Alain de Botton

A docu-drama portrait of the early-20th-century French author Marcel Proust, based on Alain de Botton's updated analysis of his work as a modern-day self-help guide. Ralph Fiennes plays Proust, with Phyllida Law and Donald Sinden as his contemporaries, while commentators including de Botton, Louis de Bernières and Doris Lessing explain their enthusiasm for his work.

A journalist meets “Man of Today” who, while a responsible citizen, is disengaged from greater society. He believes once he’s dead nothing more matters. As an experiment to see if she can turn his pessimistic view around, the journalist sends him on a journey of enlightenment to prove that the future does matter. Travelling the globe, he finds himself in surprising encounters with great minds in the arts and sciences. Starting with an unexpected poetry reading and conversation with experimental poet Christian Bök, Man of Today engages with architect Shigeru Ban, activist Francis Dupuis-Déri, philosopher Alain de Botton, artist Marlene Dumas, novelist Rivka Galchen, leading scientists and a ghost. Will the journalist succeed in turning a cynic into an optimist? Will it matter? What can one person do?

Social status in a capitalistic society is a major factor in how people live their lives. This social status greatly revolves around a person’s financial status. This film examines how the quest to move up the social ladder has brought untold depression and anxieties about ones self.

The period of time we find hardest to inhabit is the present; for a range of powerful reasons we should take on board.

The history of still life painting with oil paints

Alain de Botton, Edgar Morin, Fredric Jameson, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Orhan Pamuk converse with Brazilian thinkers and artists, creating a dialogue based on their theories and constructing a reflection on identity in the contemporary world.

Skavlan is a Norwegian-Swedish television talk show hosted by Norwegian journalist Fredrik Skavlan. It premiered in Sweden on Sveriges Television in January 2009, and the first guests to appear on the show were former Prime Minister of Sweden Göran Persson and his wife Anitra Steen. On 8 May 2009, it was announced that Skavlan had been renewed for a second season. It was also announced that the show would no longer only be produced by SVT in Sweden; Skavlan would now be partly produced in Norway by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. The first twelve episodes of Skavlan's second season were produced by SVT in Sweden, and the remaining twelve by NRK in Norway. Skavlan speaks Norwegian and his dialog is therefore subtitled in Swedish in Sweden, even though the two languages are quite similar and mutually intelligible. If the persons being interviewed by Skavlan are Swedish, he often tells them to let him know if they do not understand what he is saying. Swedish novelist Jan Guillou has criticized SVT for subtitling the program, stating "there is no need for that. If the host had been Danish, subtitling would have been necessary, but with a Norwegian host it does not make any sense."

Alain de Botton's psychobabble-free self-help course for the philosophically minded.

The Perfect Home is a television series of three 42 minute episodes commissioned for Channel 4 based on the book The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton which first aired in 2006. In the programmes, Alain de Botton explored the importance of innovative architecture for homes. He offered criticism of modern developments that build in an idealized fake heritage style, which he referred to as pastiche, often referring back to the example of Great Notley Garden Village near Braintree, Essex. The first programme looks at how the current status quo came about where volume builders are typically building houses with architectural styles harking back to pre-industrial eras such as mock Tudor, neo-Georgian and mock country cottage façades. The second looks at what defines a building's beauty, drawing parallels with the differences between the Catholic and Protestant ideals in their respective places of worship, suggesting the comparison was a trade off between decoration versus a more utilitarian approach. The third programme looks at how the current situation could be improved, with de Botton's preferred option being that buildings' architecture should reflect the era in which they are built. To this end, he approached Bellway Homes with examples of more contemporary designs being used on in The Netherlands as a suggested alternative. Bellway's reaction was quite positive, and they have incorporated more contemporary designs into their Ravenswood development on the former Ipswich Airport site in Suffolk.