Beautiful Minds

The Big Bang Theory is a comedy about brilliant physicists, Leonard and Sheldon, who are the kind of "beautiful minds" that understand how the universe works. But none of that genius helps them interact with people, especially women. All this begins to change when a free-spirited beauty named Penny moves in next door. Sheldon, Leonard's roommate, is quite content spending his nights playing Klingon Boggle with their socially dysfunctional friends, fellow Cal Tech scientists Wolowitz and Koothrappali. However, Leonard sees in Penny a whole new universe of possibilities… including love.

Dario is a little publisher from Milano. He is joining the Mantova Festival Letteratura (Book fair) 2004. Marta, his unsatisfied wife, accompanies him. Leon is a French designer-photographer. While Dario is busy with his own business, Marta take a visit to the celebrated Palazzo Te; here under Giulio Romano's fresco representing Jupiter's erected penis she meets Leon. Immediately they become lovers and spend the entire book exhibitions' days making love almost everywhere. This liaison will have soon effects also on the regular one between Marta and Dario.

Historian Bettany Hughes gives her personal take on the diverse cultures of the ancient world in this 2010 documentary series on More 4. The series begins with an examination of Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BC to become the world’s first global centre of culture. The programme explores Alexandria’s role as a powerhouse of science and learning, and focuses on the female mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Hypatia, the subject of the feature film Agora, starring Rachel Weisz.

This film of Thomas Heise, called Material, is a collection of film footage he collected over the years, not used in other projects. In the way it is structured together it gains more than the sum of its parts. The general topic seems to be the collapse of East Germany aka the DDR, though the spectre of the Third Reich is there too, for example a play being put together has to do with that and skinheads appear towards the end of the film.

Director Alfred Hitchcock is revered as one of the greatest creative minds in the history of cinema. Known for his psychological thrillers, Hitchcock’s leading ladies were cool, beautiful and preferably blonde. One such actress was Tippi Hedren, an unknown fashion model given her big break when Hitchcock’s wife saw her on a TV commercial. Brought to Universal Studios, Hedren was shocked when the director, at the peak of his career, quickly cast her to star in his next feature, 1963’s The Birds. Little did Hedren know that as ambitious and terrifying as the production would be to shoot, the most daunting aspect of the film ended up coming from behind the camera.

Can you use craft to help make the world a better place, one stitch at a time? Writer, comedian and art lover Jenny Eclair meets people doing extraordinary things with knitting, cross-stitch, banners and felt to change hearts and minds.