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Guests:
Journalist Jim White
Historian and former Cabinet Minister Roy Hattersley
Comedian Natalie Haynes

The Damned United
By 1974, the legendary football manager Brian Clough had taken Derby County from the bottom of the second division to the top of the first. Then he landed the job of managing his arch-rival’s team, Leeds United. 44 days later, he was gone.

Now writer Peter Morgan and actor Michael Sheen have brought to Clough the close-up, fiction-from-fact treatment they’ve already applied to Tony Blair and David Frost. Some of those involved cried ‘foul’ in response to the novelist David Peace’s take on this story. But how successfully have this new team tackled it?
The Damned United is on general release from Friday 27 March, certificate 15.

Five Minutes Of Heaven
In 1975, in Lurgan, Northern Ireland, a young Ulster Volunteer Force recruit shot a man he suspected of threatening Protestants. The man’s younger brother witnessed the killing. 33 years later, they have never met.

But in this new drama by Guy Hibbert, author of Omagh, a meeting between the two men is imaginatively played out, based on interviews with both of them. Liam Neeson plays the killer; James Nesbitt his victim’s brother.

Five Minutes Of Heaven is broadcast on Â鶹ԼÅÄ2 Sunday 5 April at 9.00pm.

Dimetos
In 1976, Paul Scofield starred in a new play by the great playwright of the anti-Apartheid struggle, Athol Fugard. But the play was an abstract departure from Fugard’s usual township terrain, and left many nonplussed.

Now the Donmar Warehouse in London has revived it, with Jonathan Pryce as Dimetos. So after the lukewarm critical reception for the Donmar’s West End production of Madame de Sade last week, have they plucked out another play better left on the shelf – or rediscovered a lost classic?

Dimetos at the Donmar Warehouse in London until 9 May.

The Collection
What links art and dance? Choreographer Siobhan Davies and gallery owner Victoria Miro’s new collaborative show aims to explore the connections between their two arts. The show features a machine that casts constantly changing shadows around a dance studio in south London, while in north London dancers dance in a gallery. And there’s a mirrored box festooned with coloured lights that stretch to infinity.

The Collection is at the Siobhan Davies Studio in south London and the Victoria Miro Gallery in north London until 9 April. Admission is free.

A Single Swallow
The thirtysomething writer Horatio Clare has chronicled the collapse of his parents’ attempt to relocate their marriage from London to a Welsh hillside, and his own later descent into drug use. Now he follows the swallows that sit outside his window in Wales from South Africa back to his home, in an attempt to finish growing up.

A Single Swallow is published by Chatto and Windus.

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