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The UK’s foremost film director Sir Christopher Nolan and the leading cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling unite to assess the impact of one of the biggest, boldest - and least celebrated - eras in filmmaking history.

Meet the Adland Five - five British directors who stormed Hollywood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, having already revolutionised the world of advertising.

Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Ridley and Tony Scott went from working side by side in London’s Soho ad business - on 30 second TV spots for the likes of Hovis and Heineken - to transforming the film industry with movies including Alien, Chariots of Fire and Top Gun. So why have critics never taken them seriously?

Christopher Nolan’s own love for the work of the Adland Five can be traced back to a childhood visit to the Pinewood set of Bugsy Malone in 1976. The film’s director Alan Parker was the first of the group to break into cinema, and it was the success of his debut – a prohibition-era musical starring kids, with adults providing singing voices - that led Parker’s friend and colleague Ridley Scott to move into the movies himself, with 1977’s Napoleonic drama The Duellists.

Without the impact of the Adland Five some decades before, Christopher Nolan’s own Hollywood career - with films like The Dark Knight, Inception and Oppenheimer - might never have seemed within reach. Now he believes it’s time they were given their due…

Producer - Jane Long
Executive Producer - Freya Hellier
Additional research - Edward Charles, Heather Dempsey and Queenie Qureshi-Wales
Sound mix - Jon Calver
A Prospect Street production for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Radio 4