2020 has been disastrous for the arts in Britain and many people have lost their jobs as Covid-19 has swept through the country. Sir Nicholas Hytner has been working in the theatre for nearly four decades and he tells Andrew Marr about the unprecedented challenges that now face his industry. Hytner made his name and fortune in the 1990s with the musical Miss Saigon. Further successes came with theatre and film productions of The Madness of King George and The History Boys, and the sell-out One Man, Two Guvnors.He ran the National Theatre for twelve years before setting up his own commercial venture – with his business partner Nick Starr – the Bridge Theatre. During the year of the pandemic Hytner has sought to keep the theatre afloat with performances of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, and a specially adapted, socially distanced, but joyful, version of A Christmas Carol.Producer: Katy Hickman Photographer: Helen Maybanks

As the 850th anniversary of the murder of Thomas Becket approaches Andrew Marr explores the dynamic between church and state and what happens when the most powerful political friendships turn sour. The academic Laura Ashe explains the background to the murder in the cathedral on 29th December 1170. King Henry II had promoted the lowly born Thomas Becket to the highest positions in the land – first Lord Chancellor, then Archbishop of Canterbury. But their growing animosity and conflict over the rights and privileges of the church led to his infamous assassination by four of the King’s knights. In recent years the former librarian Christopher de Hamel has succeeded in identifying the Anglo-Saxon Psalter which Becket cherished in his lifetime and may even have been holding when he died. In The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket, de Hamel looks at what this book reveals about the life of Becket. He also compares the veneration for relics of the saints in the Middle Ages, with our relationship today with historical artefacts.In Britain the Anglican Church still has an establishment role within the state, with Bishops in the House of Lords and the monarch regarded as ‘defender of the faith’. But across the Channel in France a formal separation of church and state, laïcité, was enshrined in French law in 1905. The cultural historian Andrew Hussey, who is based in Paris, looks at the devastating fault lines that have emerged in 2020 in the country’s secularist ideals. Producer: Katy Hickman

Look into the night sky in the coming days and Jupiter and Saturn will appear closer than they’ve been since the early 17th century, according to the astronomer Stuart Clark. He tells Tom Sutcliffe it’s a beautiful great conjunction that happens once every 20 years, but this year is especially rare. In his book, Beneath the Night, Clark explores how the stars have shaped the history of humankind, inspiring awe and fascination throughout the centuries. It was the extremity and majesty of whales that inspired the writer Rebecca Giggs. In her latest book, Fathoms: the world in the whale, she fuses natural history, philosophy and science to look at our relationship with this most magnificent of mammals. She asks how far the lives of whales might shed light on the condition of our seas, and the impact of climate change.Artists have long taken inspiration for their work from the heavens and the natural world around them. In Shaping the World: Sculpture from Pre-History to Now, the world-renowned sculptor Antony Gormley explores this art form, alongside the art critic Martin Gayford. Gormley argues that the desire to make objects can be found in every culture throughout the world, and is a fundamental part of our human journey and need for expression.Producer: Katy Hickman

Why do we laugh? This is the question the evolutionary ecologist Jonathan Silvertown sets out to answer in his latest book, The Comedy of Error. He looks back at laughter’s evolutionary origins, and to the similarities and differences in humour across cultures.The sell-out comic Sindhu Vee swapped a career in investment banking for one in comedy. She is an expert at exploiting cultural differences in her jokes, having been born in India, lived and studied in the Philippines and the US, before settling in the UK. John Mullan holds up Charles Dickens as a master novelist who could switch with ease from tragedy to comedy in a sentence. In The Artful Dickens he explores the tricks and ploys the writer used and how his humour has stood the test of time.Producer: Katy Hickman Photograph by Matt Crockett

Amol Rajan explores different ways of thinking, and how far humans can be seen as unique for their ability to invent. In The Pattern Seekers, Simon Baron-Cohen shows how humans have evolved remarkable ingenuity in every area of their lives – from the arts to the sciences – by using complex systemizing mechanisms. He says this ability to formulate if-and-then processes has driven progress for more than 70,000 years. He goes on to argue that the areas of the brain important for systemizing overlap with those for autism. As the Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, Baron-Cohen wants to challenge people to think differently about an often misunderstood condition. The archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Skyes is also seeking to challenge people’s perceptions. In Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, she builds a picture of an ancient ancestor who was far from being a brutish thug. She depicts the Neanderthals as curious and clever connoisseurs of their world: technologically inventive and artistically inclined. Humans may have been the survivors but Wragg Sykes argues that we are not necessarily uniquely special - we share many traits and DNA with our Neanderthal relatives. Susan Carvahlo started her career as an archaeologist with a fascination for human evolution, but her interest in uncovering knowledge of our ancestors led her to become one of the main founders of the field of Primate Archaeology. For decades she has been studying stone-tool use by wild chimpanzees in West Africa. Alongside another project in the Rift Valley, she’s looking to use the knowledge gained from non-human primates to expand understanding of human origins and behaviour.Producer: Katy Hickman

