Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. Hello, welcome to free thinking, which tonight comes from the BFI South Bank,

a building you'll find on that small blue planet between Mars and Venus.

Tonight we'll examine a film that's more than a landmark in the culture.

It's a monolith, a film that, a year before Apollo 11 landed on the moon,

broke through the limits of the medium and entered a zone that we're still mapping out today.

2001, a space odyssey, adapted from a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and shaped by its director,

Stanley Kubrick, into a kind of dream about the past and the future of humanity. It starts with

a sequence describing two tribes of warring hominids, then takes us to a base on the moon, and then

on a trip to Jupiter that gets diverted to the edge of

time and space. If you've seen it, the images will be in your head now, those angry apes

who, in a single edit, become the slightly less hairy, slightly less angry, spacefaring creatures

who travel to a new world beyond the Simeon imagination.

The ones we get to know, a mission commander Bowman, played by Keir DeLay,

and Deputy Commander Poole played by Gary Lockwood,

voyaging to Jupiter under the single red eye of the shipboard computer, Hal 9,000.

The mission has a secret purpose, to solve the mystery an alien artefact found buried under the lunar rock.

We won't explain the film in this programme any more than we'd try to explain the wasteland or Ulysses.

But it's going to be quite a trip because we'll be led by the best crew for the job.

The cultural historian Sir Christopher Fraling is on the team.

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