Toby Jones tells us about turning his hand to writing for the new six part BBC2 TV series, Don’t Forget The Driver. It's a dark and poignant comedy about Brexit Britain, set in a coach company in Bognor Regis. The latest DC comics film Shazam! flies into cinemas this week. Originally published as a comic strip in 1939, it's the story of Billy Batson, a normal 14-year-old who is given the ability to transform into an adult superhero just by uttering the magic word “Shazam!”. Film critic Larushka ...
Apr 02, 2019•28 min
Suzi Quatro was the first female bass player to become a rock star in the 1970s, with hits like Devil Gate Drive and Can the Can. Fifty-five years after her first performance, Suzi talks about her new album No Control which she wrote with her son. Playwright and actor John Kani and director Janice Honeyman discuss John's new play for the RSC – Kunene and the King - which reflects on South Africa's post-apartheid history through the relationship of a dying white actor and his black nurse. Britain...
Apr 01, 2019•28 min
The 1983 Scottish film Local Hero was a much-loved comedy drama about an American oil company rep who is sent to a fictional village in Scotland to purchase the town for his company. This film has now been adapted into a stage musical at the Edinburgh Lyceum with all 19 songs composed by Mark Knopfler, who wrote the film soundtrack. So does Local Hero the musical work? Novelist Ian Rankin delivers his verdict. After a two-year build-up, the UK will not be leaving European Union today after all. ...
Mar 29, 2019•28 min
Tash Aw, winner of the Whitbread Award and Commonwealth Book Prize, discusses his new novel We the Survivors, about a man born in a Malaysian fishing village who tries to make his way in a country and society that is transforming. He describes the book as a tribute to those battling to survive in a ruthless, rapidly changing world. As museums such as the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Modern sever ties with the philanthropic Sackler family following controversy over its alleged role in the o...
Mar 28, 2019•28 min
Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Margate, explores our relationship with the vastness and mysteries of the universe, as she works with scientists who have pioneered research on the cosmic spectrum. The artist discusses her fascination with the physical world. So many successful TV shows have non-celebrities at their heart, from documentaries to reality programmes like Made in Chelsea and Great British Bake Off. But how do programme-makers find the contributors ...
Mar 27, 2019•28 min
A history of classical music in 10 minutes. Pianist Jeremy Denk traces seven centuries of Western Classical Music in one recital and album, C.1300 – C.2000, demonstrating at the piano the evolution of harmony from the medieval composer Machaut to Philip Glass. Author Arundhati Roy has agreed to appear at Hay Festival in May following the loss of sponsorship from corporate Tata. Will Gompertz reports on the growing trend for arts organisations to drop significant investment from businesses which ...
Mar 26, 2019•28 min
Politics and Big Band music :British musician Matthew Herbert has created The State Between Us, a new album made in reaction to the progress of Brexit. It's a work which includes original composition, choral elements and recorded sounds which reflect the triggering of Article 50; there's someone walking the Irish border, someone eating fish and chips and even someone flying a WWII bomber. Matthew Herbert discusses his intentions for the work, recording in Europe, and why he changed the name from...
Mar 26, 2019•28 min
The recent Pinter season at the Pinter Theatre in London, culminating in the current production of Betrayal starring Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox, suggests that Harold Pinter has a durability that other writers of his generation may not be able to claim. What are the qualities that give his work resonance to an audience today? The director Jamie Lloyd, theatre critic and Pinter biographer Michael Billington, and Dr Catriona Fallow, research fellow on the Harold Pinter: Histories a...
Mar 22, 2019•28 min
Photographer David Bailey has shot some of the most iconic portraits of the last six decades, from the Kray twins to the Queen. He talks about his life and career and how to achieve the perfect portrait shot. Tomorrow the UK’s largest cast bronze sculpture is unveiled in Plymouth. John talks to artist Joseph Hillier, who has been working on the crouching female figure called Messenger for the last two years. Sophie Wright from Magnum considers the different ways photographers have captured the b...
Mar 21, 2019•28 min
Ralph Fiennes' third film as director is The White Crow, the story of how Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev came from a peasant upbringing to be one of the greatest dancers, and how whilst on tour in Paris in 1961 he defected to the West from the Soviet Union. Critic Sarah Crompton reviews. Last week dozens of well-heeled American parents, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, were charged with involvement in a scheme to fabricate academic and athletic credentials to get the...
