Night Waves - Clint Eastwood

Matthew Sweet discusses Clint Eastwood's new film Gran Torino - about a disgruntled racist war veteran who befriends a Korean youth - and considers the 78-year-old icon's continuing significance in cinema. Eastwood has acted for 53 years, been a director for 37, won two Academy Awards for direction and two more for best picture, and his career is as strong as ever. In Gran Torino he directs himself as an unhappy old man, who can't get along with either his kids or his neighbours, a Korean War veteran whose prize possession is a 1972 Ford Gran Torino he keeps in mint condition. When his neighbour, a young Hmong teenager under pressure from his gang-member cousin, tries to steal his car, Eastwood's character sets out to reform the youth. Drawn against his will into the life of the young Korean, he is soon taking steps to protect him from the gangs that infest their neighborhood. Matthew also talks to writer and theatre producer Michael Kustow about his new book In Search of Jerusalem. It's the chronicle of a seismic year in his life when, shaken by his mother's death and the discovery he has cancer, Kustow finds he must reinvent his beliefs, including his Jewish roots and his attitudes to the Israeli-Arab conflict. To mark the 40th anniversary of one of the most celebrated BBC series ever, Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation, Night Waves looks back at the story of how the series was made, and asks whether the corporation's arts broadcasting has gone downhill from there. Plus a look at Treasures of the Black Death - an exhibition at the Wallace Collection displaying hoards of Medieval gold and silver jewellery hidden by Jewish families in France at the time of the Black Death, when Jews were blamed for spreading the disease.