Can a book help change the way we think about a place?
How have writers been influenced by the landscape around them?
Those are the questions we set out to answer by making eleven different programmes under the title .
From broadcaster Martha Kearney to Viz creator Chris Donald – Madness frontman Suggs to Radio 1’s Alice Levine – each programme is fronted by someone with a real love for a particular part of England – and for the books written about that place.
Radio 1 DJ Alice Levine goes back to her roots for Books That Made Britain - Rebel Writers of The East Midlands
Of course many great books have been dramatised for television or the big screen – but it’s not as easy to make a programme about the book itself. Talking about the printed word can make for heavy viewing. So we set out to make programmes about books that celebrate the places we know and love – and to see how novelists have been influenced by the people and locations around them.
Madness frontman Suggs explores novels written through the eyes of newcomers as they make London their home
Suggs for example looks at books that depict the early isolation and bewilderment that moving to London can bring – from Oliver Twist’s first impressions of the city to Moses description of people living in their own “little worlds” in Samuel Shelvey’s Lonely Londoners.
Dramatic pictures of the Cornish coast fill the screen in the South West’s programme. Presenter Chris Packham looks at how The Wind in the Willows – started as a series of letters from Kenneth Grahame to his son – and explores how the landscape has influenced popular historial romances like Winston Graham’s Poldark and Daphne Du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek.
The works of Sue Townsend, Beatrix Potter, Dorothy L Sayers, Dick Francis, Catherine Cookson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Philip Larkin are among the dozens of writers featured in the programmes.
Part of the , and made by Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ English Regions working with Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Learning and Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Four, we’re really proud of these programmes – make sure you don’t miss the edition that’s about books around you.
Stuart Thomas is Head of English Regions Programmes.
- Books That Made Britain is broadcast in England on Sunday 16 October at 3.45pm on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ One