Episode 15 The Culture Show

collections. Also: Mark Kermode speaks to artist Steve McQueen

about his second feature film. John Mullan meets the his son of

Alexander Solzhenitsyn to talk about his father's extraordinary

literary work. And Aleks Krotoski speaks to

Wikipedia foundered Jimmy Wales about the freedom of ideas and his

vision for the future. Now we have seen the Arab Spring, I think we

The eclectic buildings competing for the heritage at risk award.

Michael Smith travelled to Birmingham in search of its

cultural soul. And I will be venturing slightly

further afield for a photographic exhibition of Captain Scott and his

First, a trip into the musical mind of poly math David Lynch. Not

content with being a painter, guru of transcendental meditation, Lynch

is back this time as a musician. Miranda Sawyer went to Paris to

meet him and to find out if there's anything the bequiffed one can't

turn his hand to. No filmmaker embraces the magical

qualities of music quite like David Lynch. From the queasy shimmering

title track of Twin Peaks, to the nightmarish lounge music of his

recent film Inland Empire. His sounds are just as memorable as the

And now you can give your own life a lynchian sound track for the man

himself has released his first ever solo MP. It may have been five

years since he last released a film, but he's found a multitude of

creative territories to colonise. All of which begs a question, is it

possible to hop from genre to genre and still be brilliant at

everything?! We are here to talk about your

music. We are actually in a very beautiful printing studios. Why are

we here? We are here because I'm making prints in this beautiful

space. Presses here in this room have been used by Picasso. There's

so much of the past that you can feel when you come in. If you think

about all the different things you do - you do painting, make films,

animation, you print, make music - how does music fit in with that? Is

it the most important element or is it an element? It's an element

which is a beautiful element and each medium is infinitely deep. So

once you start, then you can just keep going. It doesn't end. It just

keeps going. It's just one thrill after another.

Can I talk to you about some of the tracks on the album? Yes, you may.

The obvious one to start with is GoodDay Today. It's not about

something having a great day is it? No, it's a desire for a good day.

# I want to have a good day today # Good day today... #

The atmosphere is slightly dark and creepy in certain elements. There

is a song which mentions maybe a bit of stalking. Is that the mood

that you have when you make it or, does it just come out like that

one where you talk about stalking is like the feel of that thing came

about because that particular night, the guitar just had a different

sound. It was incredible. I barely touched this thing and it just

started singing. And I really like some of these little notes and the

way it is in there. Then it's called Speed Roadster. The guitar

started sounding like a roadster and gave birth to the lyrics.

call your phone # You weren't talking

# I kissed your face # Sort of soft... # Even if lyrics

come, it's kind of an intuitive thing. It's not even... They just

start coming, you know, it's like where do they come from, you don't

know, they just come in, like a visitor and you want to make give

the lyrics some coffee, I don't know. It makious very happy when

they come visit. You grew up around the birth of pop music. The birth

of rock'n'roll, they didn't call it pop. There were pops kls, but there

was no pop music -- popsicle. All of a sudden, everything changed. I

just remember being like thrilled beyond the beyond that this music

is talking to you in a great, great, # I went down to the football game

# I went down to the football game... #

Also, you said in the past that pop music, I'm using the word pop music,

I mean good music as well as bad. Sure. It's something that inspired

you, would you ever hear a piece of music and think, I need a film to

go with that, do you start with the music to go with the film? Yes,

Blue Velvet was that, Bobby Vincent's song came out in 61 or 62.

When I heard it then it wasn't rocking my boat. But, later I heard

it and, for some reason, hearing it - I've said it a bunch of times - I

see red lips, night, green lawns going into dark and a car. It just

started making a dream that led to all these ideas coming for Blue

Velvet. # She work blue velvet # Bluer than velvet was the night

# Softer than satin was the light... There's a lot, often in your films

of kind of performance. There's a point where there is a performance,

where you see quite often theatre curtains opening and something

happening. I was wondering how you yourself were thinking of

performing your album? I won't be performing my album.

