by nearly 20 years. In reply to an impertinent judge who suggested he was charging 200 guineas for two days' work, Whistler replied: "No - I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime". James Runcie's film re-creates some of Whistler's most famous paintings, including the portrait of his mother, in studio tableaux. It also records many of the artist's celebrated run-ins with the critics of his day (he collected his attacks on the critics in a volume from which this film takes its title: The Gentle Art of Making Enemies).

Three drama-documentary films set in a Paris art studio during a century of scandal and revolution, exploring the lives of French artists Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste Ingres, and Théodore Géricault.