Three-part series exploring the Baroque tradition in many of its key locations. Starting in Italy and following the spread of the wildfire across Europe and beyond, art critic Waldemar Januszczak takes a tour of the best examples of Baroque to be found, and tells the best stories behind those works.

Waldemar Januszczak takes us on a tour of the best examples of Baroque to be found, and tells the best stories behind those works. He follows Baroque to its dark heart in Spain, focusing on the route of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and featuring star painters Velasquez, Caravaggio and Zurburan.

Episode Three brings the Baroque home with an exploration of the English Baroque tradition that finds its climax through a tour of London's Hawksmoor churches, and Christopher Wren's iconic St Paul's Cathedral.

BB King opens his heart and tells the story of how an oppressed and orphaned young man came to influence and earn the unmitigated praise of the music industry and its following to carry the title of king of the blues.

Series of concerts featuring musicians from around the world at LSO St Luke\'s in London\'s East End. The late James Brown, aka the Godfather of Soul, is joined by a 19-piece band including two drummers, three backing vocalists, two dancers in hot pants and a brass section.

Tony Palmer\'s film, thought lost for almost 40 years, about Leonard Cohen\'s 1972 European tour, has now been pieced together from almost 3,000 fragments and restored to its former glory. A unique record of a major poet and singer/songwriter at the height of his powers.

Blues is usually described as the sound of racial suffering and feeling sad, but this documentary argues that the blues began as a form of black pop music. First appearing in the Southern states of the USA around 1900, blues created by the poorest people in the richest nation on earth took America by storm.

How blues conquered the world and the music moved from black to white audiences.

Collection of performances by British and American blues artists on BBC programmes such as The Beat Room, A Whole Scene Going, The Old Grey Whistle Test and The Late Show.

Documentary telling the story of what happened to blues music on its journey from the southern states of America to the heart of British pop and rock culture, providing an in-depth look at what this music really meant to a generation of kids desperate for an antidote to their experiences of living in post-war suburban Britain.

In a major re-calibration of 20th-century British paintings, art historian James Fox argues that British painting from 1910 to 1975 was an extraordinary flowering of genius. He predicts that art historians of the future will rank the period alongside the Golden Ages of Renaissance Italy and Impressionist France.

How a group of radical painters pioneered a style to make sense of the modern experience.

James Fox examines British art in the interwar years.

Artists turned to the figurative painting tradition to address what it means to be human.

Thom Zimny\'s film, The Promise - The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, explores the three years it took to make Bruce Springsteen\'s fourth studio album, 1978\'s Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Documentary following the making of the British Museum's biggest exhibition in a generation and telling the story of its subject, the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi.

Civilisations is an epic new series spanning 31 countries on six continents, and covering more than 500 works of art.

The first film by Simon Schama looks at the formative role art and the creative imagination have played in the forging of humanity itself.

In this episode of Civilisations, Professor Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art, from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China.

Simon Schama explores one of our deepest artistic urges - the depiction of nature. Simon discovers that landscape painting is seldom a straightforward description of observed nature.

Professor Mary Beard broaches the controversial, sometimes dangerous, topic of religion and art. For millennia, art has inspired religion as much as religion has inspired art.

Think Renaissance and you think of Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering.

In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear.

Simon Schama starts his meditation on colour and civilisation with the great Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Chartres.

If David Olusoga's first film in Civilisations is about the art that followed and reflected early encounters between different cultures, his second explores the artistic reaction to imperialism in the 19th century.

Simon Schama begins Civilisations with this premise: that it is in art - the play of the creative imagination - that humanity expresses its most essential self: the power to break the tyranny of the humdrum, the grind of everyday.

From Roman marbles and Egyptian mummies to Renaissance masterpieces and African sculptures, in this special accompanying programme to Civilisations, Mary Beard goes in search of extraordinary works of art from all over the world that can be seen here in Britain.

The film charts David Hockney's return to the theme of the double portrait, using interviews with his family and closest friends to explore the personal and private nature of his art. It creates an intimate psychological portrait of the artist as he paints the relationships in his own life.

In a programme first published in 2025, ahead of the opening of his biggest-ever show, David Hockney talks to Katie Razzall about why painting still makes him happy at 87.

David Hockney, widely considered to be Britain's best-loved living artist, has taken over the Royal Academy in London with his exhibition A Bigger Picture made up of recent works depicting the landscape of his native Yorkshire.