Actress Keeley Hawes has long been a household name and seems to have an uncanny ability to pick parts that place her in the most talked about TV shows of their moment. In this extended interview we look back on her career, considering those key roles including the Home Secretary in the hugely popular Bodyguard, working on cult lesbian drama Tipping the Velvet, MI5 agent Zoe in spy thriller Spooks, playing a cop sent back to the 80s in Ashes to Ashes, a policewoman under investigation in Line of...
Jan 01, 2019•29 min
How much were you paying attention to arts and culture in 2018? Critics Boyd Hilton, Katie Puckrik and Sarah Crompton, Raifa Rafiq from the Mostly Lit podcast, and actress Maureen Lipman battle it out to see who'll be crowned champion in our cultural quiz of the year. Plus what is your favourite cultural depiction of New Year's Eve? Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Hannah Robins
Dec 31, 2018•28 min
Journalist and novelist Jonathan Freedland remembers the Israeli author Amos Oz who died today. Tim Robey, Susannah Clapp and Laura Barton - film, theatre and music critics - look ahead to the notable arts events of the upcoming year. The legendary comic book creator and Marvel figurehead, Stan Lee, died earlier this year. Today, on what would have been his 96th birthday, we pay tribute to his life and work. Comic book artist Dave Gibbons, film critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw and comic book writer K...
Dec 28, 2018•28 min
Front Row marks the deaths of three great choreographers.
Dec 27, 2018•34 min
Internationally-acclaimed land artist Chris Drury's latest project is a dry stone chamber at the end of a remote peninsular overlooking Morecambe Bay in Lancashire. As the tide recedes, Stig brings us some 'slow radio' as he crosses the causeway and heads for Sunderland Point to meet the artist, as well as Andrew Mason, the Master Craftsman and noted dry stonewaller, as they work on the construction of the Horizon Line Chamber. When it is finished, visitors will be able to go inside the building...
Dec 26, 2018•28 min
It's estimated that almost three million people in the UK now belong to a choir. Kirsty Lang explores why this might be, and looks at the evidence that singing is really good for us. The Sixteen is a professional choir which celebrates its 40th anniversary next year. It's founder, Harry Christophers, and one of the sopranos, Charlotte Mobbs, talk to Kirsty about starting the choir, changing attitudes towards choral singing, their 2019 plans and their outreach programme, working in communities wh...
Dec 25, 2018•28 min
Andrew Davies is renowned for turning literary classics into prime-time television drama, from Pride and Prejudice and Bleak House to War and Peace. He talks to Samira about his new BBC One series, a reworking of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, explaining the appeal of the 19th Century epic novel and why the stage musical version of the book didn’t influence his adaption at all. In the Bible, Matthew wrote about the Three Wise Men, Luke about the shepherds and the angels, and ever since, Christmas...
Dec 24, 2018•28 min
Ben Elton, creator of the iconic Elizabethan sitcom Blackadder II, talks about his fascination with Shakespeare, as Upstart Crow returns to BBC Two for a Shakespeare/Dickens mashup, A Crow Christmas Carol. He's also written the screenplay for All is True, a Shakespeare biopic starring Kenneth Branagh. Vanessa Kisuule reads her poem Describing Snow in the Aftermath, part of Radio 4's poetry day marking the winter solstice. As artist Olafur Eliasson installs melting ice blocks outside Tate Modern ...
Dec 21, 2018•28 min
Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the phenomenally successful stage musical Hamilton, is starring in Mary Poppins Returns, a sequel to Disney’s 1964 classic. He talks to John about following in the cockney footsteps of Dick Van Dyke, and how he referenced the original Mary Poppins in Hamilton. As Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage musical Hamilton marks one year on the London stage this week, we look at whether it has created an increased appetite for hip hop musicals. Taking part are the Musical Director ...
Dec 20, 2018•28 min
Eileen Atkins, grande dame of the stage, looks back over her career. The actress famous for her roles in The Crown and Gosford Park, talks about playing Childie in the original stage production of The Killing of Sister George, and co-creating Upstairs Downstairs, as well as some of the famous acting roles she has turned down. Penny Marshall, the first woman to direct a film that took more than 100m dollars at the box office, has died. She was, too, the second female director to have a film Oscar...
Dec 19, 2018•32 min
Actor and director John Malkovich discusses foreign accents and facial hair with Kirsty as he explains what drew him to taking on the role of famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in The ABC Murders, the latest BBC One dramatization of Agatha Christie's novels by writer Sarah Phelps. As Christmas approaches with films like It's a Wonderful Life back in cinemas and Love Actually on the TV schedules film critic Hannah McGill and Thomas Dixon, author of Weeping Britannia, discuss what makes a good...