boo! Yeah. But I would love... I've only done one thing on stage, but

for some reason, I love the stage, I love curtains, I love the idea of

curtains opening, because it seems like we get to go into another

world. Curtains hide something. Then when they open, if it's dark,

and we are moving in, it's just like about kills me it's so

beautiful. Do you ever lose your confidence? Erm, it's not a

question of confidence. It's ideas. So you say like sometimes writers

they say have writer block. The ideas are not coming. That, for me,

is the main reason, well not the main reason, but a very huge reason

why I meditate. The ideas flow more freely. It's this negativity that

kills the flow. It's just the squeezing of the tube. The little

ideas can't get through. They want to help you. Poor ideas! Yes. But

then whoa, they just flow through like these beautiful little fish

and they come in and you catch them. So confidence is nothing to do with

it? No. No. And David Lynch's new album Crazy Clown Time is released

on November 8th. To a literary great now, this week sees the

launch of a book by a man whose life story was every bit as

remarkable as any novel. We sent Professor of English, John Mullan

to investigate the latest work by this Russian master.

He was known as the conscience of Russia, but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

was also one of the greatest writers of modern times. And he

hainged history by exposing the horrors of the sta inist regime --

changed history by exposing the horrors of the Stalinist regime.

Solzhenitsyn's books couldn't be printed in the Soviet Union, but

were read eagerly outside his land. He made his name with his 1962

novel, one die in the life of Ivan Solzhenitsyn's writing brought him

worldwide critical acclaim, and in 1970, he was awarded the Nobel

Prize for Literature. But the political climate had changed and

he had already been silenced in his own land.

In 1973, the KGB seized his manuscript of the Gulag archipelago,

his painstaking searing history of the Soviet system of political

imprisonment. He was denounced as a traitor in his own country. A year

later, he was stripped of his citizenship and De ported to the

west. He spent 20 years in exile, living as a virtual recluse.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn made an epic

journey back to Russia to a here row's welcome. - hero's welcome. It

was here he stayed until his death. It's now been three years since

Solzhenitsyn died and a collection of his short stories, Apricot Jam,

already known in Russia, has finally been published for an

English-speaking audience. Supper for the reserve regiment was

served at six in the evening, even though lights out did not come

until ten. Someone had correctly figured that the men would get by

without any more food that way and would sleep through until morning.

Stephan, you're Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's son but the

translator also of one of the stories in this new collection. Was

that an emotional commitment, as well as a demanding literary job?

It is both. It is of course both. The care you need to put into it,

the emotional investment is of course much greater. I had a very

big advantage. If I didn't understand something or if I wanted

to ask about a nuance, I could just go ask dad. I could say what

exactly does this mean or is it more like this or is it more like

that, you know, we could discuss it. Usually translators never get that

level of access, so I was very luck write there. Must have been

particularly demanding with your father's fiction as well, because

language mattered very much to him and the pressures that language was

put under, especially under the Soviet system? He was a master of

language and a lover of language. A lover of the Russian language,

absolutely. Translation is tough, translation of Solzhenitsyn is even

tougher because it's like digesting extremely nutritious very, very

robust porridge, right, there's a lot to work through. It's very good

stuff. Now this, he said, dripping some of the thick apricot jam on to

a spoon, this very amber transparency, this surprising

colour and light should be present in the literary language as well.

And indeed, every singsle apricot lay like a condensed fragment of

sun light in a crystal ball. What's distinctive about these stories,

this new collection? They form a body of work that you could not

have written without his return to Russia. He didn't sense it possible

to actually write them living in the West. He needed to be fed off

the Russians. Things seemed to be rooted in his memory of experiences.

For instance, two wartime stories, actually? Absolutely. Detail was so

important for him and the detailed diaries of the war he kept were

burned immediately upon his arrest in 1945. He said that basically

it's like his memory of the war was killed with him. The details were

not crisp enough in his memory until he actually met some of his

mates from his unit who helped fill in some of the key details that

inspired him to return to the military theme. So in this little

volume, about half of what he ever wrote about World War II, is all

In the dim light, the lieutenant scans the faces of his fighting men.

