Movies: Simon Armitage

Speech-making is the art of persuasion. Well-honed rhetoric appeals not just to the mind, but to the heart and, deeper down, in the guts. Examining the speeches that provoked radical change, surprised pundits or shocked listeners, poet Simon Armitage...

"We are the renters of this world, not its masters," reminds Pooshkar, a precocious 13-year-old member of a youth environmental defense group in India. He and his fellow voraciously energetic students actively rally against the use of plastics. In Af...

A journey into the BBC archives unearthing glorious performances and candid interviews from some of Britain's greatest poets....

Documentary exploring Ted Hughes, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, focusing on how his life story influenced his work and vision....

Virginia Woolf said that Homer's epic poem the Odyssey was 'alive to every tremor and gleam of existence'. Following the magical and strange adventures of warrior king Odysseus, inventor of the idea of the Trojan horse, the poem can claim to be the g...

Explores the importance of an attitudes towards consumption of alcohol in English society by following five subjects through interviews, recitals of poetry, and song....

Told from the point of view of an English trader working in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, the poem-film Out Of The Blue was commissioned by Channel 5 and broadcast five years after the 9.11 attacks on America....

After months of continuous rain, all coastal areas of the UK are flooded. Bella and Jude are marooned on their flooded farm, cut off from any contact with the world outside....

A documentary film crew go into Feltham young offenders prison where the teenagers who left are 75% likely to re-offend. The film talks to a handful of inmates about life in prison and how they got there in the first place. Oh yeah - and it's a music...

Poet Simon Armitage goes on the trail of one of the jewels in the crown of British poetry, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written about 600 years ago by an unknown author. The poem has got just about everything - it is an action-packed adventure, a...

Interviews with ex-soldiers who have served in recent conflicts, many of them now suffering PTSD. But they survived while their mates were killed. They are The Not Dead. After listening to their experiences and their problems, Simon Armitage writes a...

Famous for his womanising, drinking and tragic death, Dylan Thomas is the rock star of 20th-century poetry. But for Welsh poet Owen Sheers, his tempestuous life often obscures the power of his poetry. Sheers takes us on a journey that reveals Dylan T...

Women in an English prison use musical therapy to deal with their life behind bars....

The extraordinary story of the most disturbing witch trial in British history and the key role played in it by one nine-year-old girl. Jennet Device, a beggar-girl from Pendle in Lancashire, was the star witness in the trial in 1612 of her own mother...

A powerful and moving examination of the pandemic, using poetry as a central narrative and featuring people from around the country who tell us their stories of life under Covid-19....

In 2007, Sophie Lancaster was beaten to death because of her appearance. Her story is told through a sequence of poems by Simon Armitage and through the interviews made by her mother in the wake of the tragedy. Adapted for television from the poetry ...