Picasso: The Beauty and the Beast

Join Melvyn Bragg for an insightful journey into why “Art Matters,” With a career spanning over 60 years, Bragg passionately advocates for the importance of the arts as he reflects on his early experiences and engages with influential figures from the artistic world.

As a part of a tribute night to broadcaster and television executive Alan Yentob, he interviews leading British artist Jenny Saville. One of the most successful figurative painters working today, she came to prominence as part of the YBA movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She has been reluctant to discuss her work for many years on television, until now. Alan Yentob was working with her on a film for Imagine and caught up with her in Vienna on the eve of two major 2025 exhibitions she is mounting. This was the last interview Alan Yentob conducted in a career spanning six decades at the BBC, bringing many of the world’s leading artists and creatives to the screen. Alan also persuaded Jenny to allow cameras into her painting studio for the first time in almost three decades.

The comedy pioneer behind the Goon Show, Dr Strangelove and the Pink Panther series is explored in depth in this film, surveying his meteoric rise to fame and troubled personal life.

Today is a daily American morning television show that airs on NBC. The program debuted on January 14, 1952. It was the first of its genre on American television and in the world, and is the fifth-longest running American television series. Originally a two-hour program on weekdays, it expanded to Sundays in 1987 and Saturdays in 1992. The weekday broadcast expanded to three hours in 2000, and to four hours in 2007. Today's dominance was virtually unchallenged by the other networks until the late 1980s, when it was overtaken by ABC's Good Morning America. Today retook the Nielsen ratings lead the week of December 11, 1995, and held onto that position for 852 consecutive weeks until the week of April 9, 2012, when it was beaten by Good Morning America yet again. In 2002, Today was ranked #17 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest Television Shows of All Time.

Artist Tracey Emin talks to Alan Yentob about her life, from her troubled early years in Margate to a series of breakthroughs in the 1990s.

Over an extraordinary acting career spanning a decade, Stephen Rea has shown himself to be a versatile, prolific and mercurial talent. With unprecedented access to an internationally renowned creative figure, this intimate documentary explores the development of his radical outlook through the actor’s life and work.

Olafur Eliasson has been pushing the limits of the sublime and the spectacular in his art for almost 30 years. From his monumental installation, The Weather Project, in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2003 to his recent interventions in climate change and global migration, his is an art which strives to change the world every step of the way. In 2019, the Danish-Icelandic artist returns to Tate Modern with his landmark exhibition, In Real Life, surveying the breadth of his career from his beginnings as an art student in Copenhagen through to the latest pieces created in his vast studio laboratory in Berlin. Much of his work is shaped by his response to his parents' home country of Iceland and the interplay of water and light showcased in its natural phenomena.

This documentary charts the affinities between Edvard Munch’s art and Tracey Emin’s, exploring the many unexpected ways that this godfather of expressionism resonates with one of Britain’s pre-eminent artists.

Amol Rajan interviews era-defining pioneers, game-changers, leaders and maverick thinkers. Get inside the minds of the people who shape our world.