Their expressions were gloomy, complex, biting their lips, eyes

down, to the side, but outright repentance? No. He did not see that

on any of their faces. What is this coming to? If we go stealing

government property, how are we going to win the wall? Dark and

impenetrable they stood, yet this is with whom we march, to victory

or defeat. What would you say now to those readers who might say that

the terrible history that made your father has gone and that his

writing belongs with the history that has gone? I would say they

have got it a bit wrong. He was a writer and therefore he will always

come to be understood as a writer. That means that generations will

continue to read him and what exactly happened in one year or

another year won't matter so much. The power off his literature,

however, will matter. In this new collection, Solzhenitsyn's fierce

and prophetic voice comes to us from beyond the grave, telling us

again about the dark history of his times. This history may now not

matter so much to us in the West. These stories tell us that it

should. And Apricot Jam and Other Stories

is published by Canongate on November 3rd. While we're on books,

World Book Night announced the list of 25 books to be handed out in

April next year. You can check that out on their website. But now from

the storytellers of the past to a vision of the future, as Wookey

feed -- Wikipedia found a Jimmy Wales tells Aleks Krotoski waif he

thinks the internet will continue to change our lights.

One man's vision of how we access and edit information online has

become a global phenomenon. He grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, deep in

the American South, and for years he wrote computer code in his spare

time before quitting his job in finance to become a full-time

internet entrepreneur. His name is Jimmy Wales. His creation:

Wikipedia. Wikipedia has 20 million articles available in 222 languages,

with 422 million people visiting the website each month, so it seems

fitting that Jimmy Wales will be the keynote speaker at this year's

Free-Thinking Festival, which celebrates ideas. The topics for

2011 is changed. The festival is taking place at the Sage Gateshead,

a suitably futuristic looking crucible for new and innovative

ideas. We have seen so much change that has been attributed to the Web

recently. What do you think the next change is that would involve?

I think there are some exciting things coming. Two billion people

online and in the next five to ten years, maybe another two billion

people will come online and they are not coming from Europe, Japan,

the US, they are coming from China and India, even Africa. That is

driving a huge upsurge in the number of people connected,

particularly in the cities. Because people sure what is interesting,

all kinds of cool cultural influences will be flowing back and

forth. I think it will be really big. What do you imagine will

change when it is not just the people in the urban areas, when

they truly engage with the Web? think a lot of things will happen,

particularly the country's currently that have really dreadful

governments, whether people have had not much hope of positive

change and they will begin to see what has gone on in other places

around the world and to realise that actually, we don't have to put

up with collector crackeds any more, we don't need to have a strong man

system of government -- with clipped opera. What do you imagine

will happen, not just when everybody else has access but after

they have had access for a while and their influences come back on

us? What will happen? It is really interesting. I think China is one

of my favourite examples. When Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize

from China and China it refused to let him travel to receive the award,

they put an empty chair on the stage to symbolise that he had not

been allowed to come to receive the award and all across China, any

mention of his name automatically gets the page filtered, so people

were changing their profile picture, maybe not to the real empty chair

but to any empty chair just to show, this is ridiculous, I know about

this, right? When you get a group of people like this who are

beginning to feel their own strength in those subtle ways, it

is only a matter of time before they go, you guys at the top are

part of the problem and we are going to have massive protests, we

are going to change China. Jimmy's belief in the power of technology

to help create positive change can be traced back to his childhood.

The area he is from was a rural backwater until NASA moved in in

the early 1960s. # Sweet Home Alabama #.

The place where you grew up, Huntsville Alabama, also known as

Rocket City. That is cool. How much of that experience contributed to

your creating technology? Absolutely a lot. Certainly, I have

memories from being a child of windows rattling as they were

testing the rockets and you knew what they were working on, going to

the moon. Amazing. There was a sense of optimism. Technology

changing the world for the better. That spirit I think is implicit on

all of my work, it is who I am and where I came from. The idea of the

internet as a force for positive change, it is the real "beauty is

in the eye of the beholder" statement. There are limitations to

that? I don't think so. For me it is almost completely overwhelmingly

obvious that it is a tool for change. I was in Taiwan, and one of

the local Wikipedia volunteers offered to drive me around and he

said he was raised in a very nationalist household and that they

really hated mainland Communist China and he had been raised to

believe that the mainland Chinese were completely brainwashed and

then he said he started working at Wikipedia and he said, I still

think they are wrong at certain things but I can see that a kind of

have a point. You see that sort of thing, helpful in reducing tensions,

in reducing the ability of militias politicians working people into a

frenzy to go and fight someone. Every war in the entire world

becomes in a sense of civil war because we have all become closer

to each other. I see this Utopian visions stretching ahead of us. I

am thrilled people are like you in the world who think the internet

will bring us all a global group hug but I do not see that happening.

