There are two things on the UK’s BBC which may be of interest, on Saturday (20th May). The first appears on Radio 4, and is an hour long dramatisation by Roger James Elsgood of Haydn Middleton’s novel The Ballad of Syd Morgan. This sees Syd Barrett (played by Tyger Drew-Honey) encountering novelist E M Forster (played by Simon Russell Beale) in King’s College, Cambridge, in 1968. Their meeting “leads to a conversation between two men belonging to very different eras of the 20th century and at markedly different stages in their lives, about the loss and the continued absence of creativity.” More information can be found here (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001m4cx), and it airs at 3pm UK time. It will be available on demand via the BBC’s iPlayer service shortly after broadcast. Also on Saturday – and again in the UK, but potentially available worldwide online via the BBC’s iPlayer – the new series of Later…With Jools Holland starts at 9:50pm on the BBC Two television channel. Amongst the guests is Jill Furmanovsky who started photographing Pink Floyd way back in 1972, so it would be astonishing if she didn’t at least mention the band during the interview. Jill’s taken iconic pictures of numerous iconic artists, and there’s currently an exhibition of some of her incredible work at Manchester City Library, running until June 24th, 2023. Admission is free and we hear it is well worth visiting.