Mar 18, 2019•29 min
Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges discuss their new film Ben is Back, in which a mother faces difficult challenges when her drug-addicted son returns to the family home from rehab unexpectedly for Christmas. We consider the art of internet memes as the World Wide Web turns 30. Elise Bell, co-founder of Tabloid Art History, explains how they make memes that go viral on Twitter and Instagram, and art historian Richard Clay explains where the term comes from, and considers their place in our wider cul...
Mar 15, 2019•28 min
Jordan Peele talks about Us - his new film about a family terrorised by their doppelgängers. Having upturned the horror genre with his Oscar-winning racial satire Get Out, Jordan takes aim at the American dream in this follow up, starring Lupita Nyong’o. The artist Christian Marclay is best known for The Clock - a 24-hour long film composed of nearly 12 000 clips, taken from films depicting time references across a full day. Critic Sarah Crompton assesses his latest two 'collage' video works on ...
Mar 14, 2019•28 min
Briony Hanson reviews the Golden Globe nominated film, Girl, which tells the story of a trans teenage girl who, training to be a ballerina is struggling to adapt to dancing “on pointe” during her transition from male to female. Two long lost episodes of The Likely Lads have recently been discovered and are coming out on DVD and Blu Ray. Dick Clement who, with Ian La Frenais, wrote the television comedy series tells John Wilson how tapes of what now be considered classic programmes were wiped. He...
Mar 13, 2019•28 min
Idris Elba has a new Netflix comedy series: Turn Up Charlie. He plays a struggling DJ and eternal bachelor, who is given a final shot at success when he reluctantly becomes a ‘manny’ to his famous best friend's problem-child daughter, Gabby. Julia Raeside reviews. 25 years ago the Fisherman’s Friends were just a crew of friends in Port Isaac, Cornwall. Some of them were fishermen. They sang sang shanties, nautical and Cornish songs, for fun to locals and holidaymakers. In 2010 they signed a reco...
Mar 11, 2019•29 min
In 2016 Waitress made history as the first Broadway musical with an all-female creative team. Millie Taylor reviews the new West End production, with music and lyrics by the American singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles. Sadie Jones, author of the Costa-winning The Outcast, discusses her fourth book, The Snakes, which is a tale of power, greed, secrets and shame that ends in tragedy. As the internet turns 30 next week we consider how the world wide web has affected how artists create work by connect...
Mar 08, 2019•28 min
Maggie Gyllenhaal discusses her new film The Kindergarten Teacher, in which she plays a teacher who believes one of her students is a child prodigy and begins to pass his poems off as her own. She also talks about having an intimacy director on the set of The Deuce, and her upcoming directorial debut - an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel. This week Akwaeke Emezi became the first non-binary author to be long-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Critic Vic Parsons discusses the consequen...
Mar 07, 2019•28 min
In ITV’s new psychological thriller Cheat, a university lecturer accuses a student of cheating in her essay, sparking a series of retaliations which threaten to spiral out of control. Film and TV lecturer James Walters reviews the show which stars Katherine Kelly and Molly Windsor. Photographer Richard Billingham, dubbed the 'pioneer of squalid realism', won a Turner Prize nomination for his images of his parents’ alcoholic and troubled life in a Black Country tower block. He discusses his retur...
Mar 06, 2019•29 min
The career of Hollywood superstar Samuel L Jackson was recently revealed to have made him the highest-grossing actor of all time. He joins Samira to discuss the new Marvel superhero film, Captain Marvel; in which he reprises the role of Nick Fury... This time around he's playing a Nick Fury who is twenty years younger than before, as the film is set in the 90s. He reveals how he de-aged himself for the part and also talks to Samira about The Oscars, why he chooses “popcorn” films to star in, and...
Mar 05, 2019•28 min
When The Specials released their new album Encore recently, their first new music with Terry Hall since the classic Ghost Town in 1981, it went straight to Number One. Nearly four decades on from their split, the Coventry band’s lead singer Terry Hall discusses the new album and how he found himself back in the recording studio with his long-term collaborators Lynval Golding and Horace Panter after all these years. This year is the 25th anniversary of the first universal democratic elections in ...
Mar 04, 2019•28 min
Stephen Merchant has written and directed the feature film Fighting with my Family, which tells the unlikely true story of a young British woman from Norwich who found fame on the women’s wrestling circuit in America. Merchant discusses going in at the deep end and working alongside former champion wrestler and Hollywood star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. Arifa Akbar reviews new books by Leila Aboulela (Bird Summons), Oyinkan Braithwaite (My Sister the Serial Killer) and 2015 Man Booker winner Marl...