Dec 18, 2018•28 min
As the Archers prepares for its Canterbury Tales Christmas special, Carole Boyd - who plays the doyenne of Ambridge theatricals Lynda Snell - is joined by Oxford Professor of Medieval Literature Laura Ashe to discuss Chaucer’s tales of courtly love and boisterous sex. The new BBC and Netflix animated version of Watership Down will be broadcast on BBC ONE at 7pm on December 22 and 23. Critic Mark Ecclestone gives his view on how it compares with the book by Richard Adams, and whether the new vers...
Dec 17, 2018•28 min
Rita Ora on her six year journey to release her second album Phoenix, following a legal dispute with her record label. The musician, who has also acted in the Fifty Shades film trilogy and been a judge on television talent shows The Voice and The X-Factor, talks to John Wilson about finally being able to release music, song writing and her Albanian heritage. This year’s Bad Sex In Fiction award was won by James Frey and also had an all-male shortlist. So what defines good and bad writing of sex ...
Dec 14, 2018•28 min
Not Going Out is the UK’s longest-running sitcom on TV and will this year bring a live edition to our screens for Christmas. The show’s star and creator Lee Mack talks about its surprising longevity, the changing face of British comedy, and his childhood dream of being a jockey. From real life to the big screen and now the casino stage, Channing Tatum’s outstandingly popular Magic Mike is now in London’s West End. Though in the light of the #MeToo movement, the show is compared by female comedia...
Dec 13, 2018•29 min
Two new films with comic book superheroes at the centre - Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and Aquaman - have just been released. Aquaman is DC’s follow-up to their hugely successful 2017 film Wonder Woman, while Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an animated superhero film which imagines Spidermen (and women) from alternative universes who team up. Critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw has seen both and gives her verdict on which will come out on top in the battle for the box-office. Mike Bartlett, Ol...
Dec 12, 2018•28 min
Mortal Engines is a new sci-fi fantasy film co-written and produced by Peter Jackson, based on the first in a series of young adult steampunk novels by Philip Reeve. In a post-apocalyptic future, mobile cities on huge caterpillar tracks roam the landscape, consuming smaller towns for their resources. Starring Hera Hilmar as Hester Shaw, the film is the directorial debut of long-time Jackson collaborator Christian Rivers. Katie Popperwell reviews. In a year when housing has risen up the political...
Dec 11, 2018•28 min
Tamara Lawrance stars in new BBC One drama The Long Song, an adaption of the Andrea Levy novel set on a sugar plantation during the final days of slavery in 19th century Jamaica. The actress talks about the drama as well as her career so far, which in the three years since leaving drama school has seen her play Viola in Twelfth Night at the National Theatre, Cordelia opposite Ian McKellen's Lear in Chichester and Prince Harry’s republican girlfriend in BBC One’s Charles III. Meet Vermeer is a ne...
Dec 10, 2018•28 min
As Bruce Springsteen nears the end of his 236-show run in New York, Kate Mossman reviews Springsteen on Broadway, the new Netflix film of his stage show based on his autobiography Born to Run, in which he looks back on his life and performs songs on acoustic guitar and piano. From James Bond nemesis Blofeld to Scar from the Lion King – facial disfigurements have long been commonplace for cinematic villains. A new campaign by the charity Changing Faces and the BFI, I Am Not Your Villain, wants to...
Dec 07, 2018•29 min
Screenwriter Jimmy McGovern talks about his new BBC One drama Care, starring Sheridan Smith, Alison Steadman and Sinead Keenan, which looks at the personal challenges of caring for a parent with dementia and the struggle to find good and affordable care. Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera talks to us from her home in Havana and explains why she is continuing to protest over Decree 349, a new law that will require artists to obtain a government licence, despite Bruguera being arrested twice ...
Dec 06, 2018•29 min
Maggi Hambling discusses her new exhibition The Quick and the Dead at Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, which centres on paintings and drawings made over the past decade, in which she has portrayed four fellow artists - Sebastian Horsley, Sarah Lucas, Julian Simmons and Juergen Teller - whose lives have intersected at various points, and who have created their own reciprocal artistic interpretations. Nearly 40 years ago, three white Jewish teenagers called Adam Horovitz, Adam Yauch and Michael Diamon...
