This Cultural Life Folgen

Actor, writer, comedian and broadcaster Stephen Fry first made his name as a comic performer as a Cambridge University undergraduate with the Footlights company. He went on to forge a television partnership with his university friend Hugh Laurie on the sketch show A Bit Of Fry and Laurie and later the comic drama series Jeeves and Wooster, adapted from the PG Wodehouse stories. Among many stage and screen roles, Stephen Fry starred as Oscar Wilde in the 1997 film Wilde, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. He received a Tony Award nomination for playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night on Broadway, and was Lord Melchett over several generations of Blackadder. He’s written five novels and three volumes of autobiography, and has presented numerous documentaries. A familiar face on British television screens, he has hosted award ceremonies and panel shows including the long-running quiz series QI.For This Cultural Life, Stephen tells John Wilson about how he first read the Wodehouse story Very Good, Jeeves when he was 10 years old and was spellbound by the comic language. He says that seeing a film adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play The Importance Of Being Earnest led him to read all of Wilde's works, beginning a lifelong obsession with the playwright. He reveals how being an avid fan of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels led to his expulsion from school. He also chooses E.M. Forster's 1910 novel Howard's End as a huge influence, with its central theme of 'only connect' helping him make sense of his own emotional turbulence and intellectual ambitions. He also talks about spending time in prison on remand for credit card fraud, and being diagnosed as bi-polar after prolonged struggles with his mental health.The excerpt from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Final Problem is read by Greg Wagland.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Ian McEwan made his name in the 1970s with short stories and slim novels that explored the darker aspects of human nature. He won the Booker Prize in 1998 with his novel Amsterdam, and its follow up Atonement, was adapted as a film and nominated for several Academy Awards. McEwan primarily writes psychological dramas about relationships, but often within a global context of issues including climate change, the Iraq War and A.I. His most recent novel Lessons is his most directly autobiographical, drawing on aspects of his childhood and travels as a young man.In conversation with John Wilson, the author recalls early memories of Libya, where his Army officer father was posted during the Suez Crisis of 1952. He says he first realised the power of poetry, especially that of Wordsworth and TS Eliot, through an English teacher at the state-funded boarding school he attended in Suffolk. He chooses, as one of his formative experiences, meeting the novelist Martin Amis and joumalist Christopher Hitchens, both of whom became lifelong friends. Other major turning points were witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as he researched a book about the Cold War, and time spent in an operating theatre watching neurosurgeon Neil Kitchen in preparation for his 2005 novel Saturday whose protagonist is a leading brain surgeon.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004 and Britain’s official representative at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Jeremy Deller is an unconventional artist whose work is as likely to be seen in streets or fields as in museums and galleries. In his work The Battle of Orgreave he restaged a modern civil conflict; a clash between striking miners and police officers. He persuaded a traditional brass band to play Acid House tunes in his work Acid Brass. Perhaps most memorably, on the centenary of the first day of the Battle of they Somme he conjured ghostly platoons of young soldiers all around the UK in his work We’re Here because We’re Here.Jeremy talks to John Wilson about some of his most formative creative influences. Seeing The Who's rock musical film Tommy as a teenager was an unforgettable experience that revealed to him the power of imaginative vision. A chance encounter with one of his artist heroes Francis Bacon strengthened his interest in art history, and time spent with Andy Warhol in New York encouraged him to think of art as multi-dimensional and unlimited. He also recounts how P J Harvey's album Let England Shake and the play Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth crystallised ideas he was forming about notions of Englishness which he used in both his work at the British pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and his work to mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme.Producer: Edwina Pitman