I am not a Utopian, I am a very optimistic person but I think that

none of these things happen automatically. Nothing about

technology in a tacit -- necessitates certain outcomes but

there is a great opportunity for minimising war, having a lot less

of it. I am an optimist! Thank you very much, Jimmy. Thank you for

having me. And Jimmy Wales will be delivering

his keynote speech on change at The Sage Gateshead next Friday, which

will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Still to come, we have brilliant

photographic records of the Scott- Shackleton polar expeditions,

Michael Smith's search for the cultural high as a Birmingham and

Mark Kermode's journey to the sad truths of sex addiction in the new

film, Shame. But first it is all about repairing the damage and the

final category of the Heritage Angel Awards. This week Simon

Thurley looks at the four eclectic buildings competing inherited at

risk award category. Not many people today would

consider a cemetery a fashionable place to go, but in its heyday

Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol was the fashionable place to be seen.

It was also the fashionable place to be buried. The huge fortify they

get necropolis was opened in 1839, just two years after Queen Victoria

came to the throne -- 45 acre. It is not surprising it was dubbed a

necropolis. Over 300,000 people were buried here, from mayors,

industrialists to railway workers, but that is what makes this place

so special. It contains a complete cross-section of Victorian society.

When, in the 1990s, the private owners announced that they intended

to close Arnos Vale Cemetery and build 400 new houses on the site,

locals rallied round and petitioned to the council. The plan was to

remove the monumental masonry and to do mass exhumation.

dreadful! It was dreadful. At that time my father had passed away and

he was buried here and there was no way I was going to let that happen.

And your husband Richard has sadly subsequently died. Yes, he's still

here, yes. All that energy you have put into here and your husband's

devotion to it, this place must mean a great deal to you. Yes, it

always has. Sometimes it is hard to come here on my own. But there is

no way I will not come because my Victorian memorials to the dead

come in many shapes and sizes. Nestling in the picturesque village

of the Staffordshire peaks is one man's memorial to his dearly

beloved wife. The I'm a memorial cross was built in 1841 by a

wealthy industrialist, J C Watts Russell, in memory of his wife who

died suddenly aged just 48. Years of weathering saw the cross fall

into serious disrepair and the job of restoring it fell to Ian Ward, a

master mason on the regeneration project. Some of the figures were

very badly eroded so they were re- card. There were six Angel figures

and they are all slightly different, they have a melancholy quality,

especially in their distress sway. Absolutely beautiful things. They

are like guardian angels watching over the village. The third

building competing for the award is the deconsecrated church of St

Stephen's, Rosslyn Hill, in London's leafy Hampstead. It is

architect -- the architect's masterpiece and is often referred

to as his mighty jet. And no wonder. It was his most expensive

Commission -- is mighty church. It cost �27,000, an astronomical sum

in 1869. Toulan, he was a rogue, a group of Victorian architects who

tore up the rule book, who mixed and matched their starts. We have

both Fantine brickwork, French Gothic, English Gothic and

Renaissance thrown in for good measure -- by Santino. I think it

is like a Ragnar, you'll love it or you hate it, and we fell in love

with it. It had been derelict for 20 years. The floor was a rotting

in places. It looked like the black hole of Calcutta. There was 60 tons

of garbage from squatters. Thanks to Michael Taylor and his wife, the

head of a small prep school attached to the church, St

Stephen's has been given a new lease of life. Most of the schemes

that had been put forward over the 20 years of dereliction wanted to

make large structural intrusion into the main body of the building.

We came up with the idea of extending the existing undercroft

so that another branch of the school could move into it and that

has left the main body of the building as you see it in all its

former glory. I know the local community, many of whom have given

money, are very pleased with what we have done. I am told by people

who pass by in the street, Mr Taylor, isn't it wonderful to see

the children bringing life back to The final building on the short

list is the Dome Cinema in the Sussex coastal town of Worthing

which has hardly changed since it was built in 1911 as a plush

picture palace. It was very glamorous. People would

have entered through the double doors, having bought their tickets

at this wonderful pay kiosk, swept up the Titanic staircase and down

into the auditorium and it was so romantic. People loved that, you

know, the fact that they were sitting in this wonderful dark

auditorium with this marvellous magical atmosphere watching a film

which was accompanied by an orchestra.

