At the age of ninety jazz singer Dame Cleo Laine looks back at her extraordinary career. She talks to Stig Abell about her lasting musical and romantic partnership with saxophonist and composer Sir John Dankworth, her friendship with Ella Fitzgerald and collaboration with Ray Charles. Stig visits Cleo at her countryside home, where in 1970 she and husband John Dankworth created The Stables concert hall in their back garden and meets Cleo's daughter, the singer Jacqui Dankworth. Presenter: Stig A...
May 28, 2018•28 min
Iconic dancer and choreographer Akram Khan shows John around his studio at his home and discusses a life of dance, preparing for his final solo performance and what he plans to do now that he is retiring from the stage. The Austrian artist Egon Schiele features alongside a young American photographer Francesca Woodman in a new exhibition Life In Motion at Tate Liverpool. The artists used their own naked bodies as the focus for their work at different ends of the 20th century and both died premat...
May 25, 2018•33 min
Designer Orla Kiely is famous for her distinct Stem-patterned bags and a global brand that includes fashion, accessories and homeware. Now the first exhibition dedicated to her opens at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. She discusses the origins of her work at a kitchen table in Ireland and why she thinks that pattern can make you happy without even noticing. Crime novelist Belinda Bauer talks about her new novel Snap. Based loosely on the real-life murder of Marie Wilks in 1988, it begi...
May 24, 2018•33 min
The American writer Philip Roth, whose death at the age of 85 was announced today, is remembered by Ian McEwan, his biographer Claudia Pierpont, and American novelist Amy Bloom. From Roth's first novel Goodbye Columbus in 1959 to Portnoy's Complaint, American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, he was writer who courted controversy and explored complex themes concerning sexuality, Jewish life and America. Presenter John Wilson Producer Hilary Dunn.
May 23, 2018•38 min
Phoebe Waller-Bridge, writer and star of TV series Fleabag, discusses balancing performance and writing, and her latest role as L3, a female droid in the latest Star Wars episode, Solo. Andrew Sean Greer has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his comic novel Less, about a failed novelist who embarks on a trip round the world rather than attend his ex-lover's wedding. He discusses writing about gay marriage, ageing and why the win came as a surprise. Following the announcement that the B...
May 22, 2018•29 min
Ian McKellen looks back on his acting career and his work as a gay rights activist as a new documentary film comes out about his life. Critic Julia Raeside reviews season 2 of The Handmaid's Tale, which has just started on Channel 4. Bill Gold - the creator of some of the most memorable classic movie posters from the early 1940s until 2011, including Casablanca, Alien and Dirty Harry - died yesterday, aged 97. Publisher and vintage movie poster specialist Tony Nourmand remembers the man whose mo...
May 21, 2018•32 min
Shakespeare's Globe found itself in a storm of controversy when Artistic Director Emma Rice left the theatre amid objections to her use of modern lighting and amplification. In her stead the actor Michelle Terry was appointed and her first two productions, As You Like It and Hamlet, have just opened. Terry takes the title role in Hamlet but the approach is a resolutely ensemble one, with casting across gender, disability and ethnicity. Are these productions a radical new approach or are they bac...
May 18, 2018•32 min
As he celebrates his 80th birthday, photographer Joel Meyerowitz looks back at his career which is the focus of his new book of photos, Where I Find Myself. It features his early work as a street photographer in New York in the '60s, his images of Ground Zero immediately after the 9/11 attacks, and his most recent still lifes in Tuscany. In a unique commission to open the 2018 Charleston Festival, novelist Ali Smith will be performing a piece of creative prose inspired by the Famous Women Dinner...
May 17, 2018•36 min
Film critic Jason Solomons reports from Cannes on the big films, rising stars and talking points at this year's festival. In 1970 Lou Reed not only left The Velvet Underground but he decided poetry was his vocation. In 1971 he gave a reading at St Mark's church in New York which was recorded. 'Do Angels Need Haircuts?' is a slim volume of Reed's early poems that draws on this recording and other archive material. The artist Laurie Anderson, who was married to Reed and is curating his legacy, tal...
May 16, 2018•33 min
The American writer Tom Wolfe has died aged 88. His style of reportage in the late 60s became known as the New Journalism, and his best known books were the Right Stuff about the first NASA astronauts, as well as his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities which epitomised the excesses of Wall Street in the 80s. Writer and critic Diane Roberts pays tribute. Director Richard Eyre talks about his new film of King Lear which is a co-production between BBC Two and Amazon. The stellar cast includes Anthony...
