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Lights in the Darkness

Episode 1 of 8

In this alternative history of the British Isles, working artists explore an era once known as the 'dark’ ages, finding mysterious art that haunts our landscapes and imagination.

This episode immerses us in the turbulent era that followed the Roman occupation of Britain. Once known as the β€˜dark’ ages, in reality it’s a time of glittering art and extraordinary cultural fusions.

This alternative history of the British Isles, told through art, brings together encounters between contemporary artists and ancient art, and interviews with experts and curators, to trace how Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Norse peoples fought for supremacy, leaving behind mysterious fragments of art that still haunt our landscapes and imagination.

Sculptor Antony Gormley meets Spong Man, a unique clay figure that once sat on a 5th-century funerary urn, a mysterious glimpse into the mindset of early Anglo-Saxon settlers. Meanwhile, actor Michael Sheen performs the 7th-century Welsh poem of resistance against the Anglo-Saxons, Y Gododdin, and Scottish artists Dalziel & Scullion wonder at the monumental Aberlemno Stones (c.500-800 AD), believed to mark the hard-fought boundary line of the Pictish kingdom.

Like the stones, the gold artefacts of the Staffordshire Hoard fuse pagan and Christian imagery, and at Stoke’s Potteries Museum artist Cornelia Parker investigates why they were found so broken and twisted. Spreading alongside such Christian symbols was a powerful new language, English, used to gloss over the Latin in the elaborate Lindisfarne Gospels explored by the Rev Richard Coles. Maria Dahvana Headley analyses how English was used in the epic poem Beowulf and tells us how she has updated the work with a hip-hop feminist translation.

The Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi reveals a new sense of the Isles’ place in the wider world, and is examined by map artist David McCandless and British Library curator Claire Breay. Graphic novelist Woodrow Phoenix explores how the Anglo-Saxon age came to a dramatic end in 1066 by taking a fresh look at the embroidered propaganda of the Norman conquest in the Bayeux Tapestry.

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58 minutes

Signed Audio described

Last on

Tue 24 Oct 2023 03:00

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Music Played

  • Thom Yorke

    Suspirium

  • Black Sabbath

    War Pigs

  • Massive Attack, Horace Andy

    Angel

  • Nils Frahm

    Old Thought

  • Emperors New Clothes

    Leaders and Believers (Unkle Mix)

  • Zbigniew Preisner, Elzbieta Towarnicka, Dariusz Paradowski, Piotr Lykowsky, Piotr Kusiewicz, Grzegorz Zychovicz and Jan Szypowsky

    Dies Irae

  • Max Richter

    Path 5

  • Max Richter

    Path 19 (yet frailest)

    Performer: Ben Russell.
  • Deepcentral

    #Dragosteainvin

  • Thom Yorke

    Black Swan

  • Rival Consoles

    Pre

  • Four Tet

    Plastic People

  • JΓ³hann JΓ³hannsson

    The Rocket Builder (Io Pan!)

Credits

Role Contributor
Narrator David Threlfall
Director Sam Anthony
Producer Helena Hunt
Series Producer Melanie Fall
Executive Producer Russell Barnes
Executive Producer Denys Blakeway
Production Company ClearStory Ltd

Broadcasts

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