This Cultural Life

Musician and lyricist Jarvis Cocker talks to John Wilson about the most important influences and experiences that shaped his own creativity. He explains how the DIY spirit of punk during his teenage years in Sheffield inspired him to form his band Pulp, and experiment with a distinctive new look forged in that city's jumble sales. Pulp, who went on to become one of the biggest bands to define the Britpop era of the 1990s, made their BBC Radio 1 debut in 1981 on the hugely influential John Peel show, another of Jarvis's choices for this programme. And yet the band didn’t find mainstream success until well over a decade later. Pulp was put on hold while Jarvis studied Film at St Martin’s Art College in London, an experience which widened his cultural horizons and where he met the girl who came from Greece and 'had a thirst for knowledge', later featured in Pulp's biggest hit Common People. He also fondly recalls his musical hero Scott Walker who, after massive pop success with The Walker Bothers in the 1960s, pursued an idiosyncratic and experimental music career, until his death in 2019. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Penelope Lively, now 89 years old, is the author of more than 30 books for children, six short story collections and 17 novels. Shortlisted three times for the Booker prize, she won it in 1987 for her time-shifting novel Moon Tiger, in which a terminally ill woman looks back at wartime adventures, love affairs and fraught family life. Dame Penelope Lively has won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award for her children’s books. She is also the author of three volumes of memoirs.Dame Penelope recalls her early childhood in Cairo, and how real-life wartime Egypt inspired the fiction of Moon Tiger. Andrew Lang's Tales of Troy and Greece, a retelling of the Homeric myths, first sparked her creative imagination at the age of ten. Having moved to England in late 1945, she remembers the devastation left by the Blitz, and how seeing for herself the ruins in London, both ancient and modern, prompted a lifelong fascination with archaeology. An extremely wide reader, she discusses the influence of her lifetimes' reading habit on her fiction; in particular The Making Of The English Landscape by W.G. Hoskins, a book about the strata of history that have helped shape England, which inspired some of the recurring themes of memory and loss in her own work.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Inua Ellams, the Nigerian-born, award-winning poet, playwright and performer, talks to John Wilson about the most important influences and experiences that have inspired his own creativity. Inua won huge acclaim for his play the Barbershop Chronicles, which was a sell-out twice at the National Theatre and went on to tour the UK. His adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters reset during the Biafran war - also for the National - is now on the A Level syllabus, and he is the author of several books of poetry including The Half God Of Rainfall. Inua was born in Plateau State, Nigeria, moved to Britain as a child, and also spent time in Dublin during his teens. He recalls growing up in a dual faith household, with his Christian mother and Muslim father. Initially inspired by the tales of heroism he discovered in X-Men comics, he became a fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. He reveals that the 2001 album Amethyst Rockstar, by the American hip hop poet Saul Williams, was a huge inspiration on him as a writer and performer. Inua also talks movingly about his recent British citizenship which, despite being at the heart of the British theatrical establishment, took many years of struggle to secure.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Hannah Gadsby, the Emmy-winning stand-up comedian and writer, talks to John Wilson about the most significant influences and experiences that have shaped her comic career. Born and raised in Tasmania, she first came to prominence in Australia after winning a national competition in 2006. But it was her explosive show Nanette which made her an international comedy star when it was filmed by Netflix in 2018. It was candid and confessional, tackling subjects including homophobia, sexual violence and trauma. Hannah talks about how she felt like an ‘odd child’ growing up in Tasmania, and how she used comedy to negotiate social situations. She discusses her fascination with art history, a subject she studies at university, and which she explores to comic effect in many of her shows. Hannah chooses the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, who died in 2010 aged 98, as a major influence on her performances which candidly draw on personal issues. She cites the French surrealist performance artist Claude Cahun as another inspirational figure. Hannah also talks about her recent autism diagnosis as a major turning point in her life and career, and why her autism became one of the key subjects of her 2019 show Douglas.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Neil Tennant, singer and songwriter with the Pet Shop Boys, is one half of the most successful British pop duo of all time, having sold 100 million records worldwide. With his musical partner of over 40 years, Chris Lowe, Neil Tennant is known for wry, observational lyrics set to electronic dance beats and bittersweet melodies. They’ve made 14 studio albums, all of them with one word titles - from Please and Actually in the 80s, to Super and Hotspot in recent years. Neil Tennant tells John Wilson about his most important cultural influences. He joined the Young People’s Theatre in his native Newcastle in the 1960s, the start of a lifelong passion for drama and live performance. He recalls buying an acoustic guitar at the age of 11 and writing his first ever songs. David Bowie was a huge influence on Neil, having seen the legendary Ziggy Stardust show at Newcastle City Hall in 1972. He later collaborated with his hero when Pet Shop Boy remixed the Bowie track Hallo Spaceboy in 1996. Neil also recalls the social and cultural influence of Heaven nightclub in the early 1980s, the centre of London’s gay scene, where he first heard the work of producer Bobby Orlando and other pioneers of electronic dance music. