Charles Saumarez Smith of the Royal Academy of Arts

The Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts Charles Saumarez Smith talks about the Summer Exhibition which features more than a thousand works from Britain’s most renowned artists to unknown amateurs.

Dr Helen Mason is a solar physicist at the University of Cambridge and has spent her academic career studying the sun.

Find out how the sun looks today from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory.

After retiring from a stressful job in social care, Angela Plater decided to become a life drawing model. Her first sitting was for photographer Rankin and she talks to Richard and Sian about finding a new creative direction later in life.

Discover more about getting involved in art and where to find your nearest life drawing class here. 

Photo credit: David Kretschmer

Julie Redfern from Burnley can hear her eyeballs move. It’s part of a condition called Superior Canal Dehiscence Syndrome, which means the temporal bone that covers part of her inner ear has holes in it causing sound within her body to be amplified.

She’s had an operation on her right ear to reduce the noise that she hears but can’t wait for the second operation on her left ear.

Olivier award-winning musical performer Maria Friedman shares the track she inherited, the theme from ‘Peter and the Wolf’, by Prokofiev, and the track she’s passing on ‘Bess, You Is My Woman Now’, from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

David was looking to buy an old car and ended up buying his first car, an Austin 10,nearly 50 years after trading it in. He tracked it down to a farm in Sussex and persuaded the owner to sell it back to him.