Michael Kiwanuka said he was seriously surprised when he won the 2020 Mercury Prize last week. Tom Sutcliffe talks to the singer-songwriter about dropping out of his music degree, hanging out in Hawaii with Kanye West and asks why such modesty when his self-titled album had rave reviews on release, and reached number 2 in the charts. Director Joe Mantello on his new film version of The Boys in the Band, Mart Crowley’s ground-breaking 1968 play about a group of gay friends at a birthday party in ...
Sep 28, 2020•28 min
Dove Cottage Grasmere is the heart of Romantic poetry and is hosting part of this year's Contains Strong Language festival. We'll be asking what the Romantics have to tell us now, with the poet Kate Clanchy who has adapted Samuel Taylor Coleridge's unfinished poem Christabel with a newly commissioned score by composer Katie Chatburn. Novelist, poet and playwright Zosia Wand was born in London but didn't speak English till she went to school and spent all her holidays in Poland. Now she's written...
Sep 25, 2020•41 min
David McKee has just been named as the recipient of the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award 2020. Author and illustrator of the Elmer books which with vivid colour and humour make a case for inclusion and acceptance, and the creator of the magical Mr Benn, he also wrote and illustrated Not Now, Bernard, a funny and perceptive plea for children not to be ignored. Now 85, he is still working. Front Row talks to him about his life and career. It has been reported that the Royal Academy in London i...
Sep 24, 2020•28 min
Doctor Foster creator, Mike Bartlett, has come up with a new drama for BBC1. Set in Manchester, Life follows the stories of the residents of a large house divided into four flats, and explores love, loss, birth and death, and features some of the characters from Doctor Foster. Nick Ahad reviews. Channing Godfrey Peoples talks about writing and directing her debut film, Miss Juneteenth, about a beauty queen pageant commemorating the day slaves in Texas were freed – two years after the Emancipatio...
Sep 23, 2020•28 min
Lead singer of Britpop band Skunk Anansie, Skin has headlined Glastonbury, sold millions of albums, and recently competed in The Masked Singer. As her memoir, Skin - It takes Blood and Guts, is published, we ask her about channelling rage into her performances and if she thinks her achievements as queer black woman have been overlooked. After a six-month Covid delay, Plymouth’s new £40m arts and heritage museum space The Box is due to open next week. This weekend also sees the Plymouth Art Weeke...
Sep 22, 2020•29 min
Announced by Theresa May in 2018 and quickly dubbed the “Festival of Brexit”, submissions are now being made for the UK government funded £120 million festival that will celebrate British creativity in 2022. Creative director Martin Green tells us what kind of projects and ideas he’s looking for. Succession creator Jesse Armstrong on winning the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series at last night's awards. English National Opera are staging Europe’s first drive-in opera, Puccini’s La Bohème, at Lond...
Sep 21, 2020•28 min
The Los Angeles-based American artist Mark Bradford, who represented the USA at the Venice Biennale in 2017, discusses his new series of Quarantine Paintings. The three works – only available to view online – explore the nature of art in isolation and how he responded when his city was suddenly shut down unexpectedly. Nick Hornby, the writer who gave us Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy, discusses his new novel Just Like You, which features a relationship between a black man in his earl...
Sep 18, 2020•42 min
Rocks is the new feature film directed by Sarah Gavron with a screenplay by Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson. Writer Niellah Arboine reviews the film which is set in Hackney with an ensemble cast of largely non-professional actors, and it tells the story of a teenage Londoner nicknamed Rocks who takes responsibility for her little brother Emmanuel in an attempt to stop them both from being taken into care, supported by a chaotic but loving group of friends. Poet Phoebe Stuckes discusses her first...
Sep 17, 2020•28 min
Twenty five years ago Bristol musician Tricky pioneered a new genre of downtempo hip-hop with his album Maxinquaye. As he releases his 14th studio album, Fall to Pieces, Tricky joins us from his Berlin studio. Live theatre returns to Northern Ireland this evening with the play Anything Can Happen: 1972 at The Playhouse in Londonderry, in which people whose lives were affected by the Troubles tell their stories. We hear from playwright Damian Gorman, cast member Susan Stanley, whose brother was k...
Sep 16, 2020•28 min
Nica Burns, owner of some of the biggest West End theatres, discusses her plan to re-open them in sequence from 22 October, starting with Adam Kay’s one man show This is Going to Hurt and, in November, the hit musical Six. But what about large-scale shows like Harry Potter or Everyone’s Talking About Jamie? Writer Dennis Kelly tells Samira about The Third Day, his new project starring Jude Law and Naomie Harris. It's a psychological thriller, set on an alluring and mysterious island, that's been...
