5x15 Special: Inside The World of The Beatles with Gary Kemp, Simon Halfon & Tom Holland

Gary Kemp is one of the UK’s most successful songwriters of the past 40 years, best known for writing the words and music for all 23 of Spandau Ballet’s hit singles. In 2012, he received the prestigious Outstanding Song Collection Award at the Ivor Novello Awards, and in 2023, was honoured with the BMI Icon Award at the BMI London Awards for his contributions to music and popular culture. Gary is the co-host with bassist Guy Pratt on the Apple #1 podcast Rockonteurs.

Simon Halfon is an art director and BAFTA-nominated filmmaker, best known for producing Wham! for Netflix and the award-winning Oasis documentary Supersonic, which he later adapted into a Sunday Times bestselling book published by Headline, his first feature SLEUTH written by Harold Pinter, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Michael Caine and Jude Law.

Tom Holland is an award-winning historian, author and broadcaster. He is the author of Rubicon: The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic, which won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Persian Fire, his history of the Graeco-Persian wars, won the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award in 2006; Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom, a panoramic account of the two centuries on either side of the apocalyptic year 1000; In the Shadow of the Sword, which covers the collapse of Roman and Persian power in the Near East, and the emergence of Islam; and Dynasty, a portrait of Rome’s first imperial dynasty. He has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC. His translation of Herodotus was published in 2013 by Penguin Classics and followed in 2016 by a history of Æthelstan published under the Penguin Monarchs series, and in 2019 Æthelflæd England’s Forgotten Founder as a Ladybird Expert Book. In 2007, he was the winner of the Classical Association prize, awarded to ‘the individual who has done most to promote the study of the language, literature and civilisation of Ancient Greece and Rome’. Holland is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Making History. He has written and presented a number of TV documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4, on subjects ranging from religion to dinosaurs. He served two years as the Chair of the Society of Authors; as Chair of the PLR Advisory Committee and was on the committee of the Classical Association.