This Cultural Life

Actor, writer and comedian James Corden reveals the most important people, events and cultural works that inspired his own creativity. He’s now probably best known as an Emmy-winning television chat show host, although he recently announced that he would step down from The Late Late Show in 2023. James Corden is the co-creator of the much-loved BBC sitcom Gavin and Stacey, for which he won a BAFTA. His stage work includes Alan Bennett’s National Theatre play The History Boys, and the starring role in One Man Two Guvnors, which won him a Tony Award after it transferred to Broadway. His film roles include Oceans 8, Peter Rabbit, Into The Woods and The Prom. James Corden reveals how he wanted to entertain audiences from a very young age, and his theatrical ambitions were encouraged by his father who would take him to see musicals. He chooses the experience of seeing Gary Wilmot starring in the stage show Me and My Girl as one of his most important inspirations. He also reflects on the experience of working for writer-director Shane Meadows on the film 24/7, which starred Bob Hoskins, and the huge influence on his own work of filmmaker Mike Leigh. James also chooses the television comedy drama series The Royle Family as one of the inspirations for his series Gavin and Stacey, which he co-wrote with Ruth Jones. Reflecting on his recent decision to leave The Late Late Show, he reveals that he was persuaded to move on and pursue new creative challenges by a David Bowie quote. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Author, poet and playwright Michael Morpurgo reveals the most important people, events and cultural works that inspired his own creativity. Michael is the former Children’s Laureate and author of some of the best loved stories for young people including Why The Whales Came, Private Peaceful and War Horse, which was adapted for the National Theatre stage and was filmed for cinema by Steven Spielberg. Sir Michael Morpurgo, who was knighted in 2018, tells John Wilson how his mother, an actress who read nightly bedtime stories to her children, was a formative influence on his later work as a children’s author. He remembers how 1950s teaching methods, in which poems were learnt by rote and literacy was tested rigorously, discouraged him from reading for pleasure. It was whilst at boarding school in Sussex that one teacher recognised his potential, encouraged him to read a collection of Wordsworth poems, and helped reinvigorate young Michael’s passion for words. He recalls how wartime family tragedy, and witnessing the devastation of London in the post-war years, were factors that influenced the themes of conflict and peace which recur in much of his work. He also cites the poet Ted Hughes as a major influence on his life and work, remembering how the Poet Laureate offered advice on his early work. Michael Morpurgo also talks of how his most famous work, War Horse, was initially inspired by an elderly World War One veteran who, one night in the local pub, recalled how a deep bond forged with a army horse helped him survive the horror of the trenches. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah talks to John Wilson about the people, events, and cultural works that have inspired his creativity. Born in Zanzibar, the author and academic came to England as a political refugee at the age of 18, and now holds the post of Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. Since his first book Memory of Departure in 1987, he has written ten novels including Paradise, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994. When he won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, the citation praised his "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.Abdulrazak Gurnah discusses his childhood overlooking the main port in Zanzibar, and how his experience of multiple nationalities, cultures and languages inspired some of the themes of identity, belonging and departure that recur in his novels. He remembers the political turmoil and violence in the wake of the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar that saw the overthrown of the Sultan and imprisonment of the government. After travelling to the UK with his brother in 1968, he enrolled as a student in Canterbury, the town in which he still lives and works. Among his most important literary influences is The Mystic Masseur, a comic novel by the Trinidadian author VS Naipaul. Abdulrazak Gurnah also discusses the effect that winning the Nobel Prize has had on his life and work.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Violinist Nicola Benedetti reveals her most important cultural influences and experiences that have inspired her to become one of the world’s greatest classical musicians. Having taken up the violin at the age of four, Nicola won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition at 16. She’s renowned for the passion of her live concerts, her recordings of the great violin concertos, and for her work with contemporary composers, including a Grammy-winning collaboration with composer Wynton Marsalis. She’s also deeply involved in educational programmes that use classical music to transform the lives of young people. For This Cultural Life, Nicola Benedetti recalls her North Ayrshire upbringing and how her Italian parents encouraged her musicality from a young age. She remembers first listening to Brahms’s Violin Concerto on the car journey to school, a piece that inspired her to seriously pursue her ambitions, becoming the leader of the National Children’s Orchestra at the age of just eight. She discusses the influence of the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin, whose school she attended until she was 15, and at whose funeral she performed in 1999. Nicola also talks about her work with the Sistema Scotland project, and her own Benedetti Foundation, which promotes musical education. Determined to promote contemporary classical music as well as the traditional repertoire, she discusses her work with Wynton Marsalis and the young British composer Mark Simpson, both of whom have written violin concertos for her.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Norman Foster discusses the key cultural influences and experiences that led him to become one of the world’s most important living architects. Baron Foster of Thames Bank founded Foster and Partners in 1967, a practise which specialises in urban master-planning, civic, cultural, office and airport developments. His most famous designs include the Great Court of the British Museum, the Reichstag in Berlin, Millau Viaduct in France, the Apple headquarters in California, Wembley Stadium, Beijing Airport, and the London tower known as ‘the Gherkin’. At 87 years old, and still working as executive chairman of his company, Norman Foster looks back to his working class childhood in Manchester when he first became fascinated with the built environment in the post-war years. He recalls taking two books from the local library - on the architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier - which helped focus his early fascination with architecture. After studying at Manchester University’s school of architecture, Norman Foster won a scholarship to study at Yale University in Connecticut. It was there he met Richard Rogers, with whom he became firm friends and started taking long road trip across America to seek out landmark buildings. On return to the UK, Foster and Rogers set up their first architectural practise Team Four, along with their wives Wendy Cheeseman and Su Brumwell. Foster tells This Cultural Life about his continuing fascination with the design process, after a five decade career that has seen him win the most prestigious architecture prizes, including the Pritzker, the Praemium Imperiale Award, and the RIBA Gold Medal.Producer: Edwina Pitman