We had queues all around the building for the Big Philments we

managed to get. Every house was packed up. You just couldn't get in,

because the films were in quite short supply in England just after

the war. John Whittington was a teenager when he started working at

the Worthing Dome in 1945 as a projectionist. If the film broke,

the audience used to bring alarm clocks and let them off, and apart

from the shouting and that, you could hear all the alarm clocks

going off. That was quite fun, really.

Not for us, because we were trying to fix the film, but it was good

fun. Next week, we'll reveal who all the

winners are at the Heritage Angel Award z ceremony in London. But

next tonight, it's been 100 years since Captain Scott ice ill-fated

expedition to the Antarctic. To mark that centenary, there's a new

photographic exhibition at the Queen's Gallery charting his

exploits and those of the slightly later polar explorer Ernest

Shackleton. I met up with modern explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes to try

to understand the unswerving pioneering spirit that drove those

It can be easy to forget that there was once a world the ends of which

were undiscovered, untouched by the cloud of technology and endeavour,

tantalisingly unglimpsed by mankind. That was the world that men like

Robert falcon-Scott and Ernest Shackleton set out to conquer. Now,

it might almost seek lick stating the obvious to say that the poles

of the earth can be traversed, of course we can do it. Those extremes

can be withstood. We've got maps, GPS, we know it can be done. But,

100 years ago, that was far less certain.

It's thanks to photographers Herbert Ponting who accompanied

Scott and Frank Hurley who travelled with Shackleton that

proof of these explorations exist. They brought these images back from

the edge of the world. Finding an uncanny grandeur and forms like

abstract sculpture many the Antarctic's ice scape. But they're

also about a human achievement, only surpassed when man walked on

the moon. Sophie, I'm amazingly struck by

Frank Hurley's photographs of the Shackleton expedition, in

particular this amazing sequence of pictures where he charts step by

step the crashing of their boat by the ice? They're extraordinary

aren't they? It really shows how determined Hurley was to capture

the story of the expedition once it had gone wrong and it unfolded. He

wanted to be there on the ice the whole time, so once the ship

started to become crushed, he spent about three days out on the ice. He

just was determined not to miss a single moment of the sequence of

events as the ship slowly disappeared beneath the ice. It's

grizzly, almost like a still camera version of a movie. A disaster

movie. Yes, and that's what I can't get over, I suppose, the fact that

it's as if he might be photographing his own death because,

with the loss of the boat, things don't look very good? We come with

the knowledge of what eventually happened and the fact that they all

survived. Of course, Hurley and the men at that time were watching

their only way home slowly disappear under the ice. It was

really quite extraordinary that he had the presence of mind to be

there to record all of this. Am I right in thinking that, as the

expedition got into deeper and deeper trouble, he had to make some

very, very tough editorial decisions? He did. There was the

moment when they'd taken everything off the ship and the ship had been

crushed that they realised they were going to have to get into the

lifeboats in order to find land. That meant they were limited in

what they could take and the glass plates that Hurley was producing

was incredibly heavy. From about 500 negatives he'd already made, he

had to narrow it down to a selection of about 120. So, he sits

there, with Shackleton, and say s yes, we'll keep that, no, we won't

keep that one. The ones they decide not to keep, they smash because

Hurley might have wanted to run back for them. Don't put temptation

in the way? Chactly. -- exactly. It's apparent that when they are in

the lifeboats and have to lose more weight in order to keep going. They

make the decision to throw the food overboard in order to keep the

films and the cameras, so it really shows how important they are.

Looking at the photographs, it's daunting to consider the conditions

Ponting and Hurley endured to take them. A man who survived the

extremes is Sir Ranulph Fiennes. He talked me through the earlier

doomed expedition of Captain Scott who hoped to be the first to reach

the South Pole. Little did he know that another

party from Norway were already on their way.

