Night Waves - Elizabeth Gaskell, Collapse, Dominic Sandbrook, Mona Saudi

Anne McElvoy marks the 200th birthday of Elizabeth Gaskell, whose novels include Wives and Daughters and Cranford. The recent television adaptation of Cranford brought Gaskell to a large new audience but, in her other novels, she revealed herself to be an important social critic of Victorian society. Biographer Kathryn Hughes and historian Jenny Uglow discuss. David Aaronovitch reviews a provocative new documentary which claims the collapse of modern industrial civilisation is imminent. Collapse is released in cinemas on Friday. The historian Dominic Sandbrook looks back at the 1970s, arguing in a new book that the period between 1970 and 74 was more important to Britain than the 60s. He discusses the profound social and economic transformation of a country that faced daily headlines about terrorist attacks and power cuts yet possessed material comforts that went way beyond those available to the previous generation. State of Emergency: The Way we Were 1970-1974 is published in hardback. Director Nicholas Roeg and film critic Adrian Wootton remember Tony Curtis, one of the last of the golden era of Hollywood stars, whose films include Some Like it Hot, Spartacus and The Defiant Ones. Producer: Timothy Prosser.