Immediately following the death of radio DJ John Peel in 2004, it became clear very rapidly that there was no obvious heir apparent. With so many specialist shows on the station, nobody ran the full gamut of leftfield and underground music in the same way that Peel had. But if anyone comes close, it is Mary Anne Hobbs.

Joseph Strick (b. 1923) is one of America’s great Academy Award-winning independent directors. He began his maverick career with an unassuming short, Muscle Beach (1946), creating a small piece of perfection in his montage of the infamous muscle-pumpers of Los Angeles. He made the award-winning Savage Eye in 1960 and then directed a string of controversial literary adaptations: Jean Genet’s The Balcony (1963), Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1970) and Joyce's Ulysses (1967), which contained the first use of the word “fuck“ on screen. He won an Academy Award in 1971 for his devastating short Interviews with My Lai Veterans.

The sculptor Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), RA, CBE, won the Turner Prize in 1990. His public works are characterised by their gigantic scale and ambition. In the UK he is probably best known for Marsyas (2002), the viscerally red “ear trumpet” that elegantly spanned the entire length of the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern. He is also the artist behind the world’s most expensive public sculpture. Cloud Gate (picture below), completed in 2006, is a beguiling polished steel ellipsis located in Chicago’s AT&T Plaza.

Lesley Sharp could be thought of as an actor's actor: a talent equally at home in theatre, cinema and TV who has been impressing audiences and critics regularly for a quarter-century without quite becoming a star name.

Roy Williams is one of the most prolific, and most lauded, British playwrights. Born in Fulham, south-west London, in 1968, he had by his mid-30s already won a shelf-full of awards, to which he added an OBE in 2008. His debut, The No Boys Cricket Club, won the Writers’ Guild New Writer of the Year award in 1996. Two years later Starstruck won three major awards. In the early 2000s Lift Off and Clubland were also successes. In 2004 Williams won the first Arts Council Decibel Award, given to black or Asian artists in recognition of their contribution to the arts.

At 84 years of age, Sir Charles Mackerras is one of the best-respected and best-loved operatic conductors working in the world today. He conducts Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera tonight and, despite bouts of ill health, found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s and his run-ins with Richard Jones and Christopher Alden over their "monstrous" modern productions.

In Oil City Confidential, Julien Temple’s exhilarating new documentary on Dr Feelgood, the first thing you’ll see is the spidery, alien movements of the band’s guitarist Wilko Johnson, as he looks out over their Essex heartland, Canvey Island. The film is a sort of prequel to Temple’s Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, digging into the early 1970s pub rock scene the Feelgoods ruled with their hard, sharp R’n’B before punk, lessons learned, stole the stage.

Electronic music is all the rage again as artists such as La Roux, Lady Gaga, Little Boots and Calvin Harris hark back to Eighties electro-pop and Nineties club classics. Meanwhile, there are also darker crannies where synthesized sounds have evolved into stranger forms, the sonic equivalent of those bizarre fish that lurk at the bottom of the ocean. The internet has allowed whole non-geographical scenes to bloom where club music, avant-garde noise and punk attitude collide. Tim Exile used to belong here, crashing the gnarliest drum & bass into abrasive sub-genres such as breakcore and gabber then releasing the results on the Planet Mu label.

“You’ve no idea how boring everything was before I met you.” As written by Nick Hornby and spoken by Carey Mulligan in An Education, these words of gratitude come after a moment of stillness in which Jenny, Mulligan’s character, reflects on her experience as a 16-year-old schoolgirl taken on a social joyride by a 35-ish hustler, David (Peter Sarsgaard).