May 15, 2018•33 min
As the Royal Ballet stages their new production of Swan Lake this week, we go behind the scenes during rehearsals to meet some of the cast and crew, including choreographer Liam Scarlett, designer John Macfarlane and principal dancer Marianela Nuñez. This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights. An intense tale of passionate relationships, it is considered one of the most powerful and enigmatic works in English literature. As Wuthering Heights is d...
May 14, 2018•33 min
Writer David Nicholls, best known for One Day, talks about bringing sex, drugs and a silver spoon to life in his television adaptation of Edward St Aubyn's acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Gaz Coombes, former frontman of alternative rock band Supergrass, performs a track from his new album, World's Strongest Man, live in the studio and discusses its eclectic influences including the artist Grayson Perry. Kayo Chingonyi is a 31-year-old Zambian-born British poet who...
May 11, 2018•34 min
Michael Fassbender was reportedly happy to be filmed completely naked in the film Shame, but compared with female nudity, male full-frontal shots are still rare on screen. What are the reasons for this disparity and what are the certification issues with representation of the male organ? The BBFC's David Austin and film critics Hannah McGill and Ryan Gilbey consider the long and the short of it. Chris Lang, the critically-acclaimed writer and creator of ITV's Unforgotten, talks about his latest ...
May 10, 2018•35 min
Neil Gaiman discusses the big-screen adaptation of his 2006 short story How To Talk To Girls At Parties. Directed by Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell, the film tells the story of a teenage punk falling in love with an alien, and stars Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, Ruth Wilson and Matt Lucas. In our age of heightened awareness of racism, homophobia and sexism in culture, how easy is it to watch old movies with our children? Film historian Ian Christie and journalist Hadley ...
May 09, 2018•34 min
Ian McEwan discusses the process of adapting his novel On Chesil Beach for the big screen. Set in 1962, it tells the story of two young newlyweds spending their honeymoon preoccupied with - and terrified by - the forthcoming consummation of their marriage. Drew McOnie talks about directing and choreographing the first UK staging of Strictly Ballroom: The Musical, based on the much-loved 1992 Baz Luhrmann film that led to a resurgence of ballroom dancing in popular culture. A recent DCMS survey s...
May 08, 2018•35 min
Norwich will soon be home to the new National Centre for Writing in the medieval Dragon Hall. Chris Gribble tells Kirsty Lang about the extraordinary building and the role of the Centre. Authors Sarah Perry and Sarah Hall describe the thriving literary culture of the city and Kirsty visits The Book Hive, one of the city's independent bookshops. She goes to the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library and to the University of East Anglia, home to the MA in Creative Writing that has Ian McEwan, Kazu...
May 07, 2018•34 min
Graphic artist David Shrigley discusses his role as Guest Director of the Brighton Festival 2018, and his new book Fully Coherent Plan for a New and Better Society. Madeline Miller won the Orange Prize for Fiction with her debut The Song of Achilles, which told the story of a love affair between Achilles and Patroclus. Her latest novel continues the Greek theme with the story of the first witch in Western literature, Circe, daughter of Helios, who is scorned and rejected by her kin. She discusse...
May 04, 2018•32 min
The Burning Chambers is the latest historical novel from bestselling author of Labyrinth and co-founder of the Women's Prize for Fiction, Kate Mosse. Set in sixteenth century Languedoc it is the first in a new quartet that covers three centuries of religious conflict. Kate Mosse explains the inspiration for the books and her fascination for medieval France. Kanye West is never far away from controversy and this time the US rapper has caused a public outcry with his comments about slavery. Jacque...
May 03, 2018•33 min
In a BBC national poll Benjamin Zephaniah was voted the nation's third favourite poet of all times, after TS Eliot and John Donne, and the only living one in the top ten. Aged 60, the award winning playwright, novelist, activist and musician has published a memoir, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah. He talks to John Wilson. Coronation Street has just revealed that the character, Aidan Connor, will take his own life next week. Over the years soaps generally have not shied away from dealin...
May 02, 2018•35 min
Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, a new exhibition at Tate Modern, explores the intertwined stories of the two art forms from the early photographic experiments to the digital innovations of the 21st century. The two curators discuss the relationship between artists, including Jackson Pollock, Georges Braque and Bridget Riley, and photographers, including Man Ray and Edward Weston. Stephen Deuchar, chair of the judging panel for the Art Fund Museum of the Year prize, rev...