When they set out from New Zealand, we met one of his stokers, Stoker

Burton was his name. He was in his '80s, but he was on Scott's

expedition and there he was live living in New Zealand. That is

amazing. Yes, it's 70 years later, but it's within living memory.

is it like travelling on a boat like that, on a sea like that,

because it looks absolutely vatiginous? Ponting was stramed

with his camera on the rigging which might have been sea-sick

making. -- strapped with his camera. There were unpleasant days and I

took a lot of pills and stuck on a lot of patches which Scott wouldn't

have been able to do. That looks like a cold, harsh sea? You don't

want to make mistakes with the cold. If you are on a hot desert

expedition, you can learn by your mistakes. You don't learn by your

mistakes. I've lost a load of fingers in that side in one three-

minute mistake. You can see how much finger got lost. That was just

three minutes because I travelled at a dangerous time and my sledge

with all my safety gear fell in. It was minus 46, the ice was breaking

up everywhere and the only way I could get the sledge back out of

the sea was to put one hand in and then of course it got cold and

within the three minutes, there was no life left in these fingers, so

you have a nightmarish situation caused by an initial error.

I find these pictures in particular quite haunting because they're

taken, of course, by the explorers themselves. Yes. So we know that

those plates, for those pictures, were actually recovered with their

bodies. You can sense that they feel gutted that they found the

tent, the flag, they realised that the Norwegians got there first. Do

you think that was De moralising for them? It would have been for

anybody. But it wouldn't have stopped their will to survive and

to get back would have taken over their disappointment to not have

gotten there first. Sadly it wasn't enough. Scott and the team were

trapped by an apoll lick tick blizzard 11 miles from salvation

where they eventually succumbed to the Antarctic cold. These were

raised over their bodies, entombing them in the ice forever.

Then it comes to the last room of all. I suppose that's the great

relbic, I suppose, the flag he actually planted -- relic. It lay

with the dead bodies for eight months. When they discovered the

death tent, there was only about ten inches of it sticking above the

snow drifts, so they'd arrived there a week later, the tent would

have disappeared, the diaries, the flag, everything else and the

bodies would never have been found, nobody would have known anything

about what happened to the expedition. He was found with his

two great friends lying dead on either side of him. They died quite

a few days before he did, so he lingered on and somehow managed to

write his diary until within four or five days of his death. It

wouldn't have been a good way to go. And that exhibition, the Heart of

the great Alone opened on 2 October and continues until 22nd April next

year. In a similarly intrepid spirit, we sent Michael Smythe to

explore the cultural landscape of Birmingham.

Recently voted the most boring city in all of Europe!

Birmingham's a blank in my mind, a blind spot in the heart of Middle

England. It's been voted the most boring city in Europe by trip

advisor's travel website, shunned by the Lonely Planet guide books

and has even lost out to Londonderry for the coveted title

of City of Culture. There's a restless and unsettled quality

about Birmingham, like the place has never really worked out what it

is. It's a bewildering place for a visitor, it's messy, formless

confusion of different styles. You get the Industrial Revolution torn

down to make way for '60s brutalist high-rise and motorways. Then that

failed future gets torn down to make way for this bland and sterile

millennium architecture. The soul's been squeezed out of the

centre of Birmingham. Even artist Gillian Wareing's new project to

find a family to be the face of the city is currently being exhibited

in this corporate hotel. When it's done, the bronze sculpture of the

family will be plonked outside yet another new building, the generic

box of the library. Bored tourists would never find it,

but escape the oppressive blandness and find art hidden away in the

dilapidated buildings just east of the city centre. Abandoned Curzon

Street Station has been taken over by some very strange machines.

The artists have responded to the space with places inspired by

trains, machines and the mechanical process. Tape cassette recorders

wear and clunk, machines project cosmic light and old camera lenses

frame. The exhibition chimes perfectly with the industrial

messiness of the city. Messiness is in Birmingham's DNA, once known as

the city of a thousand trades and teamed with small scape workshops.

This area was the Crucible of Birmingham where the confusion of

workshops clustered. The 20th century version of this are the

small artist studios gathered teeth by Jowell with the remaining

industry. There's loads of art pieces tucked

away here. This is a piece of graffiti commissioned by a local

gallery and it's activated when you touch these two points. The sounds

all come from the motorcycle repair shop next door and it's interesting

to think the sounds of the city that inspired heavy metal are also

inspiring works like these. The East side projects run one of the

bigst galleries here. It opened Brummy sausage art! So Birmingham's

been voted the most boring city in Europe for a few years running. Why

do you think it still has that reputation with all this going on?