‘A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible’. So wrote the superstar philosopher Jacques Derrida. But what does it mean to question and deconstruct everything we think we know? In a new biography of Derrida titled An Event, Perhaps, Peter Salmon explores the life and works of one of the most enigmatic of thinkers. He questions how far Derrida’s ideas have led to today’s ‘post-truth’ age? Virginia Woolf's essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ posed the question: ‘‘Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?’ The English professor Alexandra Harris looks at whether Woolf’s answer stands the test of time.Bernhard Schlink’s literary career took off in 1995 with the publication of his novel The Reader, which became an international bestseller. His latest work, Olga (translated into English by Charlotte Collins), is a story of love set in Germany against the backdrop of the traumas of the 20th century.Producer: Katy Hickman

Ireland itself is a main character in Kevin Barry's new short story collection, That Old Country Music. He brings the western regions to life in stories set firmly in Ireland's present day but with an ancient, magical past lingering in the background. A pregnant teenager waits for her robber boyfriend, a factory worker falls for a Polish waitress, and a police officer seeks a known criminal, in stories set amidst wild and flourishing countryside.The concrete walls and tower blocks of Peckham in south London are not often the subject of poetry. For his debut collection, Poor, Caleb Femi pays tribute to the streets that shaped him as a child. He brings to life the schoolboys, rappers, artists, pastors and gentrifying neighbours of Peckham, an area where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without a single step on the ground.Daisy Johnson became the youngest ever Booker Prize nominee with her debut novel, Everything Under, and quickly established herself as a master of creepy locations. Her new novel, Sisters, is a gothic tale set on lonely Yorkshire moors, while her short story series The Hotel, available now on BBC Sounds, looks at the unsettling, waterlogged Norfolk Fens, a place where dead bodies float back up to the surface.Producer: Hannah Sander

Sir Roger Penrose was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics this year for his ground-breaking work on black holes and their relationship with the general theory of relativity. He looks back at his extraordinary career with Andrew Marr – from his early interest in mathematical patterns and the ‘impossible’ works of Escher, to his revolutionary use of mathematics in cosmology and his continued fascination with the beginning and end of time. Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who researches quantum gravity, as well as a best-selling author. In his latest collection of essays, There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness, he demonstrates a curiosity that crosses the boundaries from the sciences to the arts. He reflects on everything from Newton’s alchemy to Einstein’s mistakes, and from Dante’s cosmology to Nabokov's butterflies. The world underwater is the physicist Helen Czerski’s playground. The focus of much of her research has been the physics of breaking waves and bubbles on the ocean surface. As one of this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lecturers, Czerski will reveal the vital role oceans play in the Earth’s heating and plumbing systems, and the impact of human activity on the planet.Producer: Katy Hickman

The Latin scholar Shadi Bartsch has written a new translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid. She tells Kirsty Wark how this timeless epic about the legendary ancestor of a Roman emperor has been constantly invoked and reinterpreted over its two thousand year history. She argues that this poem still has much to say to contemporary readers about gender, politics, religion, morality, nationalism and love.It was while arguing about the merits of the Aeneid’s tragic queen, Dido of Carthage, that the classicist Natalie Haynes decided it was time to rescue the women in ancient myths. Centuries of male interpretations, she argues, has led to the demonization and dismissal of the likes of Medusa, Phaedra and Medea. In Pandora’s Jar: Women in Greek Myths she goes back to the original stories, reinstating the more complex roles given to these women in antiquity.In the 17th-century the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi drew inspiration from the women in ancient myths, allegories and the Bible, as seen in a new exhibition of her work at the National Gallery in London. The curator, Letizia Treves, says that Gentileschi challenged conventions and defied expectations, painting subjects that were traditionally the preserve of male artists, and transforming the meek into warriors.Producer: Katy Hickman(Picture credit: the National Gallery)

The pandemic has exposed serious weaknesses in Western governments, according to John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg and former editor of The Economist. In The Wake-Up Call he argues that the Covid crisis has accelerated a shift in balance of power from the West to East. Micklethwait tells Andrew Marr that unless the West can respond more creatively to what is happening, the prospect of a new Eastern-dominated world order, with China at the centre, will be inevitable.But the historian Rana Mitter argues that China is increasingly presenting itself as the creator and protector of the international order, rather than its threat. In China’s Good War he explores how the country is revisiting its role as an Allied Force in World War II, to assert newfound confidence abroad and to shape a new nationalism at home.And Katya Adler, the BBC's Europe Editor, looks at the problems facing the EU, including the relationship of China and the impact of coronavirus. She assesses how Macron, Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen and other leaders have handled this year's challenges.Producer: Hannah Sander