The author of the multi-million-selling Languedoc trilogy, set amidst religious wars in south-west France and beginning with the bestselling Labyrinth, Kate Mosse has written nine novels and short story collections, and four plays. She is also one of the co-founders of the Women’s Prize For Fiction. Kate Mosse tells John Wilson about first visiting the Festival Theatre in her hometown of Chichester at the age of six and seeing the 19th-century French farce The Italian Straw Hat, an experience that opened her mind to the power of drama. She remembers being among the million and a half visitors to the blockbuster Tutankhamen exhibition at the British Museum in 1972, and explains how her interest in historical narratives can be traced back to the treasures of the boy king. Kate Mosse also chooses two literary influences for This Cultural Life. Having read Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights as a teenager, she says the way that Bronte describes the Yorkshire moors as like a character in their own right influenced her own novels in which the Languedoc landscape plays a similar narrative role. Her last big cultural moment is the 1991 Booker Prize for Fiction when an all-male shortlist prompted Kate and other literary figures to create the Women’s Prize for Fiction as a way of shining the spotlight on novels written by women anywhere in the world.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Born Clifford Joseph Price, Goldie was brought up in care homes and with foster families in the west Midlands. After establishing himself as a graffiti artist, he began to make dance music and, with his 1995 debut album Timeless, was a pioneer of the drum’n’bass sounds that dominated club culture throughout the decade. Alongside work as a DJ around the world, Goldie has also taken on various acting roles, including in the James Bond film the World Is Not Enough and, on television, playing a gangster in Eastenders. He was also runner-up in the 2008 reality show Maestro, in which contestants learned to conduct a symphony orchestra. The following year, he was the subject of a television documentary in which he composed a piece of contemporary classical music that was performed at the BBC Proms. Goldie’s choices for This Cultural Life include hearing David Bowie’s 1969 Space Oddity when he was in care, and relating to its theme of isolation and abandonment. He also talks about the huge influence of seeing the 1983 documentary Style Wars, about the emerging hip hop scene in New York in the early 1980s, and the role of graffiti artists in reclaiming the subway trains and the walls of railway yards as their unofficial galleries. Goldie also reveals that the American jazz guitarist and composer Pat Metheny is one of his biggest influences, despite working in a very different musical field.Producer: Edwina Pitman

With a career spanning eight decades, Dame Eileen Atkins is one of the most acclaimed British actors. She is a three-time Olivier Award-winner and has won Emmy and BAFTA Awards for her role in the television series Cranford. A familiar face on screen since making her television debut in 1959, she has starred in shows ranging from Doc Martin to The Crown, and her film roles have included The Dresser, Gosford Park, Cold Mountain and Paddington 2. She also co-created the long-running television series Upstairs Downstairs and The House of Elliot, and wrote the screenplay for the 1997 film of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.Dame Eileen talks to John Wilson about her upbringing on a Tottenham council estate and how, under the tutelage of a woman she knew as Madame Yandie, she became Baby Eileen, a child stage performer, singing and dancing in working men’s clubs. She chooses as one of her greatest influences one of her teachers at Latymer School, EJ Burton, who introduced her to literature and theatre. She recalls the impact of joining the company at the Shakespeare Theatre, now the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1957, after a long struggle to secure stage roles. Dame Eileen also explains how her fascination with Virginia Woolf led to one of her most celebrated stage performances, that of the writer herself, in a one woman show adaptation of A Room Of One’s Own.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Writer Jed Mercurio, the creator of hit television series including Line Of Duty and Bodyguard, talks to John Wilson about the cultural influences and experiences that have inspired his own work. Born into a working class Stafforshire family, Mercurio went to medical school, then trained as an RAF pilot. After responding to an advert for consultants to work on new hospital drama Cardiac Arrest, Mercurio became the script writer for that ground-breaking series, which intended to be a more realistic depiction of the NHS than had been on screen before. He further drew on his medical background for the series Bodies, adapted from his novel of the same name.Jed chooses the 1980s US police TV series Hill Street Blues as a big influence on his own screenwriting, which is characterised by long-running rather than just episodic narratives, and surprising plot twists. He also reveals how the 2005 killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot by police after being mistakenly identified as a suspect following the London terror attacks, prompted him to develop the idea for a drama about undercover police investigations and corruption. Producer: Edwina Pitman

In a special edition of This Cultural Life from the Hay Festival, Dame Jacqueline Wilson is John Wilson's guest with an audience of readers young and old. One of the best-loved children's writers of all time, she has written more than a hundred books, including The Story of Tracy Beaker and Hetty Feather, both of which were adapted as hugely popular CBBC series. The childhoods depicted by her are usually far from rosy - she's tackled divorce, depression, death, bullying, abuse, abandonment and homelessness. Despite their themes, or maybe because of them, they are huge bestsellers. She reveals the film, play and places that have inspired her work.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Sarah JohnsonPhoto credit: Tricia Yourkevich