The South Bank Show Lee Hall Sunday 18 October 2009 at 10.15pm

29 September 2009

The South Bank Show looks at the work and world of Lee Hall, and how his works sprang from the culture of coal and his roots in the North East of England.   

Melvyn Bragg meets Lee Hall at the Woodhorn Colliery Museum at Ashington in Northumberland; where they discuss his works, including the sense of loss that pervades both Billy Elliot and Pitman Painters – the longing for the certainties of the culture that accompanied coal – the bands, the banners, the painting and the writing. Lee talks about growing up in East Newcastle and his early work with the Tyneside Youth Theatre and Live community theatre group who are currently performing Pitmen Painters at the Royal National Theatre in London and on tour – before taking it to Broadway.

Contributors include: Bill Feaver, whose book on the Ashington school was discovered by Lee in a second hand book shop, and inspired him to write the Pitman Painters; and Stephen Daldry, the director of Billy Elliot. Dave Douglass, a miner who worked in both the Durham and South Yorkshire coalfields, and was a leading activist in the Miners Strike; defends Billy Elliot from the charges, mainly from the left, that it is sentimental and unreal.

The South Bank Show includes extracts from Pitmen Painters – Lee’s Award winning play about a group of miners from Northumberland, who were briefly taken up as fashionable painters and became a phenomenon in the 1930s; and Billy Elliot, the Musical which has been seen by over 3.5 million people and won 73 awards world-wide since it first opened in London in 2005.