Famous for his cello and violin concertos, it's not widely known that Edward Elgar also wrote sketches for a piano concerto. This often hilarious film shows how the embryonic piece - a performance of which follows - came to life.

With Iraq having a presence at the Venice Biennale for the first time since Saddam Hussein's rise to power, Imagine follows the chosen artists ahead of the show.

Alan Yentob joins Bette Midler on a journey through the chorus lines of Broadway and the bathhouses and nightclubs of the 1970s to the very top of the film industry.

Sir Rod Stewart has had a remarkable musical journey. Alan Yentob visits Rod at his homes and examines an entertaining career across five decades.

Scrabble is experiencing a renaissance. The younger generation have rediscovered the game online - through the copyright busting Scrabulous - and they're having night after night on the tiles. LANA BOTNEY sets out to discover why the word game leaves us spellbound, tracing its surprising history, meeting the American tournament Word Freaks, and paying a visit to the SAS-style training camp that the Nigerian government trains their players at. With triple word score contributions from Moby, Richard Herring, Lynn Barber and Noreena Hertz.

Alan Yentob meets some Turner Prize-winning artists to recount how Glasgow became a city as famed for its contemporary art as it once was for its shipbuilding.

The author Nawal El Saadawi was a global legend. imagine... visited her in Cairo and travels with her to the village where she was born.

In the final programme of the series the guitarists talk about how they find their own sound, and how the guitar has changed their lives. Since its invention, the electric guitar has unleashed a seemingly inexhaustible sonic invention among guitarists. Featuring Muse's Matt Bellamy, who turns out to be following in his father's space age footsteps, Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath, who talks about the invention of heavy metal, David Gilmour from Pink Floyd, Pete Townshend (Perhaps equally famous for smashing guitars), Johnny Marr from the Smiths on 'the mother of all riffs', Slash and The Edge from U2 among many others.

Alan Yentob looks at the unique role Jews have played in creating the modern American musical, from Porgy and Bess to West Side Story and Cabaret.

Alan Yentob explores outsider art, examines why the oeuvre is only now being accepted by the art establishment and meets some visionary outside art creators and their enthusiasts.

Second episode of a two-part special documentary about a secret hoard of art discovered in Germany. The rightful owners begin the uphill struggle of reclaiming their property.

Alan Yentob presents a three-part series examining how the guitar became the world's favourite musical instrument. As the guitar turns electric, music is changed for ever. The world's first electric guitar had nothing to do with jazz or blues, but Hawaiian-style music and was known as the 'frying pan'. Yentob continues his investigation from the blues of the Mississippi to the guitar wars of the 1950s, when the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul were battling for supremacy.

Crime writer Ian Rankin invites imagine... to follow him as he writes his next novel, and as he ponders what to write about after retiring his most famous creation.

Forty years on from the release of the landmark album A Love Supreme, Alan Yentob charts the life of hugely influential jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Lol Lovett’s film looks at how his improvisational technique impacted not only on jazz but also on other art forms - his innovations have been felt in performance art and even in contemporary dance music - and shows how his profound spirituality entered into every area of his life and work.

Alan Yentob presents a portrait of Israel's most celebrated writer and political commentator, Amos Oz, whose childhood memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness gives an eyewitness account of the birth of Israel. Yentob takes Oz back to the settings of the childhood in Israel and reveals a fascinating portrait of the early years of Israel, the tragic story of Oz's family and his widely respected views on the conflict with Palestine.

Alan Yentob explores the rapid rise of one of modern music's most mercurial talents, Rufus Wainwright. Wainwright talks candidly about his background, his family of musical luminaries (father Loudon Wainwright III, mother Kate McGarrigle and sister Martha Wainwright), his troubled personal history with drugs and the tensions that have informed his music. The film also follows his journey into the classical world as he creates his very first opera, Prima Donna.

Alan Yentob tells the story of the struggle by 90-year-old Maria Altmann to recover five Gustav Klimt paintings stolen from her family by the Nazis in 1938 and which have hung in the Austrian National Gallery ever since. It chronicles Maria's early life in glittering fin-de-siecle Vienna, her escape from Nazi terror and her fight to recover the Klimts against all the odds, which takes her to the US Supreme Court and pits her not just against Austria, but also against the Bush administration.

From child prodigy to global phenomenon, Alan Yentob reveals the extraordinary life of Lang Lang, China's classical music superstar.

imagine... presents this UK television debut of a tour de force from the Divine Miss M. Bette Midler performs many of her biggest hits including The Rose and Wind Beneath My Wings.

Alan Yentob meets Lenny Henry as he publishes a first volume of autobiography, charting his early years in show business.

Alan Yentob gains an insight into the creative world of Dame Shirley Bassey in a programme first shown in 2009. After a triumphant Glastonbury appearance and a major illness at the age of 72, Dame Shirley tentatively re-enters the ring to confront her life in song. Some of the best contemporary songwriters, including Gary Barlow, the Pet Shop Boys, Manic Street Preachers, Rufus Wainwright, Richard Hawley and KT Tunstall, along with James Bond composer John Barry and lyricist Don Black, have interpreted her life through song for an album produced by David Arnold. The songs frame and explore the myth of Shirley Bassey, the girl from Tiger Bay, and the voice and the desire are not found wanting. A backstory profiling Shirley, complete with archive of her greatest performances, tells the story of what makes her the living legend that she is today.

Documentary following bestselling author Edmund de Waal over the course of a remarkable year, as he exhibits his pottery work for the first time and researches his next book.

Documentary telling the story of Judith Kerr, creator of well-loved children's books including Mog and The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Now 90, she revisits her childhood home of Berlin.

2014 Man Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan journeys with Alan Yentob through his native Tasmania, visiting the places that have inspired his novels.

Alan Yentob travels to the ghetto in Venice with award-winning novelist Howard Jacobson as he embarks on a retelling of Shakespeare's most performed play, The Merchant of Venice.