Programme Details

In the first Night Waves of 2005, Paul Allen meets the film director Oliver Stone. His latest work is an epic tracing the brief but matchlessly successful life of Alexander the Great, who by the age of twenty-five already ruled more than ninety percent of the known world. Oliver Stone explains why in his version of events, myth and history can barely be separated. And he also discusses why it's naive to dismiss Alexander as a power-crazed imperialist.

Night Waves looks back at the forgotten front of the Cold War. For twenty years the US state department sent America's finest jazz musicians on tour to act as cultural ambassadors in some of the world's most dangerous and volatile places. Geoffrey Smith and the author of a new history of the tours explain how Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong and others did their bit for world peace.

As a film adaptation of Patrick Marber's play Closer reaches British screens, Night Waves looks at the uneasy relationship between the cinema and the theatre. The younger art form has been plundering from the older since the very first feature films - but should the two be distinct?

And the art critic William Feaver considers the artists who have painted versions of the Stations of the Cross - from Giotto and artists of the Italian renaissance to a reawakening of interest in the subject in the twentieth century.

Night Waves, live at 9.30pm, here on BBC Radio3.


Presenter: Paul Allen
Producer: Thomas Morris



Additional Information:
1) Satchmo Blows Up The World, by Penny von Eschen, is published by Harvard University Press.
2) Closer is at cinemas nationwide from Friday 14 January, certificate 15.
3) MichaelKenny: Stations of the Cross is at the Royal Academy in London until March 27th. www.royalacademy.org.uk