Seriously...

Artist Emma Critchley meets filmmakers, photographers, sculptors and painters who are drawn beneath the sea to create underwater art. Julie Gautier performs a graceful, lyrical ballet on the floor of the deepest pool in the world. Without a tank of air or mask, she dances magically through crystal-clear waters across a sunken stage. In the azure waters of the world, sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor uses the seabed as his canvas. He has installed hundreds of life-sized, concrete people on the sea floor. Fish weave through his couple playing on sea-saw, tourists taking photographs or migrants huddling in a raft. As Jason works towards the opening of his first cold water installation, Emma asks what draws him to the sea, the meaning of his work and how audiences can engage with underwater art. She explores the unpredictability of working with the sea, hearing stories of storms, seasickness and near drowning. Suzi Winstanley is petrified of the deep, but her passion for documenting wildlife has taken her to the remotest and coldest places in the world. With fellow artist Olly Williams, they collaborate to paint, lightning-fast, their experience of encountering white shark and leopard sea. Emma braves the wintery British waters to talk concentration, boundaries and time with artist Peter Matthews who immerses himself in the ocean for hours, sometimes days, floating with his drawing board and paper. Sunlight dances on the twisting fabrics of headless bodies in photographer Estabrak’s pictures. For her, working in Oman, underwater is the only safe space to tell stories. For some the pull of the sea is political, for others environmental, but all the artists find extraordinary freedom in this huge untapped underwater world. Producer: Sarah Bowen

A Thankful or ‘Blessed’ village is a place where every soldier returned alive from World War One. Songwriter Darren Hayman heard about ‘Thankful Villages’ and knew that he had his next album title. He then embarked on a three year odyssey to visit all 54 of them.. Hayman writes a song for every village based on local characters, hidden stories and chance meetings. He records soundscapes in graveyards, playgrounds, churches, road sides and village fetes, uses playground xylophones, and old church organs. Some songs take the form of instrumentals inspired by location, some are interviews with village residents set to music, others are new songs with lyrics or found local traditional songs. The first Thankful Villages were identified and named by Arthur Mee in 1936 in his series of guidebooks, The King’s England. “Thankful Villages is such a beautiful and strange title, I knew what I had to do. I had to visit every one of Britain’s 54 Thankful Villages,” says Hayman. “It was not going to be a project about war. Arthur Mee’s definition was really just a starting point; a random device to point me to small places. That’s what I love and that’s the one certainty I had about Thankful Villages, that it would be about small things, small things that matter.’ Producer: Thom Hoffman A Greenpoint production for BBC Radio 4

Experimental vocalist and movement artist Elaine Mitchener remembers the life and music of the brilliant New York composer-performer, Julius Eastman, whose work, she feels, has been wrongly overlooked. Born in 1940, Eastman was black and gay when there were few like him in the world of classical music. He crossed between the worlds of minimalism, disco and contemporary new music and, for Elaine as a young British-Caribbean student of classical singing, was a much-needed hero. Eastman studied composition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia before joining the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts in Buffalo, NY - a hotbed for experimental musical outlaws. Alongside composing, he was a pianist, a dancer and a singer and was nominated for a Grammy for his compelling vocal performance of Peter Maxwell Davies' "8 Songs for a Mad King" in 1973. In 1976, Eastman moved to New York City where he composed multi-piano works with controversial titles which put questions of racial and sexual identity on the table of contemporary new music. He moved between the uptown and downtown scenes, collaborating with the likes of Meredith Monk and Arthur Russell. Despite his great talents, Eastman's life began to unravel in the mid-1980s and he died in 1990. American composer Mary Jane Leach has brought together Eastman's scores, securing his important legacy. Elaine is joined for a rehearsal of Eastman's work by cellist Anton Lukoszevieze and pianist Rolf Hind. They discuss the intricacies of Eastman's scores, his impact, and the experience of performing his work today. Produced by Zakia Sewell A Cast Iron Radio production for BBC Radio 4 Image credit: Donald Burkhardt

Guy Garvey spent a decade recording his dad’s stories and now he wants you to do the same. When Elbow singer Guy Garvey began to record his father Don's anecdotes, he already knew a lot of the stories he was capturing. What he didn't know was his father's childhood memories, his thoughts and feelings, the characters of long-gone family members, the stories which were much more touching and personal - or, as Guy describes it, 'the tales without a punchline'. Once he got his dad talking, a wealth of new stories emerged which helped Guy form a deeper bond with his dad and painted a vivid picture of a child in wartime Manchester. When Don died in March 2018, Guy realised how precious these recordings were - not just to him but also to his siblings and future generations of his family. Now he’s on a mission to encourage others to record their parents before it's too late. With contributions from Professor Catherine Loveday of the University of Westminster, BBC Technical Producer Sue Stonestreet, Paddy O’Connell and, of course, Mr Donald Garvey and his son Guy. A Snoball production for BBC Radio 4

Forty years after the infamous 'would you go to bed with me?' experiment, what are the social repercussions of biological inequality if men have a higher sex drive than women?