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The Year Of Anish Kapoor
Tuesday 17 November

Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential and pioneering sculptors of his generation. Immensely popular with the public, Kapoor is celebrated for works that evoke a sense of mystery through their dark voids, awe through their scale and beauty, and fascination through their reflective surfaces.

Alan Yentob follows Kapoor through a period of intense productivity as he prepares for a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy and the first time the academy has given the whole gallery space to a living artist. With exclusive access to each stage of the exhibition, from conception to installation, we learn about Kapoor's life and creative processes along the way. Shocking, awe-inspiring and profoundly spiritual, this is a timely acknowledgement of Anish Kapoor's position as one of the world's most accomplished sculptors.

Dame Shirley Bassey: The Girl From Tiger Bay
Tuesday 24 November

Alan Yentob accompanies Dame Shirley Bassey from rehearsals to recording studios during the making of her newest album in London and Dublin. After five decades as a recording artist, a triumphant Glastonbury appearance and a major illness, some of the best contemporary British songwriters have interpreted Dame Shirley's life through song for a new album. The songs frame and explore the myth of Shirley Bassey, the girl from Tiger Bay, and come from artists including Gary Barlow, The Pet Shop Boys, Manic Street Preachers and Rufus Wainwright along with the famous Bond composer John Barry and lyricist Don Black.

Alan discovers how Shirley takes a song and makes it her own and how she has prioritised her performance and career over her private life. Along the way Alan talks to artists contributing to the album about their inspiration behind the songs they have provided for Shirley, their opinions on her artistry and her relevance in music today. The film also takes a look back at Dame Shirley's life, including an archive of her greatest performances, to tell the story of what makes Dame Shirley Bassey the living legend that she is today.

Own Art
Tuesday 1 December

Own Art looks at a new breed of art collector on the block. Many of them have incomes equal to or below the national average, and a high proportion have never bought original art before.

Imagine uncovers a variety of people who are part of a small revolution in the art world. A pig farmer, a factory worker and a policeman are just some of those who tell how they came to appreciate art, how they chose their pieces and what they mean to them.

They have all signed up to an Arts Council scheme called OWN ART. Created five years ago to encourage the public to enjoy greater access to and engagement with the arts, OWN ART enables people to borrow up to £2,000 interest free to buy original contemporary works. Since then 12,500 people have signed up, many of whom grew up with no art on the walls at all, yet some have developed a passion that borders on addiction.

In the film we meet collectors, young and old, who speak from the heart about how art has affected their lives. We also follow two people on their journeys to commission their own paintings. A commission is a brave step and a big investment that was once the preserve of the gentry. Not any more. Now we can all own art.

Joan Baez
Tuesday 8 December

Legendary American folk singer Joan Baez was the most desired and admired performer of her generation, using her unique voice to get her message of peace and racial equality heard around the world.

Political ally to Martin Luther-King and lover to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez has always shunned fame herself. But in this Imagine film she gives her most candid interview yet about her complex personal life and a career spanning 50 years as America's Queen of Folk, performing sell-out tours and producing six gold-selling albums.

Featuring rare home movies and never-before-seen performance footage from the Fifties, she talks about her unconventional upbringing and how she broke through into the underground folk scene. Friends and collaborators Bob Dylan, David Crosby and Steve Earle talk about her immediate impact on the folk scene, paying tribute to her as one of the most original female vocalists of their generation.

But, as Baez reveals, fame came at a prize. Chronic stage-fright nearly led to a nervous breakdown. Buoyed on by support from her beloved sister Mimi, Baez emerged intact, using her fame to take on the injustices of her generation. Jesse Jackson and others acknowledge her tireless campaigning for civil liberties with Martin Luther King and against the Vietnam War with her husband and fellow peace protester David Harris. Son Gabe Harris talks proudly about a mother who has remained as committed as ever to the cause of peace, most recently in Sarajevo.

What emerges from this film is a portrait of an extraordinary woman, who became the conscience of a generation, and who today, 50 years after first taking to the stage, still delights in performing and recording with her unique brand of folk song.

Placido Domingo
Tuesday 15 December

As he approaches the 40th anniversary of his debut at Covent Garden, Placido Domingo rehearses in Berlin for his first baritone role since his youth. He talks to Alan Yentob extensively about the development of the singer's voice, through lyric and dramatic tenor parts, through lower German "heldentenor" roles down into the baritone range today.

Domingo has picked out a number of his roles that he considers his greatest, and Alan Yentob discusses many of them with him – from Don Jose in Carmen through Cavaradossi in Tosca, Samson in Samson et Dalilah, Lohengrin and Andrea Chenier onto what many critics consider his crowning achievement, Verdi's Otello. In this revealing interview, Domingo talks movingly and in detail about his reasons for singling out these particular roles and the passions which keep him pushing the boundaries, when he has already achieved more than any other operatic singer in history.

Contributors include conductors Daniel Barenhoim and Zubin Mehta who references Domingo as "simply the greatest singer of the 20th and 21st"; Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and the other two Three Tenors, Jose Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti (in archive interview).

Scrabble
Tuesday 22 December

It's the end of the series and I.M.A.G.I.N.E is in a playful mood. So Alan Yentob has set out to reveal the evolution, online rebirth and bizarre competitive world of Scrabble – the number one selling board game in the UK in Christmas 2008.

Scrabble has had a resurgence largely thanks to online culture which has boosted sales and seen office workers "scrabbling" during in-work hours. Alan travels to the home of the game, New York, where an unemployed architect invented it as a way to make a quick buck during the Great Depression of the Thirties.

However, the game didn't really take off until the Fifties when the first championships were formed. Today the tournament scene is thriving and Alan visits the American National Scrabble Championships in Ohio and the people who compete. Along the way he discovers that whilst the players know a huge amount of words, they rarely seem to know what they mean!

Hearing from psycholinguists about learning words and investigating what makes the best Scrabble player, Alan explores the game in its wider context. He heads to Nigeria to meet the Nigerian national team where the game is a national sport, complete with Scrabble Coach, and looks at their preparation for the next World Championships.

He also meets World Reigning Scrabble Champion, representing New Zealand, the seemingly unstoppable Nigel Richards (aka The Man Who Knows the Dictionary). But in the lead up to the world championships in Malaysia does he think he will reign supreme again?