Interactive Class for Viewers to Draw Nude Models on Their Screen Makes BBC TV History

Budding artists will be given a lesson in life drawing from the comfort of their own home in a two-hour special on BBC Four.

Life Drawing Live, an interactive class where viewers can draw the nude models on their screen, will make television history on highbrow channel BBC Four.

Billed as an art lesson for the whole country, the special could be the first of many interactive cultural programmes.

The audience will be asked to draw along from their living rooms as the class is led by award-winning artists Daphne Todd and Lachlan Goudie.

A range of naked models, both male and female and of all shapes and sizes, will feature in the programme.

Viewers can then send their artwork in to the BBC and the best pieces will be displayed on screen as the two hour programme draws to a close.

Artist and former children’s television presenter Josie D’Arby will host the programme.

Life drawing has long been a cornerstone of art training and in recent years it has become more popular with amateur artists too.

For hundreds of years nudity has given inspiration to some of history’s greatest artists, from Rembrandt’s classical Bathsheba at Her Bath to Modigliani’s modern masterpiece 1917 Reclining Nude.

Editor of BBC Four, Cassian Harrison, said that the show would be a meditative experience that would be a television first.

BBC Four has led the way in ‘slow TV’, an unhurried approach to programmes that are entrancing rather than stimulating.

Mr Harrison told The Times: ‘We all feel that the pace of life is rather faster than it might be. Television itself, for a long time, has wanted an accelerated pace, to become noisier, louder and faster.

‘One of the things I’ve discovered on BBC Four is that audiences really like to take it down a gear, to take the time to contemplate and drink something in.’

‘It’s a celebration of a proud and long artistic tradition. Life drawing is one of the core elements of all art and drawing, and the human body is a wonderful and extraordinary thing.’

The programme is due to be broadcast early next year.