May 01, 2018•32 min
Plan B - the singer, director and actor, aka Ben Drew - releases his fourth studio album this week. Plan B discusses Heaven Before All Hell Breaks Loose, featuring songs that reflect how his life has changed since his last album six years ago. From Picasso to Grayson Perry, design critic Corinne Julius and the Royal Academy of Art's commercial director Jo Prosser discuss the history and trends in artists' work reproduced on homewares. We hear about a new exhibition of Chinese art exploring the p...
Apr 30, 2018•34 min
Avengers: Infinity War is released in cinemas today. Fans have been counting the days until the film's release, but what does this ambitious high-budget offering reveal about the state of the hugely successful Marvel Cinematic Universe? Mik Scarlet and Larushka Ivan-Zadeh consider the bigger picture. At a time when many libraries across the UK are facing an uncertain future, Salley Vickers has gone back to the 1950s for her new novel The Librarian. Salley, and Peter Gaw who runs Nottinghamshire'...
Apr 27, 2018•33 min
Janelle Monáe, the American singer and actress, discusses her new album Dirty Computer, working with Prince, and her roles in recent films Hidden Figures and Moonlight. Controversialist Katie Hopkins has said that she might be murdered for her outspoken views. A new musical based on this premise, explores imagined events in the aftermath of her death. The Assassination of Katie Hopkins considers the boundaries of liberal tolerance and the pervasive power of social media. We talk to the show's wr...
Apr 26, 2018•35 min
Rodin and the art of ancient Greece is a new exhibition at the British Museum which highlights the influence the Greek Parthenon sculptures had on the French artist on his first visit to the museum in 1881. The show's curators, Ian Jenkins and Celeste Farge, discuss the relationship between Auguste Rodin's works, including The Kiss and The Thinker, and Pheidias's Elgin Marbles. One of Britain's leading young composers Mark Simpson, himself a winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year Award, ha...
Apr 25, 2018•33 min
Today the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square in London was unveiled. Millicent Fawcett, the suffragist who fought for women's right to vote in the early 20th century, joins 11 male figures including Sir Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandi. Art critic Estelle Lovatt gives her verdict on the artwork. We talk to dramatist Joe Penhall, writer of the award-winning The Kinks musical Sunny Afternoon and hit play Blue/Orange, about his new work Mood Music, about a feuding singe...
Apr 24, 2018•35 min
The shortlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018 has been announced today, critics Alex Clark and Toby Lichtig comment on the six novels that made it through from the longlist of 16. Country band The Shires perform live and discuss their new album, Accidentally on Purpose, working with Ed Sheeran and why country music is having a resurgence in popularity in the UK. Sean O'Brien is a man of letters, writing essays, plays and novels; as well as his celebrated poetry. He talks about and reads f...
Apr 23, 2018•33 min
Romola Garai is known for her roles in films such as Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights, and in The Hours, Emma and The Miniaturist on television. For her latest role she's on stage in Ella Hickson's new play, The Writer. Garai discusses playing the writer, who battles patriarchy and capitalism in her determination to create a pure art that will change the world. The South African choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo have been singing and touring for over 50 years. On the eve of their performance in...
Apr 20, 2018•33 min
When the Empire Windrush docked, the first contribution of the arrivals from the Caribbean was cultural - Lord Kitchener singing his calypso "London is the Place for Me". Stig Abell talks to publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove and calypsonian Alexander D Great about the artistic contribution of the Windrush Generation, and their offspring. Alexander sings 'After the Windrush', a new calypso written especially for Front Row. Comedian David Walliams pays tribute to his friend the television presenter Da...
Apr 19, 2018•31 min
Tina Turner has been closely involved with Tina, the musical which tells the story of her tempestuous life. It has just opened and Front Row has a review. The actor Nicola Walker discusses her role in Abi Morgan's new television drama series about divorce lawyers, The Split, and some of her other roles. A report was published last week looking at booking accessible tickets for people with disabilities, for music and entertainment venues. Samira Ahmed speaks to Claire Griffin from the Roundhouse ...
Apr 18, 2018•35 min
Following last night's broadcast of The Queen's Green Planet on ITV, which features the Queen in intimate conversation with Sir David Attenborough, we talk to the documentary's director Jane Treays about working with the Queen and look back over the history of royal TV projects with critic Chris Dunkley. Luke Evans has featured in many Hollywood films including The Girl on the Train, Fast & Furious, the Hobbit franchise and last year as Gaston in Disney's live-action remake of Beauty and the...
Apr 17, 2018•29 min
