The Essay

Journalist and author Susan McKay returns to Londonderry to explore what 'City of Culture' status has meant to the place of her birth. Known as both Derry and Londonderry, the walled city became the inaugural UK City of Culture in 2013, and Susan examines what rebranding and reimagining has meant to a place that endured some of the worst episodes of the 'troubles' throughout her school days. As its search for identity continues, what has the city gained from its year in the limelight, and has anyone beyond its ancient walls noticed?

What happens when cinema shuts up? Matthew Sweet explores those moments when the talkie stops talking and cuts the music dead: the final minutes of William Wyler's Roman Holiday; the heist in Rififi; Oliver Hardy's long despairing look into the camera lens. He also listens hard to those cinematic sounds being silenced by digital technology from the fizz of a reel-change to the wear and tear on a film's soundtrack and asks what we have lost now that cinema is no longer a physical, photochemical medium.

The writer and film critic David Thomson explores how film composers create mood and how the best music evokes a place beyond reality.

The American academic and social critic Camille Paglia on the film scores which have inspired her since childhood including the work of Bernard Herrmann, John Dankworth and Max Steiner.

The novelist Jonathan Coe explores how a joint concert with Arthur Honegger led to the composer Miklós Rózsa writing for film, including the scores for 'Ben-Hur', 'Spellbound' and 'The Lost Weekend'.

The live music and sound effects, the unruly audiences, the performers paid to interpret mysterious foreign intertitles, the usherettes spraying the audience with disinfectant. Matthew Sweet explores the sound-world of cinema's beginnings, from the orchestras of big-budget epics to the small improvising bands of the fleapits - and discovers how their ghosts haunt the modern cinemagoing experience.First broadcast September 2013.

Continuing the Sound of Cinema season, writer A L Kennedy contemplates the inconveniences of love in the 1945 Powell and Pressburger romance 'I Know Where I'm Going!', set on a remote Scottish island.Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, together known as The Archers, were one of the most influential and audacious film-makers of the 1930s and 40s. Their groundbreaking works include: 'The Red Shoes', 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp', 'A Matter of Life and Death' and 'Black Narcissus'.A L Kennedy is an award-winning writer and stand-up comedian.Producer: Justine Willett.

Continuing the Sound of Cinema season, Ian Christie on the 1943 Powell and Pressburger film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a film that has been called Britain's answer to Citizen Kane.Ian Christie knew Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger well, and was instrumental in bringing their films to a new audience in the 1980s. Here he looks at their unusual relationship through one of their greatest films.Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, together known as The Archers, were one of the most influential and audacious film-makers of the 1930s and 40s. Their groundbreaking works include: 'The Red Shoes', 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp', 'A Matter of Life and Death' and 'Black Narcissus'.Ian Christie is an acclaimed film scholar, who has written several works on the films of Powell and Pressburger.Producer: Justine Willett.

As part of BBC Radio 3's Sound of Cinema, a week of essays written and presented by historian and columnist Simon Heffer on classic British taboo-breaking films which depicted a society changed profoundly by war.In Heffer on British Film, he puts the case for five films from the decade after the war which show British cinema dealing with gritty social issues and dramatic high standards before the 60s were underway - including It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), The Browning Version (1951), Mandy (1953), The Long Memory (1952), and Yield to the Night (1956), the subject of his final essay in the series.Yield to the Night was widely regarded as the pinnacle of Diana Dors' career - the film on which her reputation as a serious actress rests. She plays a murderess Mary Hilton sentenced to hang, spending her last days in the condemned cell in a British women's prison. It was released a year after Ruth Ellis was executed and bore an uncanny resemblance to her case but it was actually based on a novel of 1954 - a year before Ellis murdered Blakely.Mary is a married woman who drifts into an affair with a good-looking piano player Jim Lancaster (Michael Craig) The problem is the affair is one-sided. Jim is smitten with another - Lucy Carpenter - who is way out of his league. But Mary is so hopelessly in love, she starts to believe Lucy deserves to die. And she has Jim's gun. But she shoots not her boyfriend, but her boyfriend's lover.The story of events leading to murder is told in flashback and there is little doubt that the screenplay draws liberally on the Ellis case - the murderess withdrawing her revolver from her handbag in the street, and emptying its chambers into her victim with shocking calmness. A glamorous, bottle-blonde young woman, Mary, like Ellis, had difficulties with men all her life and makes no attempt to escape justice.The film focuses almost entirely on her experience of prison - the British equivalent of Death Row - awaiting execution, and on her relationship with the various female prison warders, and in particular with MacFarlane (Yvonne Mitchell). Mary is a likeable young woman and the warders grow fond of her. Decidedly anti-capital punishment and downbeat in mood, the film won critical acclaim, particularly for the skilled acting of Dors, who had previously been cast solely as the stereotypical "blonde bombshell".Producer: Mohini Patel.

As part of BBC Radio 3's Sound of Cinema, a week of essays written and presented by historian and columnist Simon Heffer on classic British taboo-breaking films which depicted a society changed profoundly by war. The cinema of the 30s was nakedly and unashamedly escapist in a way that the cinema of the late 40s and early 50s - in an age of lost innocence and social upheaval - simply couldn't be. This was a period when British cinema was forced to embrace change and reflect reality.Taboos it had left untouched could no longer be ignored if film was to remain relevant. Families had broken up because of bereavement and adultery. Subjects considered unsuitable for a cinema audience - marital breakdown , criminality, revenge, failings in the justice system, and disability - suddenly became popular with British screenwriters and studios. Social realism was the order of the day.In Heffer on British Film, Simon Heffer puts the case for five films from the decade after the war which show British cinema dealing with gritty social issues and dramatic high standards before the 60s were underway - including It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), The Long Memory (1952), The Browning Version (1951), Yield to the Night (1956) and the focus of today's essay - Mandy (1953).Ealing Studios' Mandy, directed by Alexander Mackendrick was based on the book 'The Day Is Ours' by Hilda Lewis, with screenplay by Nigel Balchin and Jack Whittingham. It's the story of a girl, Mandy Garland, who is diagnosed with a congenital hearing defect and starred Phyllis Calvert, Jack Hawkins and Terence Morgan.As her parents Harry and Christine Garland come to terms with the fact that they have a deaf-mute daughter, they enrol her in special education classes to try to get her to speak. As she struggles to express herself and learn how to lip-read, her parents argue over the best way to deal with her condition and their marriage comes under severe strain. This is compounded by hints of an affair between Christine and Searle (Jack Hawkins) , the headmaster of the school for the deaf where Mandy is enrolled. Although it may be too late for the little girl to make great strides, the specialist training eventually pays off to the point where Mandy says her own name for the first time.While the drama revolves around the parents' sharply conflicting views of what to do for their child, the unpretentious, documentary style adopted by MacKendrick reveals the world through the eyes of the little girl as she responds to the strange way adults around her conduct themselves and the sensitive guidance of her school. And, thanks to the wonderful performance he draws from Mandy Miller, the slow but sure development of this youngster is at the heart of the film.Producer: Mohini Patel.