THIRD CENTURY

Your weekly reminder to tune into David Puttnam's Century of Cinema, the third episode of which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 2 tonight.

As you will have gathered, when the series originally hit the airwaves in 1999 it was as a celebration of the first 100 years of cinema and in this episode we talk specifically about the Hollywood film factories where so many of the century's greatest movies were made.

MGM it was said had more stars than there were in the heavens above, and like all of the other great studios - Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, RKO Pictures, Columbia, Walt Disney - they each had their hallmark style and stars.

Margaret O'Brien, Dirk Bogarde and Angela Lansbury tell us what it was like to work under the studio system and we find out that the tycoons who ran these studio came from just about every trade and business other than filmmaking.

Nevertheless this motley crowd of immigrant glove-salesmen and junk-dealers with such improbably namers as Samuel Goldfish and Edgar and Archibald Selwyn (the men behind Goldwyn Pictures) became the great studio bosses who were, as David Puttnam says, "responsible for America's sense of self-identity..."

The question in 1999 - and it is still relevant today - is whether those studio names with their famous logos and fanfares mean what they once meant back in those formative years of movie-making.

You can hear David Puttnam's Century of Cinema - 'Reel 3: Hollywood Incorporated' - on BBC Radio 2 at 10:30, and, if you miss the transmission this evening, it can be heard again for seven days via the BBC iPlayer.

And, until the transmission of tonight's episode, you've still a few hours left to catch 'Reel 2: Right Directions', which explores the talents of the people who make the movies.