Jackson Pollock is an American icon, the art world's equivalent of Coca Cola or Mickey Mouse. His celebrity goes far beyond the recognition of his status as an artist.

His life needs little embellishment. Post-war America needed cultural heroes and the Abstract Expressionists were the group that emerged as the art world's answer to that need. They were unlikely heroes; hard living, macho, anti-establishment iconoclasts who took on the emerging popular culture of the time. Of the group, Pollock emerged as the figurehead. He was, it has been said, like a dog chasing a car he didn't know what to do with when he caught it. A defining moment was the 1949 spread in Life magazine which pictured the artist in jeans and T-shirt, cigarette hanging from his mouth under the banner headline 'Is this the greatest living painter in the United States?' Meant to be ironic , it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The pressure to produce, to develop and not to disappoint became too great a burden. After a period of abstinence from drink, during which he produced his most highly regarded works, Pollock returned to his battle with alcoholism. Six years later, he drove drunk into a tree, killing both himself and a woman passenger. The ugly circumstances of his death sealed his fate as a cult hero. It was a James Dean moment.

Pollock's story is told by close personal friends, stars from the 2000 biopic, including Ed Harris, and by art-world experts.The programme reveals a large amount of control in his painting which had often been seen as a random technique and takes a look at how his celebrity was ultimately the cause of his undoing. He was the first artist to be made by the media and, in a sense, the first to be destroyed by it.