
Self
Self

Self

Self

Armando Iannucci presents a personal argument in praise of the genius of Charles Dickens. Through the prism of the author's most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, Armando looks beyond Dickens - the national institution - and instead explores the qualities of Dickens's work that still make him one of the best British writers. While Dickens is often celebrated for his powerful depictions of Victorian England and his role as a social reformer, this programme foregrounds the elements of his writing which make him worth reading, as much for what he tells us about ourselves in the twenty-first century as our ancestors in the nineteenth. Armando argues that Dickens's remarkable use of language and his extraordinary gift for creating characters make him a startlingly experimental and psychologically penetrating writer who demands not just to be adapted for television but to be read and read again.

In the early nineties, before the massive gentrification of many of New York's then slums, several young people from very disparate backgrounds left their broken homes and ventured onto the brutal streets of the city. United by their love of skateboarding, they formed a family and built a unique lifestyle that eventually inspired Kids, a groundbreaking and outrageous film directed by photographer Larry Clark and released in 1995.

The true king of cocaine. At his peak he sold 2,000 kilos a week, reaped gross profits of $70 million a month, and ran an operation with over 150 soldiers to support him. In his life champagne flowed like water, trips to Vegas, New York, and Los Angeles were the norm, and $150,000 shopping sprees were nothing. At the height of Washington, D.C.'s brutal crack epidemic in 1987, there was a 22 year old man responsible for distributing 90% of Columbian Cocaine onto the city's streets. This man is Rayful Edmond III. In the media's eyes he was guilty until proven innocent, but in the streets eyes he was a hero who made it to the top. This is his story-a story of; Power, Money, Murder, Betrayal and the rise and fall of the Edmond's Empire.