Look this Sunday for the latest stage in Paul Merton’s noble quest to educate us all into a film history some are in danger of forgetting, when BBC4 screens Paul Merton looks at Alfred Hitchcock. OK, so Hitchcock’s not exactly neglected yet, but he’s more of a name (or a body shape) than five decades of superlatively creative filmmaking to many, and we’re promised that Merton (he’s the one on the left, by the way) will include Hitchcock’s silents in his investigation. Indeed the subject of his programme is specifically Hitch’s British films, the majority of which were silent.

Screenings will be 28 Feb 2009, 21:00; 01 Mar 2009, 00:10; 01 Mar 2009, 03:10; 01 Mar 2009, 22:00 and 04 Mar 2009, 00:05. And it’ll be on iPlayer, of course.

Update: Talking of things Hitchcock, there’s an exhibition currently running at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin on Hitchcock and production, Casting a Shadow: Creating the Alfred Hitchcock Film. The exhibition, which runs until 10 May 2009, has a special focus on Hitchcock’s time in Berlin studios in the 1920s, and there’s an article by William Cook about the exhibition, ‘The Master and Murnau‘ in The Guardian which discusses what Hitchcock gained from working at the Babelsberg studio for Emelka and seeing F.W. Murnau directing Der Letze Mann.