Season 2

Mark Steel turns up the volume on Beethoven with his tribute to a man who was the nearest eighteenth-century Vienna got to not only Jimi Hendrix, but also Captain Sensible. Unflinchingly exposing Ludwig’s anger management issues and his dependence on Ceefax’s 888 subtitle service, Mark Steel sets Beethoven in his revolutionary context and reveals the quirks of his character the history books gloss over. Taking in the revolutionary nature of the Freemasons, Haydn’s contractual similarity to Prince, Beethoven’s unusual fondness for semi-hemidemisemiquavers and his love-hate relationship with Napoleon, The Mark Steel Lectures once again combines unique reconstructions with inventive graphics to bring Beethoven right up to the minute.

Creator of some of the greatest works of art in human history, but at the same time barely able to finish them, Leonardo is possibly the most easily distracted genius who ever lived. Mark Steel gets close to some of Leonardo’s greatest works, and finds out what The Last Supper has in common with EastEnders. Packing in not just a life of Leonardo but also a brief canter through the political geography and the latest technological advances of the world he was born into, Mark begins by exploring the standards of great art and great beauty as they were before Leonardo truly made his mark. Then it’s a whistlestop tour round Italy as Leonardo builds a reputation both for genius and not doing what he’s paid for.

Like Dr Frankenstein himself, Mark Steel has taken the cold-cuts of the traditional TV lecture and brought it back to life with passion and electricity. Taking as its subjects both the book for which Mary Shelley is famous and the tragedy-filled life of the woman herself, the programme moves from England to Geneva and back in search of the spark that created the monster. Almost as if genetically programmed by the pioneering mother she never knew, and on whose grave she consummated her love for the poet Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley created an indestructible legend more relevant today than ever – as Mark Steel discovers with his customary wit and passion. Kenneth Branagh does not feature in this programme.

Surely Britain’s greatest unknown international revolutionary, best-selling author and hobbyist bridge builder, Norfolk born corset-maker’s son Thomas Paine wrote the Rights of Man and helped inspire the American War of Independence. Thereafter he became the Secretary for Foreign Affairs in a government that hated his country of birth. He then went to France and escaped the guillotine by accident, after having failed to sell a bridge he built over a field in London. One of Mark Steel’s great unsung radical heroes, this comedy lecture series shines a light on a little known (in Britain) hero on two continents.

Tracing her life from schooldays in radical Manchester to retirement in rural Essex, when Haile Selassie occasionally came to call, Sylvia Pankhurst the revolutionary and Rastafarian sympathiser is brought to life as only Mark Steel can. From a bed-in with Keir Hardie to Kill Bill style ju-jitsu, here’s everything you didn’t know about this pioneer of democracy. Recalling a time when Manchester was the most radical city in Britain, this latest instalment in Mark Steel’s comedy lecture series resonates with today’s human rights campaigners and anti-war radicals, as well as containing a short section revealing the best type of stone to smash windows with.

A great physicist but a lousy father, Einstein played with the nature of space and time as easily as he did his beloved violin. Mark Steel grapples with the fundamental nature of the Universe and Einstein’s dislike of socks to provide a comic guide to the essence of the most famous scientist in history. Surely the only television programme in history to explain special relativity with reference to both minicabs and Blake’s 7, this is Einstein in a nutshell, at nearly the speed of light.