hello, i m john wilson, welcome to this cultural life, the radio four podcast, in which i ask leading creative figures to reveal the key moments in their life, and the most important cultural works that fired their own artistic imagination. my guest is director, screenwriter and playwright mike leigh. he s known for gritty social dramas, including vera drake and secrets and lies. domestic comedies like life is sweet and happy go lucky, and historical stories, including mr turner and peterloo. i spoke to him in one of the many radio studios in bbc broadcasting house. mike, welcome to this cultural life. let s take you to the beginning. what is your earliest cultural memory? as a kid, we had, and i was exposed to. ..pantomime, live theatre of various sorts. circus. the circus was a big deal. variety. live variety, the old, you know, descendants of the music hall, including, at the age of nine, a trip to the ardwick hippodrome in manchester to see laurel and hardy live on stage.
this cultural life. let s take you to the beginning. what s your earliest cultural memory? as a kid, we had, iwas exposed to pantomime, live theatre of various thoughts, circus, the circus was a big deal, variety, live variety, descendants of the music hall, including at the age of nine a trip to the ardwick hippodrome to see laurel and hardy live on stage on the famous tour, which i later realised was the famous tour, and the two important things about that were one, two extraordinary things, one was it was in colour they were in colour and two, that oliver hardy com pletely couldn t get his act together at all, he was absolutely out of control, and of course later we realised that that was because he was cracking up and it was the end of their of their career. were they funny? no. but i was fascinated, it didn t make any difference. of course, in school, from the earliest age, i was drawing, putting on sketches, generally wanted to be creative in all kinds of differen
afternoon in broad daylight, they stabbed her so brutally she stood no chance. leaving her to die, they ran off across these fields and with across these fields, and with blood still on his hands, one of the teenage murderers caught the bus home. now the two children who butchered brianna can be identified. scarlettjenkinson was 15 at the time. sentenced today, the court heard she enjoyed the killing and remains dangerous. scarlett, i have concluded that the primary motivation for brianna s murder was your deep desire to kill. the messages reveal your fantasies and show your sadistic motives. brianna s murder was exceptionally brutal. eddie ratcliffe brought the hunting knife to kill brianna and had different reasons for targeting her. you dehumanised brianna by constantly referring to her as it and your messages about wanting to see if she would scream like a man or a girl show your own interests in killing brianna link to your hostility towards her as a transgender person
what is your view? is it the end of humanity or a bit more of a benign force? well, it could be somewhere in between, i would say. i mean, ithink, like a lot of people, so i ve toyed around with like the chat bots and things, and things like that, chatgpt. we d actually, we d wrapped on this latest series of black mirror and then, and then the next month chatg pt came out. one of our episodes is quite timely. there s a sort of ai generated imagery thing going on in one of our episodes. but i toyed around with chatgpt and you sort of type in like, come up with a black mirror storyline, or something like that or, say something in the style of philomena cunk, or something like that, and it will do, it will spit out something that at first glance you get a kind of sudden spike of dread and think, that s it, i m out of a job, this thing has replaced me, because it looks convincing. but that s really. where we re at at the moment, that s really what it s doing, it s just sort
to death in nottingham say they ve been let down by police after their killer is given a hospital order for three counts of manslaughter by diminished responsibility. russia says missile fragments and black boxes have been found at the sight of a plane crash which has said to have killed tens of ukrainian prisoners of war. nhs consultants reject a new pay offer with 51% of union staying with the issue of capital punishment and according to amnesty international, the number of executions is rising globally, despite many countries abolishing the use of capital punishment. according to the latest figures, in 2022, 55 countries had the death penalty. one of those is japan, where a man has been sentenced to death following a deadly arson attack on an animation studio in kyoto in 2019 which killed 36 people. shinji aoba had previously admitted setting the building on fire. his lawyers had sought an acquittal on the grounds of mental incompetence, but the judge rejected that a