Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking.
"A Day in the Life" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as the final track of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Credited to Lennon–McCartney, the opening and closing sections of the song were mainly written by John Lennon, with Paul McCartney primarily contributing the song's middle section. All four Beatles shaped the final arrangement of the song.
Klaus Otto Wilhelm Voormann is a German artist, musician, and record producer.
Alan Yentob, is a retired British television executive and presenter. He has held senior roles at the BBC including head of music and arts, controller of BBC1 and controller of BBC2. He stepped down as the BBC's creative director in December 2015, and was chairman of the board of trustees of the charity Kids Company from 2003 until its collapse in 2015.
Dame Sheila Cameron Hancock is an English actress, singer, and author. She has performed in both plays and musicals in London’s theatre scene, and her Broadway debut in Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1966) earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Lead Actress in a Play.
Miriam Margolyes is a British and Australian actress. Known for her work as a character actor across film, television, and stage, she received the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mrs. Mingott in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993), and achieved international prominence with her portrayal of Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter film series (2001–2011). Margolyes was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2002 New Year Honours for Services to Drama.
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC since 1 October 1975. Voted by TV executives in Broadcast magazine as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has produced more than six hundred episodes directed by, among others, Frederick Baker, Jana Boková, Jonathan Demme, Nigel Finch, Mary Harron, Vikram Jayanti, Vivian Kubrick, Paul Lee, Adam Low, Bernard MacMahon, James Marsh, Leslie Megahey, Volker Schlondorff, Martin Scorsese, Julien Temple, Anthony Wall, Leslie Woodhead, and Alan Yentob.
Marian Keyes is an Irish author and radio presenter. She is principally known for her popular fiction.
Claudius Afolabi Siffre, better known as Labi Siffre, is a British singer, songwriter and poet. Siffre released six albums from 1970 to 1975 and four from 1988 to 1998. His compositions include "It Must Be Love", which reached number 14 on the UK Singles Chart in 1971, "Crying Laughing Loving Lying", and "(Something Inside) So Strong"—an anti-apartheid song inspired by a television documentary in which white soldiers in South Africa were filmed shooting at black civilians in the street—which hit number 4 on the UK chart. The latter song won Siffre the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, and it has been used in Amnesty International campaigns.
William Tulloch Paterson is a Scottish actor with a career in theatre, film, television and radio. Throughout his career he has appeared regularly in radio drama and provided the narration for a large number of documentaries. He has appeared in films and TV series including Comfort and Joy (1984), Traffik (1989), Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1986), Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), The Witches (1990), Wives and Daughters (1999), Sea of Souls (2004–2007), Amazing Grace (2006), Miss Potter (2006), Little Dorrit (2008), Doctor Who (2010), Outlander (2014), Fleabag (2016–2019), Inside No. 9 (2018), Good Omens (2019), Brassic (2020) and House of the Dragon (2022). He is a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Scottish BAFTAs.
Imagine: John Lennon is a soundtrack album of popular music compiled for the 1988 documentary film Imagine: John Lennon from songs written or co-written by John Lennon. Originally released that year as a double album, it now remains available on one CD.
Cracked Actor is a 1975 television documentary film about the musician David Bowie, made by Alan Yentob for the BBC's Omnibus strand. It was first shown on BBC1 on 26 January 1975.
William Kentridge is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films, especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s. The latter are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.
BBC Film is the feature film-making arm of the BBC. It was founded on 18 June 1990, and has produced or co-produced some of the most successful British films of recent years, including Truly, Madly, Deeply, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, Quartet, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Saving Mr. Banks, My Week with Marilyn, Eastern Promises, Match Point, Jane Eyre, In the Loop, An Education, StreetDance 3D, Fish Tank, The History Boys, Nativity!, Iris, Notes on a Scandal, Philomena, Stan & Ollie, Man Up, Billy Elliot and Brooklyn.
Ubu and the Truth Commission is a South African play by Jane Taylor. It was first produced on 26 May 1997, directed by William Kentridge at The Laboratory in Johannesburg's Market Theatre.
"Burn My Candle" is the debut single by Shirley Bassey. It was recorded in February 1956, when Bassey was nineteen years old, and released later that month on a 78 rpm shellac disc, with "Stormy Weather" on the B-side. The record was produced by Johnny Franz, with Angela Morley and her Orchestra backing Bassey. The song was written for Bassey by Ross Parker at the behest of Bassey's then-manager, Michael Sullivan, who was seeking a song to make Bassey stand out. The BBC banned the playing of the record, presumably due to its suggestive lyrics. In his 2010 biography of Bassey, John L. Williams writes that:
The song taken in isolation, is blatantly sexual but hardly convincing, as the double entendres of the title give way to single entendres in the bridge – 'There's "S" for Scotch, that's so direct / And for straight and simple sex / "I" for invitation to / A close relationship with you / "N" for nothing bad nor less / "S-I-N", that's sin, I guess.'...And that, right there, is the key to Shirley Bassey's early success: she was blatantly sexy and yet somehow, if not innocent, at least not too knowing.
Marlon James is a Jamaican writer. He is the author of five novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which won him the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022).
14–18 NOW was the UK's arts programme for the First World War centenary. Working with arts and heritage partners all across the UK, the programme commissioned new artworks from 420 contemporary artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers and performers, inspired by the period 1914–1918.
And Now for Something Rather Similar is a documentary about the Monty Python team as they prepare for their first live performances in 34 years. Airing on BBC 1 on 29 June 2014 as part of the Imagine series, the programme is presented by Alan Yentob, who tracks down the five surviving Pythons in the months leading up to their Monty Python Live (Mostly) shows at the O2 arena in July 2014.
The Beatles: Get Back is a documentary television series directed and produced by Peter Jackson. It covers the making of the Beatles' 1970 album Let It Be and draws largely from unused footage and audio material originally captured for and recycled original footage from the 1970 documentary of the album by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. The docuseries has a total runtime of nearly eight hours, consisting of three episodes, each of duration between two and three hours covering about one week each, together covering 21 days of studio time.
