Pete Townshend is the songwriter, guitarist and co-founder of The Who. The band first stormed the pop charts sixty years ago, with teenage anthems including I Can’t Explain, Substitute and My Generation. Broader songwriting ambitions led him to create the rock opera Tommy in 1969, and the concept album Quadrophenia four years later. Both projects were adapted as films, and Quadrophenia has now been staged as a ballet by Sadlers Wells. Throughout the seventies, The Who were regarded as the bigges...
May 29, 2025•44 min
Pianist James Rhodes was a relative latecomer to a professional music, and was 30 when he performed his first concert. In 2010 he became the first core classical pianist to be signed to the world’s biggest rock music label, Warner Brothers. He has recorded nine albums, including his most recent one, Mania, which features work by Bach, Chopin Brahms and other composers. He has also presented television documentaries about classical music and written five books, including his international bestsel...
May 22, 2025•44 min
Since the late 1980s, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has made work in response to conflict and political violence, drawing on the testimonies of victims to create metaphorical sculptures and installations about trauma, loss and survival. She is now recognised as one of the most important living artists, with work shown in museums and galleries around the world, including in the turbine hall of Tate Modern in 2007. Doris Salcedo is the 2025 recipient of the Whitechapel Gallery’s prestigious Art I...
May 15, 2025•43 min
Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason was born in Nottingham in 1999 into a big musical family. He and his six siblings all grew up learning classical instruments, and appeared on Britain’s Got Talent in 2015. Sheku first made his mark as a solo performer the following year when he won the BBC Young Musician Of The Year competition. In 2018 a global audience of over a billion watched him perform live at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Since then he has received two classical Brit awards, An ...
May 08, 2025•44 min
Choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor is one of the most acclaimed, innovative and influential figures in contemporary dance. His works are often the result of creative collaborations with artists, musicians, filmmakers, or with scientists to explore technological issues. In 2006 he was appointed as Resident Choreographer at the Royal Ballet. He has created more than 20 new works at Covent Garden in that time, including Chroma, set to music by Joby Talbot and The White Stripes, and Woolf Works, a ful...
May 01, 2025•44 min
Actor Sir Simon Russell Beale is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest actors of his generation. He has played many leading roles at National Theatre and RSC, including Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. He is currently starring in Titus Andronicus at the RSC. His awards include three Olivier Awards, two BAFTAs, and a Tony Award in 2022 for his leading role in The Lehman Trilogy, which had transferred from London. Simon Russell Beale was knighted in 2019 for services to drama. Simon tells John Wil...
Apr 24, 2025•44 min
Maggie O’Farrell is the author of nine novels. Her debut, After You’d Gone, was published 25 years ago this year and won the Betty Trask Prize in 2001. Her 2010 book The Hand That First Held Mine won the Costa Novel Award; and Hamnet, her hugely acclaimed and bestselling story of the death of Shakespeare’s son, won the 2020 Women’s Prize for fiction. Maggie O’Farrell has also written a memoir; I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. Maggie tells John Wilson about some of her creative inf...
Apr 17, 2025•44 min
Screenwriter and playwright Abi Morgan has worked across a diverse array of themes and genres for more than 25 years. She wrote the television series The Split, a domestic drama involving divorce lawyers, and created the psychological Netflix series Eric. Her other television credits include Sex Traffic, for which she won a BAFTA for Best Drama serial in 2005, and The Hour, the television news drama which earned her an Emmy award in 2012. Her film credits include The Iron Lady, which starred Mer...
Apr 10, 2025•43 min
The internationally acclaimed and hugely influential artist Theaster Gates was born, raised and works in Chicago. He trained as a ceramicist, and still makes pottery, but it’s just one part of a diverse artistic output that also includes painting, sculpture and vast installations, in works which often explore the black experience in contemporary America. He is best known for redeveloping derelict buildings for community projects, using art to transform run-down neighbourhoods of his city. A reci...
Feb 20, 2025•44 min
The premiere of David Hare’s play Plenty at the National Theatre in 1978 marked him out as one of the UK’s most skilled and socially conscious playwrights. Plenty transferred to Broadway, Hare adapted it into a film starring Meryl Streep, and in the following years he became known as a writer for whom the political and the personal are deeply entwined. Often referred to as Britain’s pre-eminent ‘state of the nation playwright’, his plays in the 1980s examined a wide range of social and political...
