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That’s me in the £45m Hockney! The man in the masterpiece relives sitting for David back in the heady LA party days | David Hockney

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‘Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!” Laughter explodes down the line from California. “It was a very long time ago!” says the painter Don Bachardy. His voice is high and rasping. Listening to him, you could be forgiven for thinking that the late Truman Capote was still with us. As for what happened “a very long time ago”, Bachardy is referring to the parties he threw with his partner, the British novelist Christopher Isherwood. Their home in Adelaide Drive, Santa Monica, was a salon thronged by movie stars and writers as well as Bachardy’s fellow artists.“Yes, we had a good time…

The turbulent history of the union jack

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Stewart continues: "This was another means of smoothing national sensibilities by ensuring that the precedence given to the Irish saltire – because it lay over the Scottish saltire – was balanced by the Scottish saltire having precedence in the more prestigious half of the design." The flag was first flown on 1 January 1801, when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came into being. Since the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, the red has represented Northern Ireland.AlamyThe Death of Major Peirson by John Singleton Copley (1783) portrays a moment of British victory against a French invasion of Jersey (Credit:…

The office worker who became the first person ever to appear on TV

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Enter William Taynton, a 20-year-old office boy who was working downstairs from Baird's makeshift laboratory. He told the BBC 40 years later to the day: "Mr Baird came rushing down full of excitement and almost dragged me out of my office to go to his small laboratory. I think he was so excited at the time that words didn't come. He almost grabbed me and wanted me to get upstairs as quickly as possible."When Taynton came across the ramshackle state of Baird's laboratory, he said he felt like running straight back down the stairs. First, he had to navigate his…

11 of the best TV shows to watch this October

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Riot Women premieres 22 October on Britbox in the US and in October on BBC1 in the UKWarner Bros9. It: Welcome to DerryOnly in Stephen King's world could a welcome message sound so menacing. Pennywise, the evil clown played by Bill Skarsgård in the films It (2017) and It: Chapter Two (2019) had to start somewhere, and Skarsgård returns in this prequel series, based on the "interlude" chapters in the 1986 King novel that inspired the films. The show is set in 1962 in Derry, Maine (far from the Ireland of Derry Girls) where a couple with a young son…

Why Anna Magnani is the overlooked ‘goddess’ of Italian cinema

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Less than a year earlier, Teresa Gullace, a six-month-pregnant mother of five had been shot in Rome by a Nazi soldier after she waved at her captive husband. In the film, Francesco shouts "Teresa", as an homage. At the time, Magnani was also suffering, as her son had contracted polio.An unconventional star Magnani's communication of this raw pain on screen is perhaps one reason why she is less popular in the US today than other iconic Italian actresses. "Anna is the embodiment of a country that came out of the war with the courage of showing its wounds," says De Bernardinis.…

The pioneering photographer who captured the horror of World War Two

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Miller's headstrong creativity is evoked by her wry quotes; she once explained of her work: "It was a matter of getting out on a damn limb, and sawing it off behind you." The urgency, audaciousness, and unexpected compassion that defines so much of her photography is also inextricably linked to her personal experience.She was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York State; she began her global adventures in her youth, though her ultimate home was Farleys House in the East Sussex countryside, where she moved in 1949 with her husband, British painter and curator Roland Penrose, and their infant son…

12 of the best films to watch this October

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Released on 24 October in the US and Canada, and internationally from 30 OctoberDisneySpringsteen: Deliver Me from NowhereAre we moving on from the era when pop music biopics such as Ray, Walk the Line and Elvis would squeeze decades of a star's life into two hours? Last year's A Complete Unknown concentrated on the earliest years of Bob Dylan's career, and now Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere dramatises an even shorter chapter of its subject's life story. As played by Jeremy Allen White (The Bear), Bruce Springsteen is shown making just one album, 1982's Nebraska. He is on the verge…

The dog-centred horror led by a new canine acting ‘superstar’

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"The idea started as a concept after watching Poltergeist [1982] for probably the 100th time," Leonberg tells BBC Culture. "In the opening of that film, the family's dog clearly senses the presence of the ghost before anyone else. That trope of 'the dog who knows better' appears in so many horror films, and I thought, 'Someone should really tell that story from the dog's perspective.'"Leonberg didn't have to search far to cast the lead, as Indy is his own dog, who he thought could be perfect due to his "intense, unblinking stare". Through expressive head tilts, whimpers and inquisitive stares,…

How The Social Network predicted the future of tech

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Zuckerberg may have a point, but it's hardly the first time that a film has twisted the truth for dramatic and thematic purposes. "As a historian and someone who believes very strongly in media literacy, I always approach and encourage others to approach a film based on real events as still a dramatisation," Jason Steinhauer, the author of History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past, tells the BBC. "Every Hollywood film takes liberties, removes elements from the story, heightens the drama, and accentuates certain characters, all in the name of storytelling. I would…

The century-long search for the Loch Ness Monster

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The most famous image appeared in 1934 at the height of Nessie-mania: a slender, serpent-like neck rising from the loch. For decades, the photo baffled Nessieologists. In 1979, Californian naturalist Dennis Power suggested the "monster" it depicted was an elephant swimming with its trunk above water. Elephants, he noted, could swim up to 30 miles. While admitting the idea of an elephant in the Scottish Highlands was almost as unlikely as a real monster, he said: "We'd love to apply for a government grant for four round-trip tickets to Scotland and 40 tonnes of peanuts to try and trap it,…