The 1980s were a great decade for British women playwrights. During those Thatcher-dominated years, Caryl Churchill produced two world-class masterpieces – Top Girls and Serious Money – while a host of other playwrights, such as Timberlake Wertenbaker, April De Angelis, Charlotte Keatley, Sarah Daniels, Winsome Pinnock and Andrea Dunbar lit up our stages.

The equipment pictured above is the Powertran 1024, one of the first digital sequencers to hit the market. According to the May 1981 issue of Electronics Today International magazine, which unveiled it to the public, the British-invented “1024 composer is a machine which will repeatedly cause a synthesiser to play a pre-determined series of notes either as short sequence or a large compositions of 1024 notes: i.e. several minutes long.” The article was headlined “Treat your synth to this sequencer/composer.”

At September 2010’s MTV Video Music Awards, Lady Gaga took the stage in a dress made of stitched-together cuts of meat. The outfit, she said, was a political statement worn to draw attention to the aspect of the US military's don't ask, don't tell policy preventing anyone who "demonstrate[s] a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts" from joining the forces. The first female singer to wear a meat dress on stage, though, had less of a profile.

Birmingham audiences are a supportive bunch. There was never much likelihood that they’d greet Andris Nelsons’s first Birmingham appearance since he departed for Boston in 2015 with less than the same warmth that they keep for other former CBSO music directors. Even so, he must have been gratified to walk out to a capacity audience – for a programme of Bruckner and Maxwell Davies – and a 30-second ovation, complete with a couple of cheers, before he’d given so much as a downbeat.

The reasons for enduring cult status can sometimes be hard to fathom for those not embedded in the minutiae of genre cinema. Take The Burning and Hell Comes to Frogtown, both of which are being given top-notch home cinema releases. The Burning is a dual format package with a booklet and masses of extras including an over-the-top three commentaries. Hell Comes to Frogtown is Blu-ray only, has no booklet or commentaries but is replete with extras. Both film looks great: the image quality for each is unlikely to have ever looked better.

William Friedkin’s super-stylish bad cop/bad villain thriller was his return to form after the disasters of Cruising and Sorcerer. To Live and Die in LA didn’t achieve the instant classic status of The French Connection when it was released in 1985, but it's enjoyed a cult following ever since, and this new edition in a restored print is a treat.

Pictured above is Sweden’s Ralph Lundsten. He might look like a guru or mystic but is actually a multi-disciplinary artist most well-known on his home turf for his pioneering electronic music. His first album, 1966’s Elektronmusikstudion Dokumentation 1 (made with Leo Nilson), was issued by national Swedish radio’s own label and recorded at the station’s electronic music studio. Lundsten (born 1936) began making music for soundtracks in the 1950s and has issued at least 38 albums.

What to do if you’re a despotic leader with an underperforming film industry? Hiring better directors and actors wasn’t an option for Kim Jong-il in the late 1970s, so he took drastic action: luring South Korea’s biggest female star Choi Eun-hee to Hong Kong on false pretences and having her abducted. Her ex-husband, the South’s leading filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, did the honourable thing and went in search of her, only to suffer the same fate. What happened next is the subject of Rob Cannan and Ross Adam’s engrossing documentary.

Shin was a financially inept directorial maverick, whose production company had been shut down by the restrictive South Korean regime. He and Choi were one of the country’s most famous couples, though his infidelity had recently led to divorce. On arriving in North Korea, Choi was kept in a gilded cage while Shin languished in prison after repeated escape attempts. Shin managed to convince his captors that he was willing to work for the regime and the couple were reunited. They co-directed 17 films over a two-year period, with movie buff Kim Jong-il effectively acting as producer (pictured below right, with Choi and Chin).

It’s an insane, credulity-stretching story, clearly and unfussily told. Interviewees include a spry, elderly Choi, and it’s a neat touch to have some of the more outlandish anecdotes illustrated by clips taken from Chin’s films. Choi managed to obtain a micro-cassette recorder and tape many of the pair’s conversations with the dictator – the cassettes later confirming that they had not willingly defected, as some nay-sayers on both sides of the divide later claimed. Chin’s comment that he hated “everything apart from not having to worry about money” is bitterly apposite; despite his semi-incarceration he was given unprecedented artistic and financial freedom by Kim Jong-il, a tragi-comic figure all too aware of his charisma deficit. Chin and Choi managed to play the game for several years, the pair well aware that they could be discarded in an instant should the Dear Leader fall out of love with them.

How they plotted and pulled off their eventual escape is brilliantly reconstructed, but the triumph was short-lived. Shin’s Hollywood career was limited to producing a series of bad Disney comedies. He returned to Seoul under a cloud in 1994, making few films before his death in 2006. Cannan and Adam make excellent use of archive footage, and it’s to their credit that they’ve managed to persuade so many bit-part players in the story to talk frankly on camera. And how well constructed this film is, its 94 minutes flying by. Image and sound are impeccable, but there are no extras.

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