UTOPIA: In Search of the Dream
3x60’ for BBC4
2017
Producer
Series in which art historian Professor Richard Clay explores visions of 'utopia' and examines what they reveal about our deepest hopes, dreams and fears. I developed and produced this series, which was filmed across Lithuania, Germany, the USA and the UK.
EP 1: In this first episode, Prof Richard Clay explores how utopian visions begin as blueprints for fairer worlds and asks whether they can inspire real change. Charting 500 years of utopian visions and making bold connections between exploration and science fiction - from radical 18th-century politics to online communities like Wikipedia - Richard delves into colourful stories of some of the world's greatest utopian dreamers. Across Britain, Germany, Lithuania and America, Richard talks about the meaning of utopia with a rich range of interviewees, including Katherine Maher, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols, explorer Belinda Kirk, football commentator John Motson and Hollywood screenwriter Frank Spotnitz.
EP 2: Utopia has been imagined in a thousand different ways. Yet when people try to build utopia, they struggle and very often fail. Art historian professor Richard Clay asks whether utopian visions for living can ever reconcile the tension between the group and the individual, the rules and the desire to break free. Travelling to America, he encounters experimental communities, searching for greater meaning in life. He looks back at the grand urban plans for the masses of the 20th-century utopian ideologies, from the New Deal housing projects of downtown Chicago to the concrete sprawl of a Soviet-era housing estates. He also meets utopian architects with a continuing faith that humanity's lot can be improved by better design. Interviewees include architect Norman Foster and designer Shoji Sadao.
EP 3: Richard Clay asks whether utopia is, ultimately, a state of mind. Can we find utopia within? He explores the many ways we have created to immerse ourselves in a perfect moment, of epiphany or transcendence, pushing the boundaries of artistic expression and pleasure. Seeking answers in a broad range of arts, Richard meets digital games pioneer Sid Meier, Rada improvisation teacher Chris Heimann and opera impresario Martin Graham. He tries to compose a haiku and uncovers traces of the hedonistic medieval carnival tradition in the churches and pubs of his native Lancashire. Richard also compares and contrasts different musical escapes, interviewing Acid House legend A Guy Called Gerald and the celebrated minimalist composer Steve Reich. This is not about the utopia of the future but about the utopia of the immediate world that we can experience now.
The Guardian - **** ‘BBC4 is giving us a highly promising three-parter, Utopia: In Search Of The Dream and art historian Richard Clay has already managed, without straining, to link Thomas Spence’s “commons” of shared ownership, via George Bernard Shaw and Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry, directly to Wikipedia. It’s intellectually splendid.
The Arts Desk - ‘the best of all possible documentaries… richly thoughtful’
The Times - **** ‘BBC Four used to be tagged “A Place To Think” and at its best like this, it still is…. this was willfully eclectic, embracing boozy, iconoclastic medieval carnivals and the democratised architecture of minecraft, Steve Reich’s minimalism and the blissful, inclusive release of acid house: Clay looked as starstruck meeting A Guy Called Gerald as Lucy Worsley would have been to encounter Jane Austen.’
Daily Mail - ‘Richard Clay takes a steady-eye look at intended settlements, from gender-equal settlements of the C19th to Soviet Communism… it’s fascinating to see what works and doesn’t and why… a fascinating and broad approach.’
The Daily Telegraph - Pick of The Day