Well, I mean, I don't know, partly maybe if you ask a stupid question

you get a stupid answer, but it's a pain in the cars that Birmingham is

the stupid answer. I left Birmingham when I was a kid because

I didn't think it was interesting, I thought it was boring but I moved

back five years ago because I think it's something else now. What is

distinctive about Birmingham's art scene? What I thought was weird

about the city in a way is, it's such a massive city and never

really had an art scene, so we try and learn from something like

Glasgow, we've learned from scenes, scenes arise in Manchester or

Newcastle. I think we can be really ambitious because it could grow in

principle. The city could support a massive art scene.

The creative enclave here seems in tune with the self--efacing and

independent Brummy spirit. For a second city, there's always been

something strangely humble about it, just quietly getting on with things

and not feeling the need to shout about itself.

To me, this area feels like a grass roots DIY ant dote to all that's

gone wrong in the city centre. You've just got to know where to

look. Hiya. Hi, you all right? Totally intriguing this project,

Pigeon project. Is it a strong Brummy tradition? Yes, Birmingham

and the Black Country. Within a three mile radius here, there's 45

competitive pigeon flyers. Do you race them? Yes, in a local pigeon

club. There's also a lot of local artists and galleries that sponsor

pigeons as part of our syndicate. How do you make art with pigeons?

curated an exhibition for which the pigeons carried art works from

different low cases across the country in different artist studios

carrying little message tunes and USB sticks with videos on and GPS

systems and the pigeons clifred the art work. So the exhibition was in

their pigeon lofts -- delivered the art work. Do you think Birmingham

and the art scene is distinctive? Is it unusual? Yes, definitely

exciting and edgy. You can do things in Birmingham that I don't

think you would be able to do in other parts of the country. I could

never imagine keeping pigeons under a viaduct in the centre of London.

Can I see a pigeon? Yes, I'll get you one of the pile Errolers. It

does backflips along the floor and We are five minutes from the city

centre but we may as well be in a different kettle world. It is

ridiculous to say that Birmingham is the most boring city in Europe.

Birmingham is boring if you are boring, but if you don't want your

culture spoon-fed, if you are adventurous and wedding to go off

the beaten track, it is all here and waiting for you to discover it.

Now we join Alex Renton, who went to Armenia with Oxfam up to report

on the food crisis, where five years ago almost a quarter of the

population were undernourished, with half of that figure living on

less than $2 a day. The result is a series of photographs of empty

kitchens to sit alongside the shocking statistics, illustrating

I find kitchens moving and revealing. They can often tell you

much more about the people who live in them than looking at their

bookshelf or music collection can. I am a journalist, I write about

development. I was keen to write about somewhere where people were

newly poor and newly hungry but Armenia was particularly moving

because these people, on the edge of Europe, are very easily

identified with and they have gone middle class to abject poverty,

African levels of poverty, in 20 years. The collapse of the Soviet

Union meant subsidised wheat did not come through, climate change

has made the traditional crops in these mountains harder to grow and

a lot of the people are refugees who came from Azerbaijan with no

skills on how to live up on the slow line and grow vegetables

because they were the urban middle class. The most moving for me with

these guys, the Josephians. Hasmik with her five children and her

Plastic sheeting in the windows. We went into the mountains above the

village and this is what Hasmik does every day to feed her children.

She finds the roots and vegetables wild and this is the first green as

they had seen in six months so this is exciting. In the evening she

cooked us an omelette with the greens but it was one egg. The rest

of the meal was some pasta, which in the traditional way they fry up

till it is almost burned and then boil it, and for the children this

is a treat, they gobbled it up like a roast chicken. In these countries

where you have seen this very swift economic collapse, there are

enormous cultural changes. People are thrown back into the lifestyles

of 600, a 1,000 years ago. What interests me is that the basic

principles of how you sit down with your family and get joy even if

there is not enough food remains the same.