Sep 14, 2020•29 min
David Tennant talks to Front Row about new ITV drama DES, in which he plays one of the most infamous serial killers in UK history, Dennis Nilsen - a civil servant who went undetected as he murdered boys and young men he met on the streets of London from 1978 to 1983. 2020 is the 15th anniversary of the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University. Tonight, with the help of judge Lucy Caldwell – who has herself been twice shortlisted for the award – Front Row announces this year’s sho...
Sep 11, 2020•41 min
Diana Rigg has died aged 82. Her breakthrough role was as Mrs Emma Peel in The Avengers, going on to have a distinguished career across film, theatre and television with roles including as a Bond Girl in Her Majesty's Secret Service, Lady Macbeth at the National Theatre and Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. Charles Dance remembers the actress alongside Mark Gatiss who wrote an episode of Doctor Who for Diana especially. On the line from Beijing, Chinese pianist Lang Lang discusses his new record...
Sep 10, 2020•28 min
Tonight the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction is announced at a special virtual ceremony – the judgement delayed because of Covid 19. We talk to the winner live on air. How has the pandemic affected what viewers expect from the major arts broadcasters? We ask Director of Sky Arts Philip Edgar-Jones, whose channel becomes free to watch on the 17th of September and to Director of BBC Arts Jonty Claypole, who has just announced an extension to the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine season bring...
Sep 09, 2020•28 min
Andrew Lloyd Webber told MPs today that the arts are at the "point of no return". Also speaking to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee was Rebecca Kane Burton, chief exec of LW Theatres, who joins us to discuss the crisis, and Lucy Noble, chief exec of the Royal Albert Hall. Will performing venues be saved by the government's recently announced Operation Sleeping Beauty? Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel, Mayflies, is the story of two young friends in a small Scottish town who spend the ...
Sep 08, 2020•29 min
The Venice Film Festival is currently underway, featuring films we’ll be seeing on our screens over the coming months. Jason Solomons is just back from the city and discusses the films to look out for and which to avoid! In light of some of the critical reaction to Christopher Nolan's new film Tenet, which found the film to be confusing and difficult to follow, we ask how much do you have to understand a work of art, be it a film, a complex poem, a piece of atonal music to enjoy enjoy it? Noveli...
Sep 07, 2020•29 min
The much-loved story of the Chinese warrior Mulan is the latest Disney animation to get a live-action remake. Its less a direct remake of the 1998 original and more a retelling of the Chinese folk legend of Hua Mulan with an all-Asian cast. There have been changes - no cute animated dragon or songs - are we going to love it as much? Find out with critic Gavia Baker Whitelaw. Lorna Sage was a much admired literary critic but it was her memoir Bad Blood that made her a household name. Bad Blood ex...
Sep 04, 2020•42 min
As major City firms and the likes of Facebook and Google allow their employees to work from home for the foreseeable future, does it herald the end of the office as we know it? And what does it mean for culture? From Working Girl to The Office, The Bell Jar to Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came To An End, the office has provided rich inspiration for the arts. We discuss the history of the office in culture and contemplate what comes next with writer Jonathan Lee and film and TV critic Hannah McGill. T...
Sep 03, 2020•28 min
Bernardine Evaristo on Girl, Woman, Other - shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize For Fiction. As Front Row continues our interviews with writers on the shortlist, the author talks to us about her Booker prize winning novel which follows 12 characters, most of them black British women, on an entwined journey of discovery. Ginette Vincendeau reviews Les Misérables, the French entry for the 2019 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Its director, Ladj Ly was raised in Les Bosquets, a febrile housi...
Sep 02, 2020•28 min
Gavin & Stacey writer and actor Ruth Jones joins us to discuss her new novel Us Three, which follows the tumultuous friendship of three women over four decades. She shares the inspiration behind the book, how her screenwriting has influenced her novel writing and whether Gavin & Stacey will return to our screens… As many theatres remain shuttered due to Covid-19, those looking to get their thespian fix may find some consolation n the form of virtual reality. Tender Claws, an independent ...
Sep 01, 2020•28 min
Robert Macfarlane walks into the mountains, along ancient paths and down into caves and potholes. He has written beautiful and popular books about these - Mountains of the Mind, The Old Ways, Underland. He is concerned about the depletion of the natural world, and the language we use to speak of it. Landmarks is a lexicon of landscape and nature. When a new edition of a famous children's dictionary left out several common nature words - bluebell, conker, kingfisher - he wrote a series of poems, ...
