24/12/2011

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests historian Kathryn Hughes, writer Kevin Jackson and Canon Giles Fraser review the week's cultural highlights including The Artist. The Artist is a silent movie which begins in Hollywood in 1927, as silent movie star George Valentin wonders if the arrival of talking pictures will cause him to fade into oblivion. For young film extra Peppy Miller it seem movie stardom awaits. We wade into the self help genre with our books. The Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steve Peters presents a mind management model that purports to help you become a happy, confident, healthier and more successful person. 18 Minutes, Find your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done is by management and leadership guru Peter Bregman. Will they change the lives of our reviewers? The great Dickens anniversary is almost upon us, and we look at some of the offerings coming up. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens' story of a humble orphan, who suddenly becomes a gentleman with the help of an unknown benefactor, has been adapted into a major three part drama for BBC television by Sarah Phelps, starring Gillian Anderson as Miss Haversham and Ray Winstone as the convict Abel Magwitch. And in Armando's Tale of Charles Dickens, Armando Iannucci's television feature looks beyond the stature of Dickens as a national institution and instead explores the qualities of his works, which make him one of the best British writers. Your Paintings - Uncovering the Nation's art is the first national online museum of all publicly owned oil paintings in the UK. It was launched in June of this year by the public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC. Now a further 40,000 paintings have been uploaded to the site, over half the national collection. And we round up the year by looking back at the best, when our reviewers and listeners pick their own cultural highlights of 2011 Producer: Anne-marie Cole.