Mar 01, 2019•28 min
In his new series After Life, Ricky Gervais plays a local journalist who tries to find humour as he struggles in the wake of his wife’s death, with a dog as his closest companion. Gervais discusses how he copes with people’s reactions and offence at his work and the controversy surrounding historical social media posts and celebrity redemption. Tom Walker, winner of this year’s British Breakthrough Act at the Brits, performs his new single Just You and I live in studio. He describes his music as...
Feb 28, 2019•28 min
Charlotte Rampling discusses her new film Hannah, for which she won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival playing a woman shunned by her family and society. She also talks about her five decade career, from Georgy Girl to her recent Oscar-nominated performance in 45 Years. Hector Berlioz died 150 years ago next week. Best-known for his Symphony Fantastique - described by Leonard Bernstein as the first musical work of psychedelia, he wrote the first symphony to feature the viola as a solo inst...
Feb 27, 2019•28 min
How much should we separate art from the artist’s behaviour? With new sexual abuse allegations concerning Michael Jackson in the forthcoming documentary Leaving Neverland and R Kelly being charged with 10 counts of sexual abuse – writers Anna Leszkiewicz, Ekow Eshun and Dreda Say Mitchell consider the extent to which we should boycott or continue to appreciate an individual’s work in the light of questions over their behaviour. On the eve of his world tour, multi-instrumentalist, singer, compose...
Feb 26, 2019•28 min
The return of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s black comedy Fleabag: we preview the new series of BBC3's biggest success. The main character continues to battle with her family and her own self-destructive behaviour, but can Fleabag be as fresh and surprising as before? And because it'll be broadcast weekly, one episode at a time (after the news on BBC1) rather than being released as a box set for bingeing), we consider how viewers' watching habits are changing. American glam metal band Mötley Crüe sold m...
Feb 25, 2019•28 min
Award-winning journalist Jonathan Freedland talks about his alter ego, thriller writer Sam Bourne, and his new book To Kill The Truth. With the strap line “read it before it becomes fiction," this fast paced action thriller sees America taken to the brink of a new Civil War as academic and holocaust survivors are found dead, libraries destroyed and Black Live Matter protestors clash openly with slavery deniers. Jonathan Freedland talks to Kirsty about the inspiration behind the novel, the differ...
Feb 22, 2019•28 min
The Cuban American conductor Odaline de la Martinez talks about this year's London Festival of American Music in which she showcases the music of women and African American composers who are unjustly overlooked. She also tells Samira about the premiere of the third part of her own opera trilogy Imoinda: A story of Love and Hate Anna Paquin stars as a disaster PR tasked with clearing up the scandals of high profile celebrities in new drama Flack. Anna Leszkiewicz reviews the show which is UKTV’s ...
Feb 21, 2019•28 min
Felicity Jones discusses her new film On the Basis of Sex, in which she plays Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the American Supreme Court Judge who rose to prominence as a lawyer in landmark cases against gender discrimination. Vue, one of the UK’s biggest cinema chains, has threatened to boycott the Baftas after the film Roma, which they describe as a ‘made for TV’ film, won four awards including Best Film. John is joined by Vue’s chief executive Tim Richards, who has written an open letter to Bafta,. As S...
Feb 20, 2019•28 min
The directorial debut of Oscar -winning actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor,is The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Airing on Netflix, adapted from a bestselling novel of the same name Ejiofor also stars as the father. This true story follows the young boy William as he races to save his village from a devastating famine, with a wind turbine he was inspired to build after reading a library book. Come From Away is the hit Broadway musical which tells the remarkable story of the thousands of airline passengers div...
Feb 19, 2019•28 min
9 to 5 is Dolly Parton’s stage musical based on the 1980 film, in which she starred, about three female office workers getting revenge on their misogynist boss. The songs were written by Dolly Parton and she narrates the story via television screens across the stage. Sarah Crompton reviews. Performance artist, comedian, musician and activist Bryony Kimmings talks about her new autobiographical show I’m a Phoenix, Bitch and explains why she chooses to create pieces about taboo and difficult subje...
Feb 18, 2019•28 min
Roma, the black and white Mexican film about a young domestic worker in Mexico City in the 1970s, won Best Film at the Baftas on Sunday and is up for the same at the Oscars. The film’s producer, Gabriela Rodriguez, talks about the background to director Alfonso Cuarón’s personal project which draws on his own childhood, and discusses their working relationship. The death has been announced of the acclaimed author Andrea Levy. Her fiction, including the Orange Prize-winning Small Island and the M...
Feb 15, 2019•28 min
