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September 24, 1961

Season 5

01. Gian-Carlo Menotti

Gian-Carlo Menotti

Composer of 'Amahl and the Night Visitors' and 'The Consul', filmed at his

Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto in Italy.

'I never really finish a libretto and then set it to music, I let it burst into flame as I go along'.

Max Ernst

The first Surrealist painter, interviewed by Roland Penrose.

'The most magnificently haunted mind of today' (Andre Breton)

'If painting is the mirror of time it must be mad to have the true image of what the time is' (Max Ernst)

September 24, 1961

02. The Private World of George Williams

The Private World of George Williams

Michael Ayrton with Paintings, Sculpture, and Words on The Myth of Icarus

...Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, whose wings melted, and who fell to his death...

October 8, 1961

03. Ninette de Valois

Ninette de Valois D.B.E., creator of The Royal Ballet with film taken during rehearsals for next week's BBC Television production of her ballet The Rake's Progress.

October 22, 1961

04. Style in the Theatre and Portrait of an Experience

Style in the Theatre and Portrait of an Experience

Michel Saint-Denis now directing rehearsals of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard with the Royal Shakespeare Company talking with Peter Newington.

Poems, prose, and photographs from Flanders and The Somme

November 5, 1961

05. In Cork

Frank O'Connor, novelist, essayist, and short-story writer, revisits the provincial city where he lived for twenty-eight years and which provides the setting for many of his stories.

'I think all great literature begins in the provinces. If I hadn't left Cork, I'm quite certain I wouldn't have been the writer I am; but I think that if I hadn't been brought up in a city like this, I wouldn't have been a writer at all...'

November 19, 1961

06. Big Soft Nellie

With Henry Livings the author and scenes from the production of his new play now running at the Theatre Royal, Stratford.

November 26, 1961

07. Paul Tortelier

Paul Tortelier

Portrait of a complete musician. Filmed in Paris at the Salle du Vieux Conservatoire, the Ecole Normale de Musique, and his studio.

In rue Leon Cogniet with John Amis and L'Orchestre des Gardiens de la Paix de Paris, La Chorale des Jeunesses Musicales de France, The Tortelier Cello Orchestra.

December 17, 1961

08. The Lonely Shore

The Lonely Shore

A fantasy.

No one is left alive in England. All that remain are the fragments of our civilisation.

January 14, 1962

09. Episode 9

H.M.S. Pinafore Revisited

Sir Tyrone Guthrie gives his views on Gilbert and Sullivan.

January 28, 1962

10. Do My Ears Deceive Me?

An enquiry into the music of our day from Jazz to Schoenberg.

Musicians taking part include:

Colin Davis with the London Symphony Orchestra (Leader, Hugh Maguire), Aaron Copland, Michael Tippett, Deryck Cooke, Hans Keller.

February 11, 1962

11. Episode 11

Friso Ten Holt

The Dutch painter whose first British exhibition opened at the New London Gallery last week talking with John Berger.

'Suddenly the painting begins to talk, to ask its own questions. And you have to respond to that question, otherwise you are never a painter'.

February 25, 1962

12. Episode 12

A fortnightly magazine of the arts.

Introduced and edited by Huw Wheldon.

March 11, 1962

13. Pop Goes the Easel

A fortnightly magazine of the arts.

A group of four young artists, who between them have won critical acclaim, exhibition prizes, and Arts Council awards, are among those who have turned for subject-matter to the world of pop singers, pin-ups, space-men, wrestling, and the Twist. Monitor cameras spent an ordinary Saturday with them, from dawn to midnight.

The artists and their pictures:

Peter Blake, Siriol, she-devil of naked madness

Derek Boshier, I wonder what my Heroes think of the Space-race

Pauline Boty, Goodbye, cruel world

Peter Phillips, For Men Only starring MM and BB

Introduced and edited by Huw Wheldon.

March 25, 1962

14. What Makes a Tenor?

What Makes a Tenor?

Last week the National Federation of Music Societies held a Tenor Competition in London to find promising young singers. Bernard Keeffe of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden discusses the qualities of a great tenor and the reasons why this country has produced so few of them.

April 8, 1962

15. Episode 15

Commercial Art

A sidelong glance at the world of advertising.

Peter Ustinov in the studio.

May 6, 1962

16. Vincent Van Gogh

The Preservation Man, with Professor Bruce Lacey, A.R.C.A. actor, theatrical property-maker, and collector of the past, from stuffed camels to Victorian families, from Victrola voices to rejected vacuum cleaners.

In the studio: Michael Tippett on Music in the Theatre. His new opera "King Priam" has its world premiere at the Coventry Festival on May 29

Vincent Van Gogh

Featuring a short film narrated by Cecil Day-Lewis. Using the text of Vincent Van Gogh's own letters, the programme explores the artist's life.

May 20, 1962

17. Julian Bream

Julian Bream

A film profile with George Malcolm and the Julian Bream Consort.

The Death of Patroclus

Christopher Logue talks about his new adaptation of Book XVI of Homer's Iliad and reads scenes from it with Patrick Allen and Gary Watson.

June 3, 1962

18. Dial for Plato

In America, as in this country, education is suffering from a shortage of text-books, classroom space, and, above all, of teachers.

Sol Cornberg talks to Huw Wheldon about his current projects to tackle this problem in America by applying radio and television techniques to education.

My mission is to create the tool which will permit the educator to multiply himself

I am concerned with efficient means for the passing of information. Books are extremely inefficient

Plato's thoughts have not been used up: he can be made available on a channel

A Monitor production

June 12, 1962

19. Marcel Duchamp

A fortnightly magazine of the arts.

Introduced by Huw Wheldon.

Marcel Duchamp

The legendary French artist whose paintings and theories have radically affected modern art - he might be said to have murdered art with irony and then sat down by the corpse to play chess.

Interviewed by Richard Hamilton, and discussed also by Reyner Banham and Eduardo Paolozzi.

June 17, 1962

20. Stratford-on-the-Subway

A Monitor film made in New York's Central Park, where every summer there is a season of free open-air Shakespeare performances with Joe Papp, the director and members of the New York Shakespeare Company in rehearsal.

July 1, 1962