imagine... - Season 34

The story of Rupert Everett's ten-year quest to write, direct and star in his own film about the tragic last years of his hero Oscar Wilde, the great Irish writer imprisoned for loving another man. imagine... joins Everett five years on, halfway through his epic journey. The programme follows Everett from his onstage triumph playing Oscar in the West End, through numerous false starts and setbacks. As the years go by there are highs and lows, peppy optimism and lunatic serendipity.

Turkey's best-known writer, the Nobel Prize-winning Orhan Pamuk, glories in his city of Istanbul, which in his lifetime has grown from two to fifteen million people. Despite political controversy which nearly forced him into exile, he continues to live in the city which feeds his novels. They evoke the lost world of his own eccentric family, explore Turkey's rich Ottoman past and engage with its teeming troubled present.

Poised between east and west, it is at once modern and traditional, secular and religious. An obsessive, outspoken and engaging man, Pamuk paces through the backstreets of Istanbul, showing Alan Yentob the places which have inspired his work - the Ottoman palace recreated in his best-selling murder mystery My Name Is Red, the burgeoning building sites and high rises which are the surprising setting for his recent books, and his extraordinary Museum of Innocence - a novel and a real museum in one.

Very few people would have recognised the name Rose Wylie until this remarkable artist was in her mid 70s. Youthful, playful and unpredictable at the age of 83, this is an artist in her prime.

Her unlikely subjects are drawn from the world around her - from footballers like Wayne Rooney, the gory brilliance of Quentin Tarantino films, memories of her childhood in the London Blitz, to the stuff of everyday life - gas hobs and even her own pet cats. In Rose Wylie's universe past and present collide in vivid explosions of colour and form.

Her exuberant large scale canvases are being exhibited, and sold, all over the world. Alan Yentob meets Rose Wylie and delves into her curious and colourful world to discover how her memories and experiences have helped mould the artist that she is today, and how she transforms the stuff of everyday experience into new and hitherto unseen painterly visions.

It is unprecedented for an artist to be exhibited simultaneously in three of London's leading galleries, each one exploring a different theme: landscape, portraiture and still life. But that is the accolade bestowed on the internationally renowned British artist Tacita Dean. The granddaughter of Basil Dean, who founded Ealing Studios, she is celebrated for her works on analogue film which include beguiling portraits of figures she admires, enigmatic stories and painterly meditations on light. Alan Yentob joins Tacita Dean in her studio in Berlin to discover how the city has infused her work, and visits her in LA where she is completing an hour-long film inspired by her older sister Antigone and the Greek myth which bears her name. Her work is poetic, elegiac, and thought-provoking. It is also the story of her crusade to preserve the medium which inspires her - film.

It has been the site of royal weddings, funerals and nearly every British coronation since 1066, Westminster Abbey is also known as a Royal Peculiar - a church controlled not by a bishop but by the monarch herself. Crowned there 65 years ago, Queen Elizabeth II is now the world's longest-reigning monarch and to celebrate, Westminster Abbey has commissioned an historic new work - a towering stained-glass window. The artist behind it is David Hockney - who famously refused a knighthood and declined an invitation to paint the Queen's portrait because he was too busy painting landscapes in Yorkshire. Adopting an art form which is over 1,000 years old is yet another surprising move from an artist whose career has continually defied expectation. With unique access, imagine... follows the whole process from design to installation.

He has been crowned with every laurel in contemporary classical music, composed operas which play on the world's most illustrious stages and been knighted for his services to music. Yet Sir George Benjamin is still relatively little known outside the classical world. Imagine... sets that straight. Intimate and humorous, this film tracks the creation of the British composer's latest opera Lessons in Love and Violence, which premiered at the Royal Opera House this year. The film follows his journey from composing songs aged three and being transfixed by Fantasia and 2001: Space Odyssey to his golden days as the youngest ever pupil of the legendary composer Olivier Messiaen in Paris. Early experiments with computers, a passion for folk instruments and virtuosity on the piano combined to produce the startling, moving music heard today.

This year has been an extraordinary year for British artist Tracey Emin. With large-scale commissions catapulting her from London's St Pancras station to the streets of downtown Sydney - only pausing for breath with exhibitions in Hong Kong and Brussels along the way - she has proven yet again that she packs a punch like no other.

But as she turns 55 and enters what she likes to call the "last stage" of her life, is it time for a more mature, reflective Tracey? Following the death of her mother in 2016, she has decided to return to her home town of Margate and convert a derelict print works there into a new studio where she can live and create.

imagine... has spent the past year following Tracey across the world in a bid to chart her creative process at work. Throughout the film, she tells Alan Yentob about her life to date, from her troubled early years in Margate to a series of breakthroughs in the 1990s as a leading light of the Young British Artists, featuring career-defining work like My Bed and her embroidered tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995.

With contributors including Sir Nicholas Serota, Jay Jopling, Maria Balshaw and David Dawson, this is the definitive account of one of Britain's most infamous artists.

The unexpected story of this Hollywood icon who was not all he seemed on screen. With readings from his unpublished autobiography spoken by actor Jonathan Pryce and newly discovered footage shot by Grant himself this is a revealing and fascinating insight into this troubled legend of cinema.

Andrea Levy's novel Small Island about the Windrush generation captured imaginations. imagine... finds out if the new adaptation of her book The Long Song follows suit.