imagine… Spring 2007

Over the last 40 years, British artists Gilbert and George have fascinated, outraged, delighted and confounded the art establishment. Since their first appearance as 'living sculptures' in the late 1960s, their work has persistently taken a provocative, often uncomfortable look at both their own lives and the life of the city that continues to inspire their art - London. Alan is invited into their East End home, where the couple have lived together for four decades, for an intimate look at what is the most unique, productive and long-standing partnership in contemporary art.

Alan Yentob presents a profile of the provocative French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois, who was still producing cutting edge work at the age of 95. Memories of a disturbed childhood have produced fantastic and disturbing sculptures of giant spiders and poured-plastic body parts. As a girl she restored old tapestries, worked with Leger and knew surrealists like Breton and Duchamp. In New York she emerged as an artist in her own right, bringing dread, desire, sex and the psyche into her work.

Alan Yentob tells the story of Scott Walker, who was one of the all time great voices of pop, and then disappeared. This is the story of one of the enigmas of modern music, who has influenced a huge range of artists from David Bowie to Lulu to Radiohead, told through his ever-changing music. Scott Walker has crooned ballads to swooning orchestral accompaniment, and created percussion by thwacking a side of pork. For decades he was a recluse with a reputation for eccentricity, but the music was evolving all the time. Rare exclusive interview material of Walker at work on his latest album is the climax to a story told by a gallery of musicians and producers touched by his music: Brian Eno, Marc Almond, Johnny Marr, Alison Goldfrapp, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker, and Ute Lemper among them.

Surrealism has been described as one of the most successful revolutions of the 20th century, a revolution in perception that broke down the barriers between the world of dreams and the world of everyday reality. Its influence can be felt everywhere, in design and architecture, fashion and furniture, cinema and advertising. Even so, Surrealism is disdained by most contemporary artists, its ambitions regarded as overblown, its ideas out-moded and its greatest artists, like Magritte and Dali, dismissed as poster-art for teenage bedrooms. In this programme Alan Yentob takes a personal and dream-like journey, from Sigmund Freud's couch, where the story of Surrealism begins, to the current Surreal Things exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Exploring the history of Surrealism and its legacies, he makes the case for the Surrealist conviction that the world is 'an immense museum of strangeness'.