BBC Radio 4 is lining up 75 leading public figures, including film director Bernardo Bertolucci, singer Paul Weller and novelist Jeanette Winterson, to reveal their most treasured cultural influences for what the station claims will be one of the most comprehensive arts events broadcast.
The network has already confirmed 30 names for the project, Cultural Exchange, which will see individuals selecting a single item to talk about, with the choices ranging from the King James Bible to an obscure 1960s album.
It will feature every weekday on Front Row until the end of July.
Artist Tracey Emin will launch the series on 22 April with her insights into a Vermeer painting – Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid. She describes Vermeer as "one of the first feminists", pointing to the unusual and fascinating way he depicted women. "He showed that women had singular thoughts that were away from their husbands," she says.
Weller has nominated the album Odessey and Oracle by The Zombies, revealing that he gives a copy of the 1967 work as a present to friends. Winterson has chosen the King James Bible, which is often described as "the most influential version of the most influential book in the world", while actor David Walliams has chosen the work of Harold Pinter.
Bertolucci, the Oscar-winning Italian director of films including Last Tango in Paris and The Conformist, is yet to choose his subject. But Radio 4 confirmed that Madness singer Graham McPherson, better known as Suggs, will discuss John Betjeman's meditation on mortality, On a Portrait of a Deaf Man, while novelist Howard Jacobson will wax lyrical about Mike Nichols's 1971 film Carnal Knowledge.
It's about the endless problems men and women have when it comes to sex," says Jacobson in his recorded tribute to the film, which revolves around the love lives of two college friends played by Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel.
Other contributors who have not yet confirmed their choices include novelists Hilary Mantel, PD James and Zadie Smith, National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner and historian Simon Schama. The BBC is understood to be hoping to recruit more figures from sport and science, including England cricket captain Alastair Cook and one of his predecessors, Michael Atherton.
Cultural Exchange is part of Radio 4's renewed focus on the arts ordered by controller Gwyneth Williams a year ago. Williams said she hoped that the project will also draw listeners to her station's archive, which is being made available on demand for the first time.
"We have all been inspired by a work of art, a poem or piece of music or writing – and some stay with us all our lives," she said. "I am looking forward to a summer of discovery – I can't wait to learn which works have inspired some of our most creative minds."
Jeffrey Archer is yet to confirm his choice, but the novelist and Tory peer has agreed in principle to contribute. Arts broadcaster Lord Bragg will be heard choosing a 1658 Rembrandt self-portrait he first saw at the Frick Museum in New York when he was a boy. In his interview he reveals how he still has a tattered postcard of the picture he bought at the time and which he has kept next to his desk for well over half a century.
Arts Council chairman and former Big Brother producer Peter Bazalgette has plumped for the British painter Wyndham Lewis's portrait of the poet and critic Edith Sitwell, which he said captures "not just the likeness but the essence" of its subject.
"The point of this is to try and tease out people's secret passions, something they love," said Cultural Exchange's series producer Tim Prosser. "Also, each contribution will have a bespoke page on the BBC website so this is also a way of opening up the Radio 4 archive in way we have never done before."
Other confirmed Radio 4 Cultural Exchange contributors
Kwame Kwei-Armah August Wilson's play Joe Turner's Come and Gone
Will Self The Man who was Thursday by GK Chesterton
Meera Syal To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Adrian Lester Bob Marley's Redemption Song
Brian Sewell Christ Contemplated by the Christian Soul by Velazquez
Nigel Kennedy Louis Armstrong's recording of the jazz standard Black and Blue
