Woman's Hour - 18/03/2010

With Jenni Murray. There was a resounding British success at the Oscars this year: costume designer Sandy Powell won her third statuette for her work on The Young Victoria. It's just one of the 40 films to which she's brought her considerable talent. Sandy explains what it's like to dress some of the biggest names in Hollywood and to be given a million dollars to spend on clothes. Art played a remarkable role in the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The couple frequently exchanged paintings, jewellery and sculpture to show their love for each other. Now a new exhibition at Buckingham Palace reveals that despite the monarch's enduring image as a dour widow of 40, she had been a lively, romantic and open-minded young woman. Jenni is joined by Jonathan Marsden, Deputy Surveyor of The Queen's Works of Art, who curated the exhibition, and Lynda Nead, Professor of The History of Art at Birkbeck University, to talk about some of the treasures in the collection. What does this exchange of art tell us about Victoria and Albert's relationship? And how do some of the more erotic pieces change the standard view of Victorian society? When Charlotte Madison was at her girls' boarding school, she and her friends joined the local Combined Cadet Force as a way to meet boys. The other girls eventually lost interest in the army, but Charlotte continued and after university she started on a series of training courses which saw her become the first woman to qualify as an Apache helicopter pilot. She's now completed three tours of duty in Afghanistan and she joins Jenni to talk about taking her helicopter into active combat. Despite the so-called 'Jade Goody Effect', which has seen a rise in the number of women attending cervical screening appointments, 20 per cent of women who are entitled to a test still don't go and get one. The makers of a new DIY cervical smear kit are hoping their product will encourage these women to do a test, now that they can use it in the privacy of their own homes. So how reliable are such tests, and why do some in the medical profession feel they could create unnecessary anxiety in young women? Jenni is joined by Dr Anne Szarewski, clinical consultant at Cancer Research UK's Centre for Epidemiology, and Dr Thom Van Every, a medical doctor and a member of the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.