BBC Arts

London: The Modern Babylon is legendary director Julien Temple's epic time-traveling voyage to the heart of his hometown.

The extraordinary life of playwright, singer, actor, composer, and director Noël Coward, who rose from poverty to stardom while keeping his sexuality a secret. Featuring Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Frank Sinatra, Michael Caine and Lucille Ball. Narrated by Alan Cumming. With Rupert Everett as the voice of Noël Coward. Directed by Academy Award Nominee Barnaby Thompson.

The 1916 Battle of the Somme remains the most famous battle of World War I, remembered for its bloodshed and its limited territorial gains. What is often overlooked, however, is the literary importance of the Somme: more writers and poets fought in it than in any other battle in history. Narrated by Michael Sheen, War of Words: Soldier-Poets of the Somme details the experiences of the poets and writers who served in the battle. The work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg and JRR Tolkien (who arrived at the Western Front with ambitions to be a poet) was informed and transformed by the battle. Taken together, their experiences allow us to see this dreadful historical event through multiple points of view. The film uses animation, documentary accounts, surviving artefacts, battalion war diaries and the landscape itself to reconnect this literature to the events that inspired it.

Dream city, Sin City, a mirage in the desert, Las Vegas is a film set in its own right, a piece of pop art, an outdoor museum of American culture. What is the story behind the neon lights and fantastical buildings? What will its future be in these tough times? Alan Yentob takes a mob tour and talks to producers and performers about the golden days when Sinatra and Dino held the stage, and the wise guys called the shots.

While touring to promote her second studio album "Sucker", Charli XCX tackles what feminism ('the f-word') really means to women in the music industry in a series of interviews with other pop artists.

As good as any Dickens novel, this is the triumphant and tragic story of the greatest architectural dynasty of the 19th century. Dan Cruickshank charts the rise of Sir George Gilbert Scott to the very heights of success, the fall of his son George Junior and the rise again of his grandson Giles. It is a story of architects bent on a mission to rebuild Britain. From the Romantic heights of the Midland Hotel at St Pancras station to the modern image of Bankside power station (now Tate Modern), this is the story of a family that shaped the Victorian age and left a giant legacy.

Writer Broadcaster and Newsnight arts correspondent Stephen Smith finds out what it took to get ahead at the court of Richard II.

The story of Gluck - Britain's cross-dressing high society painter of the 1930s - who staged 'one-man shows', had relationships with women and somehow got away with it.

Inspired by a powerful involuntary mania which took hold of citizens in the city of Strasbourg just over five hundred years ago, this film is a collaboration in isolation with some of the greatest dancers working today.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra perform a live soundtrack in this premier stage adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes thriller.

A pioneering artist and cultural icon. His work is a history of 20th-century America. A country reinventing itself - as seen through the legendary artist's eyes.

An ageing director is making her final film: one delving into her past. Face to face with the embodiment of her younger self, the line between her present reality and the film's blur.

Featuring exclusive access to their recent tour and their new album, this documentary reveals the fascinating world of Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe.

This groundbreaking documentary unlocks the hidden psychology of J.M.W. Turner through his 37,000 private sketches, drawings, and watercolours – an extraordinary archive that reveals the man behind the masterpieces. For the first time on television, these pages – Including erotic sketches previously thought to have been destroyed – are used as a window into Turner’s inner world, exposing his private thoughts, creative obsessions and emotional life. Rarely writing about himself, Turner left behind few clues to his personality. But in his sketchbooks, his restless imagination and vulnerabilities come vividly to life. They guide viewers through Turner’s life and art, revealing how his 37,000 sketches not only chart his creative evolution but also provide an unprecedented psychological portrait of a man both visionary and vulnerable.

Join art historian Robert Hughes for a fascinating journey into the life of Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Using the artist's works as the benchmarks in this biographical profile, Hughes follows Goya from his role as painter to the royal court through his maturity as a war reporter and into his troubled final years. Hughes reveals how the upheaval of Goya's life can be traced through his paintings that range from the fanciful to the insane.

The Skeleton Wummin rests at the bottom of the cold sea, withering away in the passing tides and dreaming of life above the waves, in this vivid and poetically eerie Scots-language fable.

In 1968, Jackie Collins published her first novel The World Is Full of Married Men to remarkable success and immediate scandal. Over the next decades, Collins would go on to build an empire writing books where female agency came first. Jackie Collins’ women were unapologetic about their needs and their sexual desire, and to her devoted readers, Collins became a symbol of the effortless power that defined her heroines.

Set during the years between the "Rebecca" trial and the writing of Du Maurier's short story "The Birds", including her relationship with her husband Frederick 'Boy' Browning, and her largely unrequited infatuations with American publishing tycoon's wife Ellen Doubleday and the actress Gertrude Lawrence.

The Ruins Of Empires is an innovative performance piece by Hip Hop Artist and writer Akala. It is an abridged version of his epic poem of the same name and is a personal interpretation of history as told through the 'knowledge seeker' performed by Akala himself. He follows the course of mans evolution, via astral travel and multiple reincarnations, in an attempt to discover the cause of the rise and fall of Empires. It is driven by a musical score by Mala and Paul Gladstone-Reid and combines innovative animation techniques and emerging technology with some of the most ground breaking creative talents in the industry, under the creative guidance of Andy Serkis and The Imaginarium.