Season 2011

From the 1940s through the 1960s, Sister Rosetta Tharpe played a vital role in shaping rock and roll, influencing future stars from Elvis Presley to Chuck Berry. Though never widely famous, her flamboyant gospel performances and electrifying guitar style made her one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. Born in 1915 in rural Arkansas, she developed her sound in Chicago’s church scene before moving to New York at 23 and signing with Decca Records. For the next three decades she toured extensively across the US and Europe. Her legacy was formally recognised in 2008, when Pennsylvania declared January 11th Sister Rosetta Tharpe Day.

The BBC Four Britannia series turns its focus to British reggae, tracing how music from Jamaica arrived in the 1960s and went on to shape both the UK’s sound and its social landscape over the following two decades. Featuring key artists, performances, and voices from the era, the programme explores roots reggae, lovers rock, and their crossover into mainstream British pop and punk-influenced scenes. It highlights the genre’s cultural impact, the changes it sparked, and the enduring influence reggae has had on British music.

This film tells the previously untold story of one of Jamaica’s most important musical figures, Toots Hibbert. Blending new, intimate performances with rare archive material, it follows his journey from singing in a Jamaican church to becoming a Grammy-winning global artist. Interviews with friends, collaborators, and admirers underline his far-reaching influence. Toots was the first to put the word “reggae” on record with his 1968 track Do the Reggay, and across six decades his songs helped define and popularise the genre. With his unmistakable, soulful voice and songs rooted in everyday Jamaican life, the film celebrates a true giant of popular music.

This is the first feature-length film devoted to Gustav Holst, portraying him as both a radical thinker and an uncompromising composer. Largely self-taught, Holst learned Sanskrit, lived among brothels in Algiers, cycled into the Sahara, and during the First World War aligned himself with outspoken anti-imperialist causes. He despised the patriotic words later attached to I Vow to Thee, My Country, believing they contradicted his principles, and even helped distribute the Socialist Worker. His music—most famously The Planets—owed little to prevailing English traditions and was strikingly individual. Despite his originality, Holst died disillusioned and ill, not yet 60, leaving behind a body of work that was truly his own.

A journey through hip hop history using BBC archive performances, spanning from the Sugarhill Gang in 1979, through 1980s pioneers such as Run-DMC, LL Cool J, and Eric B & Rakim, into the 1990s with Ice-T, Monie Love, the Fugees, and the Roots, before concluding with later figures including Dr. Dre, Eminem, Dizzee Rascal, and Jay-Z.

This documentary examines how Prince—performer, innovator, and mystery—reshaped global ideas of Black popular music in the 1980s through hits such as 1999, Kiss, Raspberry Beret, and Alphabet Street. His status as an international icon was sealed with the release of the Oscar-winning, semi-autobiographical film Purple Rain in 1984, launching a remarkable and ongoing journey of artistic reinvention.