Howard Barker, Welcome to India, attracting young opera audiences

Available for over a year

With Mark Lawson. Welcome to India is a new BBC series which aims to lift the lid on the reality of life for India's 1.2 billion residents. The poet Daljit Nagra reviews the programme, and also considers previous Western documentaries about the country. The playwright Howard Barker - who coined the term 'Theatre of Catastrophe' - shares his uncompromising views on collaboration, accessibility, and art as an ordeal. And as his play Scenes from an Execution receives a new production at the National Theatre, he offers a theory as to why his works have never been staged there before. For younger audiences, opera can seem an unwelcoming art-form, and its reputation for high ticket prices can also make it seem unattractive. As the English National Opera launch a scheme designed to encourage young people to try opera, artistic director John Berry explains how Damon Albarn and Terry Gilliam are part of the plan to bring in new audiences. In the week that Channel 4 gathers a whole host of its presenting talent under one roof for its week-long Hotel GB series - including Gok Wan, Mary Portas, Gordon Ramsay and Katie Piper - David Quantick considers such celebrity supergroups, and whether they can ever be more than (or even as much as) a sum of their parts. Producer Ellie Bury.