Aug 31, 2020•27 min
British artist Luke Jerram discusses his new work, In Memoriam, a large-scale outdoor installation designed specifically to be presented in large open and windy spaces, constructed from bed sheets flying from tall flagpoles arranged in a 36-metre wide circular formation. It was created as a temporary memorial to honour those we have lost during the Covid-19 pandemic and also in tribute to NHS staff and key workers. The Lying Life of Adults is the much-anticipated new novel from Elena Ferrante, t...
Aug 28, 2020•41 min
British composer Errollyn Wallen has been putting the finishing touches to her new arrangement of the Hubert Parry hymn Jerusalem, to be performed as part of a very different Last Night of the Proms. After a public row about whether to drop the traditional favourites that make up the concert's programme, the Proms announced new versions for a smaller, socially-distanced orchestra with no choir. Errollyn joins Samira to discuss the work of arranging well-loved music, her relationship with Jerusal...
Aug 27, 2020•28 min
Natalie Haynes on A Thousand Ships - shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize For Fiction. As Front Row continues our interviews with authors on the shortlist, Natalie Haynes talks to us about her novel which tells the stories of The Trojan War from the perspective of the female characters. Literary critic Alex Clark reviews the winner of the International Booker Prize 2020, which was announced this evening. And Agatha Christie’s lost play, The Lie – a very personal 1920s domestic drama which lay ...
Aug 26, 2020•28 min
As her new drama I Hate Suzie launches, dramatist Lucy Prebble talks to Tom Sutcliffe about her writing career. Prebble is Co-Executive Producer and writer on the BAFTA, Golden Globe and EMMY award winning HBO drama Succession. She was the creator of the TV series Secret Diary of a Call Girl. She wrote the political thriller A Very Expensive Poison (Old Vic), and before that The Effect (National Theatre), which is a study of love and neuroscience, as well as the hugely successful drama Enron, ab...
Aug 25, 2020•28 min
Following the outcry at shool exam results downgraded by an algorithm and then revised to take into account human teachers expectations instead, we consider how algorithms perform versus humans in creativity in the arts – do they deserve an A* or a fail? What are algorithms used for in the arts? Can they be creative and make good work, or do we need the human touch? We're joined by Marcus Du Sautoy, mathematician and author of The Creativity Code, and artist Anna Ridler, who uses data sets and a...
Aug 25, 2020•29 min
Next week finally sees the release of Tenet, the latest big-budget film by Christopher Nolan. For our Friday Review, film critic Ryan Gilbey and novelist and short story writer Irenosen Okojie give their response to the film, and consider the future of cinema in light of the pandemic. And they’ll be discussing their cultural picks – the TV series Broad City and Lovecraft Country. Algorithm-downgraded A level student Jessica Johnson on her strangely prescient Orwell Youth Prize winning short stor...
Aug 21, 2020•42 min
The One and Only Ivan is a new Disney film about a 400-pound silverback gorilla called Ivan. He lives in a suburban shopping mall with other animals where they perform in a circus owned by Mack, played by Bryan Cranston. The film is a hybrid of live action and CGI and features the voices of Sam Rockwell, Angelina Jolie, Danny DeVito, Helen Mirren and Chaka Khan. We speak to the film's director Thea Sharrock. 40 years since Willy Russell wrote Educating Rita Stephen Tompkinson stars in an open ai...
Aug 20, 2020•28 min
The Wives of Stanley Spencer are the subject of a new exhibition Love, Art, Loss at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire. Artist and illustrator Siân Pattenden reviews. The explosion in Beirut two weeks destroyed thousands of buildings in the Lebanese city, including many of the art galleries and museums. Sursock Museum Director Zeina Arida and gallery owner Saleh Barakat consider the damage done to the city's culture as well as its infrastructure. Continuing Front Row's interviews ...
Aug 19, 2020•29 min
As novelist John Connolly publishes a prequel to his hugely successful Charlie Parker thriller series, he and critic Suzi Feay discuss the art of creating a prequel, both in books and on screen, from Endeavour to Hannibal Rising to The Wide Sargasso Sea. From the Minack Theatre, nestled in the cliffs of west Cornwall, to Cirencester’s Barnfest, and Brighton Open Air Theatre, many theatre-goers have turned to the great outdoors as indoor theatres remain shuttered due to Covid-19 restrictions. The...
Aug 18, 2020•29 min
Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Jamiaca 68 years ago, moving to London to join his mother aged 11 and has created a unique career as a performance poet. Signed by Richard Branson to Virgin Records in 1978 he went on to record a series of acclaimed albums which combined his powerful verse with reggae rhythms. Linton Kwesi Johnson was the first black poet to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series, and was recently been awarded the 2020 PEN Pinter Prize, a literary award for a lifetime...
Aug 18, 2020•28 min
