The Culture Café - 28/09/2010

Orlando - Award-winning composer Craig Armstrong, famous for his scores for Baz Luhrmann, Oliver Stone and Philip Noyce discusses the music he helped create for a sensuous epic of self-discovery based on Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando. Taking place over hundreds of years, Orlando opens with the hero as a young man in Elizabethan England, we then follow his transformations of fortune, love and even gender! Lost haul of rare British TV Progranmmes - we'll hear about how a chance find by a US television researcher at the Library of Congress in Washington DC has resulted in the discovery of an extraordinary collection of, previously lost, British television programmes, not seen by the public since their original transmission in the 1960's. Tinker Tailor Project -a location report on new project which lets people bring in broken household items (electrical goods, clothing, leatherwork, toys, bikes etc) and repair them with the help of master craftsmen. A clever creative twist on the make-do-and-mend resurgence started by the recession and environmental issues. All that and actor Simon Ward discuss his role in Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III, on its first national tour since it was written nearly 20 years ago, it embodies pathos bewilderment - and anger - at the way psychiatric disorders were observed in the 18th century. But more than that, it takes a swipe at those in government who don't really give a fig about anyone but themselves.