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Award-winning novelist, playwright and short story writer Ali Smith is the author of 12 novels, three of which have been nominated for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Her best-selling How To Be Both won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Costa Novel of the Year in 2014. Brought up in the Scottish Highlands, she was the youngest of five children in a working class family, studied English at Aberdeen University and began writing fiction whilst studying for a doctorate at Cambridge. Ali Smith tells John Wilson about the influence of cinema on her fiction, particularly the work of French new wave director Jacques Rivette whose disregard for conventional linear narrative in films including Céline and Julie Go Boating made a big impression. She also recalls how, as an aspiring writer, the work of fellow Scottish novelists and poets, including Liz Lochhead, Alistair Gray, James Kelman and Muriel Spark, helped give her the confidence to write her own fiction. Ali Smith also discusses 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty, a contemporary of Peter Blake and David Hockney, who tragically died at the age of 28 in 1966. Boty’s life and work - overlooked for three decades after she died - became a central aspect of Ali Smith’s 2016 novel Autumn, the first of a quartet of seasonal-themed books written and published over four years. Producer: Edwina Pitman

As one of the most successful screenwriters of modern times, Aaron Sorkin is renowned for his quickfire, rhythmic dialogue in films and television dramas including The West Wing, A Few Good Men, The Newsroom, Moneyball and The Social Network. More recently he’s directed his own screenplays with films including Molly’s Game, The Trial Of The Chicago 7 and Meet the Ricardos.Aaron Sorkin tells John Wilson how, at the age of five, his parents took him to see the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, an experience that sparked his love of theatre. He remembers seeing Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf a few years later and being entranced by the musicality of the dialogue. Debates around the family dinner table, led by his corporate lawyer father, are another source of inspiration for a writer famed for creating adversarial scenarios in courtrooms and the corridors of power. Sorkin pays tribute to his mentor, the Oscar winning screenwriter William Goldman, and explains how Goldman’s screenplay for the classic 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid offers a masterclass in dramatic dialogue. Aaron Sorkin also reflects on his writing process, and how he often gripped by ‘writer’s block’, despite being one of the most prolific screenwriters of his generation.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Spanish ballet star Tamara Rojo has enjoyed a 20 year stage career, in which she starred in all the greatest classical ballet roles to both critical and popular acclaim. She became artistic director of the English National Ballet, and recently made her debut as a choreographer with a new version of the 19th century ballet Raymonda. Now, after a decade running the ENB, she is preparing to take on a new job as artistic director of the San Francisco ballet, the first woman to hold the role. She tells John Wilson about the chance introduction to a dance class at school, and her unexpected success winning the Paris International Dance competition in 1994 which led to a role at Scottish Ballet at the age of 17. She reveals how seeing Francis Bacon's studies of the Velazquez portrait of Pope Innocent X made her reassess approaches to classic works of art and inspired a desire to re imagine works from the classical ballet canon. She also explains why she loves the Lars von Trier film Dancer in the Dark and how Bjork's tour de force performance mirrors he own approach to inhabiting a role.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Olivier and Emmy-winning actor Brian Cox is best known these days as Logan Roy, the tyrannical media mogul and disappointed father in the hit series Succession. It’s a character familiar to him having played King Lear, along with virtually every other classical role during a sixty year stage career at the National Theatre, the RSC and repertory theatres throughout the UK. On screen he’s made a name for himself as the go-to character actor of his generation, with roles in the Bourne trilogy, Troy, Braveheart and many more. Villains are his speciality and include the original portrayal of Hannibal Lector on screen in the film Manhunter. In a wide-ranging conversation, he tells John Wilson about the most formative influences on his career which started when he worked as a stage hand at the Dundee Rep Theatre in his home city. He reminisces about working with directors including Lindsay Anderson and John Schlesinger, and how seeing Albert Finney on screen in the 1960s made him realise there were new opportunities for working class actors. He also reflects on the international fame he has found playing Logan Roy.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Artist Maggi Hambling is a painter known for evocative portraits, and powerfully energetic seascapes of the Suffolk coastline where she grew up. She’s also a sculptor, whose public artworks, including tributes to Oscar Wilde, Benjamin Britten and more recently Mary Wollstonecraft, have been the focus of both acclaim and controversy. She tells John Wilson about her unconventional family life in Suffolk, discovering her artistic talent as child and studying with the East Anglian school of painting under Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. She explains how Rembrandt's portraits were a major influence on her own work, and reveals how a trip to New York in 1969 proved to be a formative experience, not least because she found herself at the legendary Woodstock Festival that year. She also speaks candidly about how painting family members and close friends after they have died, including both her parents and her partner in their coffins, helped keep their memory alive for her.Producer: Edwina Pitman