Tom Stoppard is perhaps the world’s leading, funniest and cleverest playwright. Ever since he hit the ground running in the 1960s with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, there has always been a streak of melancholy beneath the sparkling surface of his work. Now with his latest play, Leopoldstadt, he comes full circle and faces up to the pain and loss in his past. In this programme, he tells Alan Yentob his extraordinary story.

Follow the moment Barrett was kicked out of Pink Floyd, from the narrative of him going from groundbreaking musician to iconic rocker and manic, unstable star.

Sir André Previn, born in Berlin in 1929, figures among the most prominent musicians of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He won four Academy Awards for his film scores, he composes concertos, musicals and operas. He conducts, arranges music, and is a renowned pianist, as well as a jazz musician. Previn’s first opera, ‚A Streetcar Named Desire’, based on Tennessee Williams’ play, successfully premiered in San Francisco, in 1998. Our film mirrors Sir Previn’s affinities to Europe as well as to the United States. He is at home in both worlds, with their rather different cultural realities.

Writer Michael Bracewell presents an unusual and provocative look at the life and legacy of Oscar Wilde, the controversial Irish-born writer. Michael sets out to rescue him from the dangers of respectability by portraying him as an inspiration to generations of rockers and artists.

This absolutely top-notch documentary by Robert Fischer is a fascinating look back at not just the film in question, but Fassbinder's meteoric career which ended all too soon with his untimely death. Archival footage of Fassbinder is utilized (including several fascinating snippets culled from interviews he did at the disastrous Cannes premiere of Despair), as well as many others involved in the film and its release. Even if you're not a particular fan of Despair, or even in fact of Fassbinder, this is stellar documentary film making and is an intriguing look at one of the most enigmatic masters of the New German Cinema.

Alan Clarke's documentary about Soviet writer and dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who had left the Soviet Union in 1976 after years spent in their prisons and psychiatric wards. The film was completed in 1977 but never broadcast, subject only to private screenings. The documentary appears publicly for the first time as a special feature of the BFI's 'Dissent and Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969-1989)' box set, alongside 50 minutes of outtakes.

A documentary on the life and career of one of the most influential film directors of all time, Steven Spielberg.

Rob Hedden's witty on-set documentary captures the revolutionary air that had begun to swirl around Brazil even before the controversy surrounding its U.S. release. It features footage of director Terry Gilliam; actors Michael Palin, Jonathan Pryce, and Kim Geist; screenwriters Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown; and other key members of Brazil's cast and crew.

“In-Side-Out” is the debut film by US beat poet George Moorse, a wildly colorful pop poem. The film critic Enno Patalas described “In-Side-Out” as a “fantastic abracadabra and erotic delirium” and considered it the best West German film at the 1965 Oberhausen festival. “In-Side-Out” was also the LCB's first film production: the cheerful and colorful kaleidoscope of romantic love, told as an associatively swirling sequence of images.

In documentary style, Al Pacino tells the story of how he came to stage a production of Oscar Wilde's Salomé. He travels to the Mojave Desert ("dessert?"), to Ireland and the United Kingdom to show who Wilde was as a private person and as a writer.