Midweek - 28/07/2010

This week Libby Purves is joined by Dan Edelstyn, Linda Marlowe, Kurt Jackson and Gregg Wallace. Dan Edelstyn is a filmmaker whose discovery of his grandmother's diaries leads him to uncover his family's long-lost vodka factory in the Ukraine. He attempts to revive the brand, 'Zorokovich 1917' and bring prosperity back to his great-grandparents' village by entering the cut-throat world of international business. The 24-part series of short films How to Re-Estabish a Vodka Empire can be seen on website Babelgum and next year on More4. Linda Marlowe is an actress and performer best known for her collaboration with Steven Berkoff and for shows including 'Oh! Calcutta!', 'Berkoff's Women' and 'The World's Wife'. Her latest show is 'My Hamlet' which she is performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It consists of Linda, Shakespeare's greatest text and six brilliant puppeteers from Fingers Theatre, Georgia. She plays Sarah, a cleaner who finds herself playing the actor's definitive role, as a company of puppets come to life around her. Kurt Jackson is a landscape painter and environmentalist. He has been the resident artist for the Glastonbury Festival for the past twenty years and was the Greenpeace artist on the Rainbow Warrior. He has a new exhibition, 'The Dart' in the autumn at the Lemon Street Gallery, Truro which will show paintings and sculptures created on a journey along the river Dart in Devon, inspired by the stories his father told him about his childhood there during the war. A book Kurt Jackson - A New Genre of Landscape Painting is published by Lund Humphries. Gregg Wallace has been in the food business all of his working life, starting off in Convent Garden selling fruit and veg. He is probably best known as co-presenter of BBC One's highly successful 'Master Chef' and 'Celebrity Masterchef'. As a self confessed pudding addict he has compiled a book of desserts called 'Gregg's favourite puddings' which is published by Octopus Books.