Steven Knight on Sitting Bull

Great Lives

BBC

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For Steven Knight, the screen writer and director of ‘Peaky Blinders’ and ‘Taboo’, it was easy to nominate his great life. For him there was just one choice, his all-time hero Sitting Bull.

As a young boy growing up in Birmingham in the 1970s, Steven was obsessed with stories and tales of Native Indians. At the age of thirteen, Steven searched for pen-pals and ended up exchanging letters with the great grand-children of Sitting Bull who lived in South Dakota. The correspondence and friendship he built up has continued into his adult life.

Steven, makes his case for why Sitting Bull is a great life and to help unravel this story he is joined by Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Professor of American and Indigenous Histories at the University of East Anglia.

Presented by Matthew Parris.

Producer: Perminder Khatkar

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2017.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.3	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:19.8	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.4	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.1	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	This is the BBC.
0:43.7	He was an iconic figure.
0:45.4	He had a heavy muscular frame, a big chest and a large head, and it made him look a bit
0:50.4	short and stocky, although he stood at 5 foot 10 inches tall. He had alert piercing
0:56.2	eyes, a prominent hooked nose, and a firm mouth. His hair was often braided on one side with otter fur, the other side hanging loose and his
1:06.0	scalp would be painted in a bright colour.
1:08.9	He would ride naked except for a breech cloth when hunting and daubed himself and his horse with splashes of colour.
1:16.0	Today's Great Life sounds like a fictional character from some Wild West film,
1:22.0	but he was a real character from the real Wild West.
1:25.7	He is a choice of my guest Stephen Knight, writer and creator of Peaky Blinders and Tabu, his
1:31.7	latest TV drama on BBC One Stephen tell us why have you picked
1:36.1	big chief sitting bull well it's because I was a strange child I think at the age of
1:41.3	about eight or 9,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.