South Bank's fab four

After 26 years of presenting its viewers with a diet of the most highbrow - and sometimes obscure - artists from around the world, the South Bank Show has decided to lighten up a bit.

Having recently given its audience profiles of a 30-year-old Peruvian opera singer, Sir Ian McKellen and a Brazilian poet, the ITV programme's producers have turned to...London's buskers.

A show due to be aired next month will see four of the capital's finest street musicians showcased in a determined departure from the programme's usual range.

It comes little more than a year after London Underground launched the Carlingsponsored licensed busking scheme, which now boasts 602 performers regularly playing at 31 station pitches.

The four performers to be profiled on the South Bank Show include an accountant who walked out of work one day to start busking with a penny whistle and a single mother who combines opera singing at, or at least outside, Covent Garden with bringing up two daughters and studying for a history degree.

By contrast, in the last few months viewers have been treated to programmes dedicated to Brazilian poet and songwriter Caetano Veloso, the Harlem Dance Theatre and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

Other shows have seen profiles of James MacMillan (one of Scotland's leading composers of modern music), Juan Diego Florez (an opera star from Peru) and Johnny Hallyday, "the biggest rock star you have never heard of ".

But the show's presenter Melvyn Bragg asked producers to commission a programme on buskers after being impressed by the quality of some street musicians and intrigued by their stories.

Archie Powell, who produced and directed the 50-minute documentary, said: "It is a bit different from some of the programmes that have been done in the past but what is fascinating are the stories behind these artists.

They are fantastic musicians in their own right but what they have to go through to be able to perform is inspiring."

The South Bank Show: Street Music Stories, ITV1, Sunday 22 August.