Feb 13, 2025•44 min
Born and raised in south London, Cynthia Erivo made her name with musical theatre in London, starring in shows including The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg and Sister Act. In 2015 she became a Broadway star and won Tony, Emmy and Grammy awards for her role in The Color Purple, the musical adaptation of the Alice Walker novel which had transferred from London. Her screen acting credits include the title role in Harriet, about the 19th century abolitionist and campaigner Harriet Tubman, a film which earne...
Feb 06, 2025•44 min
American conductor Marin Alsop was the first woman to lead major orchestras in the UK, South America and in the United States, becoming principal conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007. Nominated for Grammy Awards five times, in 2013 she became the first ever woman to lead the Last Night Of The Proms, and is now regarded as one of the greatest conductors in the world. She talks to John Wilson about her professional musician parents who nurtured her love of music and supported her ...
Jan 30, 2025•43 min
Having worked as a BBC television journalist, and as political editor for the Observer newspaper, Robert Harris published his debut novel Fatherland in 1992. A counterfactual story set in the 1960s that imagines Nazi Germany had won the Second World War, the book was a global bestseller. Since then Robert Harris has written 15 novels, mainly historical fiction which ranges from the ancient Roman politics of Pompeii and his Cicero trilogy, to the Restoration era manhunt of Act Of Oblivion, and Pa...
Jan 23, 2025•44 min
James Ivory formed the filmmaking company Merchant Ivory with producer Ismail Merchant and the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in 1961. The company went on to produce over 40 films and became synonymous with a particular sumptuous movie genre in the 80s and 90s, often adapted from literary classics. Merchant Ivory won awards and acclaim for A Room With A View, Howard’s End, The Remains Of The Day and many more. In 2018, at the age of 89, James Ivory became the oldest ever winner of an Academy Award....
Jan 16, 2025•43 min
Chilean author Isabel Allende became an international literary star after the publication of her 1982 debut novel The House Of the Spirits, an epic family saga set amidst violent political upheavals. Since then she has written 21 novels and five works of non-fiction, and has sold over 80 million copies worldwide. Isabel Allende tells John Wilson about her upbringing in Santiago and how, after her parents split, her grandfather became a hugely influential figure in her life, encouraging her love ...
Jan 09, 2025•43 min
Thelma Schoonmaker has, for over five decades, been Martin Scorsese’s cutting room collaborator. Having edited his first feature film in 1967, she has worked on every Scorsese movie since Raging Bull, including Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, Wolf Of Wall Street, right up to his most recent features The Irishman and Killers Of The Flower Moon. As the widow of the legendary British filmmaker Michael Powell, she has also played a key role in the restoration of classic Powell and Pressburger film...
Nov 07, 2024•44 min
A star of stage and screen, Bill Nighy has enjoyed a fifty year career and is now among Britain’s most prolific and much loved actors. Acclaimed for National Theatre roles in plays by David Hare and Tom Stoppard, his popular appeal lies with scene-stealing appearances in films including Pirates Of The Caribbean, Harry Potter and, most famously, Love Actually. Bill Nighy has won Bafta and Golden Globe awards and was Oscar nominated for his starring role in the 2022 historical drama Living. His mo...
Oct 31, 2024•43 min
Theatre, opera and film director Julie Taymor is regarded as one of the most imaginative directors and designers working today. Her stage version of the Lion King is the highest grossing show in Broadway history, having made nearly $2 billion, and it recently marked its 25th year in London. The Lion King Julie two Tony Awards, including for best director of a musical in 1997, making her the first woman to do so. Julie Taymor has told Shakespearean stories on stage and the big screen including Ti...
Oct 24, 2024•43 min
Novelist, playwright and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi's first screenplay, My Beautiful Launderette brought him Oscar and BAFTA nominations in 1985. Five years later his debut novel The Buddha Of Suburbia, set amidst the social divisions of mid 70’s Britain, became a bestseller and was adapted as a BBC television series. After eleven screenplays including My Son The Fanatic, Venus and The Mother, and nine novels, including Intimacy and the Black Album, his latest book is a memoir called Shattered....
Oct 17, 2024•44 min
Nile Rodgers is one of the most successful and influential figures in popular music. As a songwriter, producer and arranger he has enjoyed a 50 year career with his bands Chic and Sister Sledge, and collaborations with artists including Diana Ross, David Bowie, Duran Duran, Madonna, Daft Punk and Beyoncé. Bringing his 1959 Fender Stratocaster guitar to the This Cultural Life studio, Nile tells John Wilson how the instrument has been the bedrock of almost every record that he worked on, and acqui...
