The Mark Steel Lectures
2003
📺 3 Seasons
🎬 18 Episodes
📅 Ended
🌐 EN
⏱️ 30 min/episode
DocumentaryComedy
The Mark Steel Lectures are a series of radio and television programmes. Written and delivered by Mark Steel, each scripted lecture presents arguments for the importance of a historical figure.
The lectures were originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 over three series between 1999 and 2002. Many of the arguments were illustrated by miniature sketches. These sketches featured Mark Steel, Martin Hyder, Mel Hudson, Carla Mendonça, Femi Elufowoju Junior and Debbie Isitt. The first series was subtitled "A series of lectures about Englishmen who changed the course of history", with the remaining two changing this to "A series of lectures about people with a passion". The first series was produced by Phil Clark; the others by Lucy Armitage. The lecture on Ludwig van Beethoven was nominated for a Sony Radio Comedy Award.
The programme transferred to television in 2003, with an Open University series on BBC Four, which was later repeated on BBC Two. This variously featured:
⁕Gerard Logan as Lord Byron
⁕Martin Hyder as Isaac Newton, Sigmund Freud, Aristotle, Che Guevara, Oliver Cromwell, Ludwig van Beethoven and Charles Darwin
⁕Ainsley Harriott as Robert Boyle
⁕Linda Smith as Martha Freud
Seasons
Season 1
Mark Steel follows the glorious life of Lord Byron from his birth just off Oxford Street in London to his death in Greece thirty-six years later. We see Byron on the beach, Byron and his pet bear and Byron on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, as Mark traces an extraordinary, unpredictable and rude life in Nottinghamshire, London and Athens, from Byron’s bedroom to his deathbed. In Lord Byron, Mark finds echoes of other modern heroes – revolutionaries, adventurers and poets like Joe Strummer, Lech Walesa and David Beckham, and suggests convincingly that Byron would have enjoyed Last of the Summer Wine.
Season 2
Mark Steel turns up the volume on Beethoven with his tribute to a man who was the nearest eighteenth-century Vienna got to not only Jimi Hendrix, but also Captain Sensible. Unflinchingly exposing Ludwig’s anger management issues and his dependence on Ceefax’s 888 subtitle service, Mark Steel sets Beethoven in his revolutionary context and reveals the quirks of his character the history books gloss over. Taking in the revolutionary nature of the Freemasons, Haydn’s contractual similarity to Prince, Beethoven’s unusual fondness for semi-hemidemisemiquavers and his love-hate relationship with Napoleon, The Mark Steel Lectures once again combines unique reconstructions with inventive graphics to bring Beethoven right up to the minute.
Season 3
Join Mark Steel as he charts Cromwell’s course through British history; his election and resignation from parliament, the formation of his New Model Army, the overthrow and subsequent execution of the King, Charles I, the monumental shift of power from monarchy to parliament, the abolition of the House of Lords right through to the massacre at Drogheda. Oh, and the introduction of the first ever pineapple to Britain.
Cast
Crew
Writer
Mark Steel
Producer
Phil Bowker, Jon Rolph
Network
BBC Four