Screening date of 3rd March on BBC4 confirmed for Pauline Boty documentary!

The first screening on TV of BOTY: I am the Sixties, the new documentary film from Mono Media Films and Channel X, has been confirmed as 10:00pm on BBC4 on Monday 3rd March, then available on iPlayer.

Further info here from its creators: “The first TV documentary of the Pop Art sensation Pauline Boty; Boty: I Am The Sixties tracks the artist’s original contribution to British art, her feminism and unique take on the nascent celebrity culture of the 1960’s. Ahead of her time in so many ways, Boty’s story ends with her tragic early death at 28 in 1966 and the subsequent revival of interest in her work in the last decade.

Packed full of original photographs and art work, this 60 minute film calls on an array of family, friends, art critics and famous fans to lead us through the Boty story. Contributors include Pop Art titan Sir Peter Blake, comedian and artist Jim Moir, critic Kate Bryan, best friend and Print Designer Natalie Gibson MBE, Celia Birtwell CBE, musicians Corrine Drewery and Tanita Tikaram and TV presenter Ronnie Archer Morgan amongst many other notable friends and fans of the British female Pop Art pioneer Pauline Boty.

A Mono Media Films and Channel X Production; Boty: I Am The Sixties is Directed by Lee Cogswell, Written and produced by Vinny Rawding and Mark Baxter, Executive Producers are: Alan Marke, Jim Reid, Natalie Gibson MBE, Executive Producer for the BBC is Mark Bell.”

The BBC’s page for the programme is here: [link]

New BBC series “Simon Schama’s Story of Us” includes Pauline Boty in the first episode

“Historian Simon Schama explores how art and culture has captured the transformations of British society since 1945. Although the postwar years saw a shared optimism, expressed in the 1951 Festival of Britain, Simon discovers how a common British identity slowly fragmented as different and sometimes clashing voices emerged. Writers like Alan Sillitoe depicted working-class life with new authority, while artists like Pauline Boty reflected a new mood of sexual frankness. The evangelical Christian Festival of Light fought back against what its leaders viewed as a rising tide of filth, but nothing could stop competing voices from being heard – first on TV, in what were known as ‘open access’ programmes, and today on social media.” [from the BBC website]
.
The programme will be first broadcast on BBC2 at 21:00 on Wednesday 8 January and then available on iPlayer.
.
For further information please see [link]
.
With thanks to John Earls for the notification.

Listen to clips of Pauline Boty on “The Public Ear” at BBC Sounds

A Year in the Life of the Swinging Sixties was broadcast yesterday on Radio 4 and is now available at BBC Sounds.
.
It features clips of Pauline Boty alongside other contributors including Mary Quant and The Beatles from “The Public Ear”, a fortnightly programme on culture and entertainment she co-presented, including her thoughts on the popularity of romantic fiction! The programme ran from 6 October 1963–22 March 1964.
.
“James Peak and Joan Bakewell find some incredible hidden BBC archive from 1963. Wait! Is that The Beatles? And Mary Quant? And Morecambe & Wise?

The Public Ear was a bold new arts show, broadcast on The Light Programme in 1963, which tried to make sense of all the amazing things that were happening in London and the UK in music, art, theatre, comedy, football, politics and feminism. Travel back in time for a Year in the Life of the Swinging Sixties, for archive unheard for these last 60 years – the precise moment that Beatlemania started and the National Theatre was founded, a time when broadcasters could ask people on the street who they’d drop a bomb on. Joan Bakewell was there the first time around and puts these amazing archive finds into context.” [from the programme website]
.
The programme is available here: [link]

Discussion on Pauline Boty from Radio 4’s Front Row now available on BBC Sounds

The section on Boty concludes the programme and starts at approximately 29:10. The BBC website describes the contents of this edition as follows:

“The extraordinary work of the artist Pauline Boty (1938 – 1966) is explored by the curator of a new exhibition, Mila Askarova, and the art historian Lynda Nead.

Paddington director Paul King returns with Wonka starring Timothée Chalamet in the title role. He talks with Samira about exploring the backstory of Willy Wonka and Roald Dahl’s surprising vision for fiction’s greatest confectioner.

Front Row rounds up the best non-fiction books of 2023 with Caroline Sanderson – non-fiction books editor for The Bookseller and chair of judges for the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2022, Stephanie Merritt – critic and novelist, and John Mitchinson – cofounder of Unbound, the independent crowdfunding publisher and co-presenter of literary podcast, Backlisted.”
.
The programme is available to listen to here [link]

Details
Presenter: Samira Ahmed
Producer: Paula McGrath
Released On: 6 Dec 2023
Available for over a year

New landmark eight-part BBC series includes work by Boty

Art that Made Us is a landmark eight-part series for BBC Two co-produced by the BBC and The Open University. Through 1,500 years and eight dramatic turning points, the series presents an alternative history of the British Isles, told through art.

Leading British creatives, including Simon Armitage, Anthony Gormley, Lubaina Himid, Maxine Peake and Michael Sheen join cultural historians to explore key cultural works that define each age.

Boty is represented in the final episode of the series, Brilliant Isles which “explores how the generation of artists who recorded the shocks of global war gave way in the 1950s and 1960s to an explosion of new voices from across the British Isles, reinventing the arts and creating a richer, more diverse culture. Young artists rebelled against the old establishment, kicking against the confines of class, sex, nation and race. Actress Lesley Sharp performs passages from Shelagh Delaney’s breakthrough play A Taste of Honey which brought the ordinary lives and unheard voices of working class women to a mainstream audience, while Chila Kumari Singh Burman explores the career of pop artist Pauline Boty.” [from the BBC website]

For further information including synopses, clips, broadcasting times and dates and link to iPlayer please see the BBC Programme page here [link]

Images of Boty’s lost collages seen in “Pop Goes the Easel” to be shown on paulineboty.org

“Untitled (I surrender dear)”, collage, c. 1961. Screen grab from “Pop Goes the Easel”. *© Estate of Pauline Boty*

I would like to thank the BBC Photo Library for their assistance in confirming that copyright for the images of Pauline Boty’s works shown in Ken Russell’s 1962 documentary Pop Goes the Easel resides with the Estate of Pauline Boty, and am delighted therefore to be able to include them on this website.
Commissioned by BBC Television for its Monitor series, Russell’s film includes 16 of Boty’s works shown initially full screen and face-on and then side-on whilst she sat with Peter Blake to discuss their content and sources of imagery. The titles aren’t discussed, but as mentioned in the previous News item, the hope is to ultimately match at least some of them to those of works exhibited in the Blake, Boty, Porter, Reeve exhibition which took place at the AIA Gallery whilst the programme was being filmed.

For UK viewers, Pop Goes the Easel is currently available on iPlayer here: [link]