The Culture Show - 2009/2010 - Episode 14

Lawrence Pollard presents a packed Culture Show from Nottingham, which includes items on art, architecture, poetry, crime fiction, films and the media. The Nottingham Contemporary, opening in November, is one of the biggest art centres in the UK. Tom Dyckhoff explores the new building designed by award-winning architects Caruso St John, and tells the story of how, since Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim opened in New York 50 years ago, art galleries have become icons in their own right. There's a review of the opening exhibition at the new Nottingham gallery - 60 works by David Hockney from 1960-1968, his early years in London and Los Angeles. It's the first time the early works, finishing with the iconic Californian painting A Bigger Splash, have been brought together since the Whitechapel retrospective of 1970. To mark the 80th anniversary of Faber & Faber, a group of young Faber poets perform in places associated with great poets. The tour takes in Philip Larkin's Hull and Heptonstall in West Yorkshire, where Sylvia Plath is buried. In a rare TV interview, crime-fiction writer James Ellroy talks to Miranda Sawyer about his fascination with crime and with 1950s Los Angeles - a world where celebrity, crime and politics converge. He also talks about the paintings of Ed Ruscha, which capture the menace and promise of LA, currently the subject of a major show at the Hayward Gallery in London. Harold Evans, one of the legendary figures of British newspapers, talks to Matthew d'Ancona about his time in Fleet Street and his hopes and fears for the future of the press in Britain. And writer Alain de Botton has turned his latest book about Heathrow's Terminal 5, A Week at the Airport, into a short film for the Culture Show.