Episode: 30x01 | Airdate: Jul 17, 2016 (100 min)
Alan Yentob tells the story of London's Olympic Opening Ceremony, as seen through the eyes of its artistic director Danny Boyle, his creative team and just some of the thousands of volunteers who worked to make it happen. The documentary relates how they united in the face of a cynical nation and produced a warm-up act like no other.
Episode: 30x02 | Airdate: Jul 19, 2016 (70 min)
Imagine reveals the darker side of one of Britain's most original and inventive artists. A sculptor working with found materials, Cornelia Parker creates beauty from acts of brutality - an exploded shed, piles of squashed silver, the charred remnants of a burnt church suspended in time. Born in 1956 to a German mother and an English father in rural Cheshire, Parker always struggled to fit in. Art was her escape. In 2016 she embarked on the most high-profile commission of her career - the roof of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alan Yentob follows Parker's creative process in a film that sees her delve deep into America's history, cinema and art, as well as her own personal past.
Episode: 30x03 | Airdate: Jul 26, 2016 (65 min)
In the pioneer days of the late 19th century, a slight young girl from the windswept prairies of Wisconsin dreamt of becoming a painter. Always determined and solitary, but with a great hunger for life, she set off alone to study. In 1916 she was swept up in the wild bohemian world of modernist New York.
Georgia O'Keeffe shot to notoriety posing nude for her older lover, Alfred Stieglitz, in some of the 20th century's most famous portraits. Her own unforgettable, voluptuous flower forms were at once associated with a shocking and vibrant expression of femininity - an association that she found limiting and denied.
Episode: 30x04 | Airdate: Jul 31, 2016 (82 min)
From beatnik to mod, from folkie to disco tart, from glam rocker to, most recently, crooner of American standards, the newly ennobled Sir Roderick Stewart has had a remarkable musical journey. Alan Yentob visits Rod at his homes in Beverly Hills and Essex and talks to his friends and family, including all eight children aged from two years old to 50.
Featuring rare archival footage of Rod when he was barely out of his teens and living above his parents' north London sweetshop, in a revised repeat Imagine examines an entertaining career across five musical decades.