Oct 10, 2024•43 min
The novelist, biographer and critic Dame Margaret Drabble published her debut novel in 1963. She quickly went on to become a bestselling and critically acclaimed chronicler of the lives of modern women in a series of contemporary realist stories, often based on her own life and experiences. Her 19 novels include The Millstone, The Waterfall, The Ice Age and The Radiant Way, and her non-fiction includes books on Thomas Hardy, William Wordsworth and Arnold Bennett. She has also edited the Oxford C...
Oct 03, 2024•43 min
For over more than five decades the Serbian conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović has used her own body as her artistic medium, exploring the human condition in works that are often feats of endurance, exhaustion and pain. From her earliest works such as Rhythm 0, in which Abramović invited audiences to freely interact with her however they chose, to her long-durational work The Artist is Present, she has put herself in danger at the mercy of audiences all in the name of art. Abramo...
Sep 26, 2024•43 min
Having started out as a current affairs journalist, Peter Kosminsky made his name by telling contemporary social and political stories in the form of television drama. Warriors was about British soldiers in the peace-keeping force in Bosnia; The Government Inspector dramatised the events surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly; The State explored the radicalisation of British Islamists. Kosminsky is also acclaimed for his television adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. He has won si...
Sep 19, 2024•43 min
Marlon James made his name in 2014 with A Brief History Of Seven Killings, a novel which interweaves various narratives over several decades, starting with the attempted assassination of reggae superstar Bob Marley in 1976. Having won the Booker and the American Book Award, and becoming an international bestselling author, he moved into the fantasy genre with his next two novels Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King. A professor of English, Marlon James teaches creative writing at ...
Sep 12, 2024•43 min
The New Zealand born opera singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is one of the world's greatest sopranos. She enjoyed a 50 year career singing lead roles in opera houses around the globe, and on dozens of studio recordings. Since retiring in 2017 she has focussed on leading her Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation which supports young opera singers from her home country. Dame Kiri talks to John Wilson about her early life in Gisborne and Auckland, New Zealand. Of Māori heritage, she was adopted as a baby and cites bo...
Sep 05, 2024•43 min
Lee Child created his tough guy protagonist Jack Reacher, a former military policeman who roams America fighting crime, in 1997. Writing a book a year since his debut Killing Floor, Lee Child established himself as one of the most acclaimed and popular novelists in his genre, and has now sold over 100 million copies worldwide. The Reacher books have been adapted for a film starring Tom Cruise and, more recently, an Amazon Prime television series. Lee Child’s latest publication, Safe Enough, is a...
Aug 29, 2024•44 min
The grandfather of British Pop Art, Sir Peter Blake is one of most influential and popular artists of his generation. A Royal Academician with work in the national collection, including Tate and the National Portrait Gallery, he is renowned for paintings and collages that borrow imagery from advertising, cinema and music. Having created The Beatles’ Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band sleeve in 1967 he became the go-to album designer for other musical artists including The Who, Paul Weller, Madn...
Jul 04, 2024•43 min
Director and actor Simon McBurney, one of the founders of the ground breaking theatre company Complicité, reveals his creative inspirations and influences. For over four decades McBurney has created innovative and experimental works, from immersive staging to the reinvention of classic texts. His works include A Disappearing Number, The Encounter and Mnemonic, a landmark production which has been recently revived at The National Theatre. Simon McBurney tells John Wilson about his childhood in Ca...
Jun 27, 2024•43 min
One of the world’s greatest novelists, Salman Rushdie has won many prestigious international literary awards and was knighted for services to literature in 2007. He won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children, a novel that was also twice voted as the best of all-time Booker winners. In 1989 Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared that Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was blasphemous and pronounced a death sentence against its author. For over a decade he lived in hiding wi...
Jun 20, 2024•43 min
John Wilson's guest is the pioneering American artist, author and educator Judy Chicago. Having run the first ever feminist art course in California, she established herself as a powerful advocate of women artists in the early 1970s. She is best known for a ground-breaking installation piece called The Dinner Party, a monumental work which was made with the help of a team of ceramists and needle-workers over five years and first displayed in 1979. Now enjoying her sixth decade as an artist, Judy...
Jun 13, 2024•43 min
