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Clive Myrie, photographed at the Langham hotel, London.
Clive Myrie: ‘I’m a big opera fan. My wife and I usually go to the Verona festival every year.’ Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer
Clive Myrie: ‘I’m a big opera fan. My wife and I usually go to the Verona festival every year.’ Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

On my radar: Clive Myrie's cultural highlights

This article is more than 3 years old

The News at Ten presenter on reimagining Dickens, his love of opera and catching up with Gilles Peterson on a Saturday afternoon

The BBC news journalist Clive Myrie was born in Bolton, Lancashire, in 1964. He studied law at Sussex University and joined the BBC through its graduate trainee scheme in the late 1980s, starting out as a reporter for Radio Bristol. As a foreign correspondent, he reported from Tokyo, Los Angeles and Brussels and covered wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. He became a presenter on the BBC News channel in 2009 and is now a regular on BBC News at Ten. His recent reports from the Royal London hospital, speaking to nurses, doctors and morticians on the Covid frontline, have been harrowing but essential viewing.

1. TV

Dickensian (BBC One)

The cast of BBC One’s Dickensian. Photograph: Todd Antony/BBC/Red Planet Productions

I know I’m five or six years late on this, but my wife had watched it all in one go and she convinced me to take the plunge during lockdown. The premise sounded a bit naff – a sort of origins narrative for Dickens characters from different novels – but it was absolutely brilliant. The acting was wonderful and the whole concept worked really well. There’s a scene where a character has her baby, who turns out to be Esther in Bleak House, and her sister hides the baby because she’s jealous – it was absolutely heartbreaking. I loved this so much that my wife and I ended up watching the BBC adaptation of Bleak House, just to follow up on Esther’s adventures.

2. Documentary

Agnelli (HBO)

Gianni Agnelli. Photograph: David Lees/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Gianni Agnelli was the playboy grandson of the founder of Fiat and later the company’s CEO. This documentary about his life starts out as a shimmering evocation of 1950s and 60s Italy and that whole era of sun and beautiful women and good-looking guys. Then it morphs into a heavy-duty political analysis of the times, as Agnelli has to deal with industrial relations and the violence of the Red Brigades in the 1970s and 80s. They used to say that what was good for General Motors was good for America and it was the same for Fiat and Italy after the second world war, because it was such a big part of the Italian economy. This is a brilliant documentary.

3. Opera

Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne (online)

Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

I’m a big opera fan. My wife and I go to Verona for the opera festival every year, but since Covid hit we’ve been catching up with a lot of opera performances online. And we finally managed to catch – because we missed it when it came out in 2018 – Glyndebourne’s production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare with Dame Sarah Connolly and Danielle de Niese. It was rightly hailed as a landmark production by David McVicar and the designs were by a friend of ours, Rob Jones, who took a bow at the end, which was nice to see. It’s funny, touching, heroic, wonderful.

4. Radio

Gilles Peterson on BBC 6 Music

Gilles Peterson on BBC Radio 6 Music. Photograph: PR

Gilles Peterson’s Saturday afternoon show on 6 Music keeps me up to date with what’s going on in jazz, funk, soul and hip-hop. I’ve been listening to him since the mid 80s and I’ve still got cassettes of his early shows in my loft. He’s introduced me to so many new artists. Recently, he reacquainted me with Fela Kuti, who I haven’t listened to in ages, as well as Sérgio Mendes and Dee Dee Bridgewater. He brings these people out again, but then adds newer voices, such as Robert Glasper, a brilliant modern jazz pianist. He’s my link to the modern world.

5. Novel

Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy, circa 1908. Photograph: Hulton Getty

I haven’t had that much time to read during lockdown because of work, but I was asked to read three books for A Good Read on Radio 4 and this was one of them. It’s quite a short book, which was good for me. It’s the story of a Muslim commander fighting for independence from the Russians in 19th-century Chechnya. He’s a heroic figure with a righteous cause, but he ends up having to decide whether to betray his side to help free his family who have been kidnapped. I never covered the Chechen war in the 1990s, but this made me want to read up on what’s been going on there more recently.

6. Art

Titian: Love, Desire, Death at the National Gallery

Danae by Titian at the National Gallery. Photograph: Stratfield Saye Preservation Trust

The BBC made a documentary about this Titian show at the National Gallery and when the lockdown eased I went to see it. It was the first time that these six paintings, commissioned by the future Philip II of Spain, and based on classical myths (primarily taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses), had been displayed together since they were split up. It was really interesting to look at the colours, the brushwork, all the classic Titian stuff, but for me, it was just the idea that what Philip had commissioned was finally on display in one room, for the first time in hundreds of years. It was just wonderful.

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