While we were watching her cook, I was distracted and fascinated by

the way she had arranged her cooking implements. All of them

were old and battered and much loved, I think. She laid a piece of

cloth against the wall so she could hang them up to drive and be ready

to grab, as all of us do, and to protect the wallpaper. So after we

had been in Hasmik's house, I made sure I made a few minutes in the

other people's kitchens, looking at these natural still lives. And

realised there was something there, an internal beauty about the way we

organise our everyday objects. So I This is another lady in another

village. She said she had brought these plates 20 years ago from her

city when she became a refugee and preserved them. In the way they

boarded their dishcloth, they arranged their pots and their much

loved old saucepan, those told a story of the struggle and these

terrible circumstances, the struggle to stay civilised and

dignified and provide, as you must, Next we move from the kitchens of

Armenia to the bedrooms and boardrooms of New York, the setting

for Steve McQueen's new film, Shame. It has already picked up a Best

Actor award at the Venice Film Festival Paul Michael Fassbender's

performance as a sex addict and it has just had its UK premiere at the

London Film Festival. Mark Kermode went to meet the director to talk

about the challenges of using such Not content with beating Tracey

Emin to the Turner Prize in 19 99th and serving as an official war

artist in Iraq, Steve McQueen is making a mark in the world of

feature films. His new film Shame centres on a sex addict in New York,

with life is falling apart. This is the second time he has collaborated

with Michael Fassbender. They first worked together on Hunger, about

Bobby Sands. Shame adds almost as a companion to Hunger, as Steve

McQueen unflinching leak explores all things corporeal. What is it

about the subject of sex addiction that intrigues you? In the film, as

his addiction becomes more and more rampant, he becomes more and more

alienated, although he says that is What fascinated me was that this

eviction, in some ways you need someone to facilitate it. Not all

the time of course. I love the idea of that drama, there are two people,

one wanted something from the other person, that control, but also it

was all about struggle, and knowing you had a problem in the first

place. When I first read about sex addiction I found it funny but then

you realise this person, similar to an alcoholic, longs to get through

a day without relieving himself, I don't know how many times a day,

but that is sad. It ceases to become funny. I think to be in love

with someone is pretty brave. That person can break your heart. For

him, somewhere along the line in his life, he didn't want that to

happen and he didn't want the possibility of being vulnerable.

Many of the scenes involves a degree of physical nakedness and

also emotional nakedness. Tell me how difficult that may be to work

with a cast. One imagines that acting without your clothes on is

not something which everybody is comfortable with. No, then they are

not very good actors, are they? If Michael was walking around with a

bazooka and an AK- 47, no one would say anything, but the bizarre is

normal and abnormal is bizarre. He is an actor and we had to get to

the emotional depth of the character. This is 1951, a lot of

people didn't wear pyjamas, they got up and they were naked, that is

what you do. End of story. There have been comparisons made between

Michael Fassbender and Marlon Brando in terms of physical

performance and people now view Michael fast bend as arguably one

of the greatest screen actors of his generation -- Michael

Fassbender. TUC a connection? I do. -- do you see a connection

was made he is a man's man but there is a certain fragility which

is beautiful. You can project yourself as the audience on him and

see yourself. This gite nailed it today. You are

the man. Your pitch was amazing -- this guy it nailed it today. He is

just picking colours randomly! can bring you in. He doesn't push

you away. He can bring you in because he is not afraid to show

his vulnerability. He is exceptional. Tell me about

Brandon's relationship with free. There is a key confrontation

between them when she says, we are not bad people but we come from a

bad place. One of the things I admire it is that you are never

explicit about what that bad places although it seems to me the film

had suggestions as to what it might be. Tell me what you can about what

that line meant. I wanted to make their past familiar rather than

mysterious. I also didn't want it to be and let out for Brandon...

Like an explanation. Precisely, for what he does in the movie. It is

their past. When we meet people in general, we know nothing about them

other than what they present and sometimes there are tales of the

past in the present when you are with them. In the film, the biggest

tell was when Carey Mulligan is singing New York New York to

Brandon and it is the only time when Brandon listens to secede and

he has to listen to her, he can't move and he can't escape, it is a

performance. He has to listen, he is forced do. In terms of where you

go from here, two feature films, critically very well received, do

you see future from making as the primary part of your future or do

you see yourself as a visual artist who happens to work in film?

don't want people to make me have to choose! I want to do what I want

to do. Next time I might want to dance, I don't know! No, really, it

is not even a joke. As an artist, as a person who wants to do stuff,

you should do stuff, whatever it is. There is no barrier or divide. I

Shame is released in the UK on the 13th of January next year. Next

week's Culture Show is on Saturday at 6pm, where Mark Wallinger talks

about the White Horse project, Terence Conran shows us the Way we

Live now and the Journalist Anne McElvoy investigates the power of