27/06/2009

Synopsis

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by novelist Kamila Shamsie, broadcaster and film historian Matthew Sweet, and foreign correspondent Bridget Kendall to discuss the cultural highlights of the week, featuring Lynn Barber's long awaited memoir, a documentary about David Hockney and a new film from the makers of Little Miss Sunshine - Sunshine Cleaning.

Sunshine Cleaning is a similar quirky look at a dysfunctional American family starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin. A single mother enlists the help of her sister in her new business cleaning up crime scenes, a job neither of them knows anything about. Granddad is left looking after the boy, mayhem ensues and finally their triumph over adversity.

Lynn Barber is the winner of five Press Awards. She started her journalistic career writing for Penthouse and now writes for the Observer where her incisive and penetrating interviews have won her the nickname of 'Demon Barber'. Her long awaited memoir, An Education, scrutinizes her own past for the first time, including a formative relationship with a much older man when she was only 15.

The artist David Hockney is followed over three years as he leaves California, his home for the last 25 years, to return to his native Yorkshire to paint a very English countryside. Hockney, who is about to be 70, reflects on the nature of his art and examines his uneasy love affair with photography.

Walking In My Mind at the Hayward Gallery's 2009 Summer Exhibition continues the tradition of inviting high profile and up and coming artists from around the world to transform the Gallery's unique outdoor and indoor exhibition spaces. This year, ten artists have been selected to show works that explore how the inner workings of the mind - emotions, thoughts, memories and dreams - can be represented in three-dimensional spaces.

While in Everything Must Go at the Soho Theatre in London, ten writers come up with their take on the credit crunch. Making a virtue of the 'living on a shoestring' aesthetic, they explore the fear, denial, rage - and the opportunities - the most severe economic downturn since the 1930s may offer us.

Broadcast

1. Sat 27 Jun 2009
   19:15
   BBC Radio 4