Programme Details

What do poetry and the cinema have in common? For the writer, set designer, painter, editor and documentary film maker, Humphrey Jennings, the question would have seemed odd if not nonsensical.....but then he has been hailed as the only true poet of the English cinema.
In Night Waves this evening Kevin Jackson, who has just completed a biography of Jennings, talks to Paul Allen about his achievement as a film maker and discusses poetry and cinema with the poet, George Szirtes, whose new collection, Reel, draws on some of the formal strategies of film to conjure up the world of his Hungarian childhood. 

There'll also be a review of an exhibition of the portraits painted by the eminent Victorian, G.F. Watts and the playwrights, Paul Jepson and Tanika Gupta will be discussing the vitality of the dramatic monologue in dealing with topical issues.

That's all in Night Waves with Paul Allen on BBC Radio 3 at 9.30pm.

Presenter: Paul Allen
Producer: Zahid Warley



Additional information:
1) Humphrey Jennings by Kevin Jackson is published by Picador on October 25th.
2) Reel by George Szirtes is published by Bloodaxe Books on 18th November. Bloodaxe also publish two of his earlier collections -The Budapest File and An English Apocalypse.
3) The National Theatre in London will be staging three more in its series of dramatic monologues.
Asylum by Moira Buffini is on Monday 18th October.
Debt by Gregory Burke is on Tuesday 19th October.
And Health by Tanika Gupta is on Thursday 21st October.

The performances all begin at 6pm.