Dec 05, 2018•29 min
Twelve flights. Twelve travellers. Twelve stories. David Szalay talks about his new book, Turbulence, which features lives in turmoil, each in some way touching the next. David Szalay was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016 – and Turbulence is an original Radio 4 commission. The 55th annual Golden Horse awards, dubbed the "Chinese Oscars", saw An Elephant Sitting Still win best picture. Created by novelist-turned-director Hu Bo, who adapted it from his own book, it tells the story of fo...
Dec 04, 2018•29 min
For his final role as an actor, Robert Redford plays a charming bank robber in The Old Man and the Gun, harking back to his early roles in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. Tim Robey reviews. Booker prize winning narrator of Anna Burns’s Milkman reads 19th century novels as she cannot bear the 20th century. What do other fictional characters read and what does it reveal about them, their authors and the period in which the books were written. John Bown, Professor of Literature at...
Dec 03, 2018•29 min
Strictly Come Dancing Head Judge Shirley Ballas describes her approach as fun, firm, feisty but fair. As one of the couples comes ever closer to raising this year’s glitter-ball trophy she talks about her own background in dance, dismisses the “curse” of Strictly and explains why she thinks the show has such appeal to young, old and everyone in between. Sarah Jenkins, who recently won the BBC Proms Inspire competition for young composers, talks about her new piece, inspired by the winter solstic...
Nov 30, 2018•29 min
Hot on the heels of Disney's successful remake of The Jungle Book, Netflix release a live action/motion capture retelling of Kipling stories, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, directed by Andy Serkis and starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Benedict Cumberbatch. Novelist Katherine Rundell reviews. Samira talks to Dana Gioia, who as Poet Laureate of California recently went on a poetry reading odyssey, visiting all 58 counties in the state. He's also spent the last year choosing the poems for ...
Nov 29, 2018•29 min
Naomi Alderman’s debut novel, Disobedience, has been adapted into a film starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. The women are reunited as Ronit, now living in New York, returns to her Orthodox Jewish community in London after her father’s death, reigniting a forbidden passion with her childhood friend Esti. Briony Hanson, Head of Film for the British Film Institute, reviews. Scottish artist Rachel Maclean discusses her new exhibition, The Lion and The Unicorn, at the National Gallery in Londo...
Nov 28, 2018•29 min
The 2018 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award today celebrated its 30th anniversary, and at the awards ceremony the prize was shared between two books for the first time. The two winning authors - Paul D Gibson for The Lost Soul of Eamonn Magee, and Tom Gregory for A Boy in the Water - join the prize's co-founder Graham Sharpe and fellow judge Alyson Rudd to discuss the winning books and reflect on the current state of sports writing. Jim Carrey’s career has been one of the most varied of ...
Nov 27, 2018•29 min
Fifty Shades of Grey and The Fall actor, Jamie Dornan, stars in new BBC Two drama Death and Nightingales. Based on Eugene McCabe's modern Irish classic novel of the same name, it’s a story of love across the religious and class divide, set in the beautiful countryside of Fermanagh in 1885. Theatre Royal Plymouth announced today they have commissioned the UK’s largest bronze sculpture, to be installed in front of the theatre in spring 2019. The artist Joseph Hillier discusses his the work, named ...
Nov 26, 2018•29 min
Golden Globe Award winner Ruth Wilson stars in the new BBC drama Mrs Wilson in a uniquely challenging role: she is playing her own grandmother, Alison Wilson. The drama follow Alison's investigation into the mysterious multiple lives of her husband Alec, which only come to light after his sudden death. TV critic Alison Graham gives her verdict. As veganism gains more popularity in the UK, we consider how it is applied to the art world; both in terms of how animals are represented and how animal ...
Nov 23, 2018•29 min
We reveal this year's Costa Book Awards shortlists. Critics Alex Clark and Toby Lichtig discuss the books chosen in the five categories: novel, first novel, poetry, biography and children's fiction. Category winners will appear on the programme in January and Front Row will announce the overall prize-winner on 29 January 2019. Documentary maker Sean McAllister reveals what has happened in the week after his film, Northern Soul, was shown on BBC Two. He explains what has happened with Steve Arnot...
Nov 22, 2018•29 min
Kurt Russell, whose credits include The Thing, Escape from New York and The Hateful Eight, discusses his new role as Santa Claus in the new Netflix family film The Christmas Chronicles. Russell looks back over his five-decade acting career, including the time he worked with Elvis and Walt Disney as a child actor. Poet Ruth Fainlight talks about her new collection Somewhere Else Entirely, her first book in eight years and the first since the death of Alan Sillitoe, her husband of 50 years. Severa...
Nov 20, 2018•29 min
