In the week Rowan Atkinson returns to the big screen as the hapless spy in Johnny English Strikes Again, which sees him batter innocent bystanders and himself in a series of pratfalls, we look at the art of physical comedy. Jonathan Sayer of Mischief Theatre, classicist and stand-up Natalie Haynes and Dr Oliver Double of the University of Kent attempt to answer an eternal question: why is the unfortunate mishap hilarious - so long as someone else is falling off the ladder? Damien Hirst has just ...
Oct 03, 2018•29 min
We announce the winner of the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award and the Young Writers' Award live from West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge and celebrate the power and possibilities of the short story. Judges Sarah Howe and Stig Abell discuss the merits of the entries from the shortlisted authors. In contention for the £15,000 prize are Kerry Andrew, Sarah Hall, Kiare Ladner, Ingrid Persaud and Nell Stevens. Radio 1 presenter Katie Thistleton will also announce the winner of the BBC Young Writers...
Oct 02, 2018•29 min
Sarah Perry discusses Melmoth, her eagerly awaited novel after her award-winning The Essex Serpent. Her new novel is about an English translator who, hiding from her past in Prague, uncovers the legend of Melmoth – a woman in black who wanders the world bearing witness to humanity’s worst crimes. BBC1’s new Sunday night drama is a television adaptation of Helen Fitzgerald’s novel The Cry, in which the abduction of a baby leads to the psychological disintegration of a young woman. Emma Bullimore ...
Oct 01, 2018•29 min
After being appointed director of last year’s opening event for Hull’s year as City of Culture, award-winning and Hull-born filmmaker Sean McAllister decided to make a documentary looking at the impact of the City of Culture on Hullensians by following the work of one man to set up a hip-hop project for disadvantaged kids. He discusses the result, A Northern Soul, and explains his current efforts to challenge the film’s certification. Jamaican-born Poet Tanya Shirley is one of the Hull 18, a sel...
Sep 28, 2018•31 min
In Theatr Clywd’s new production of William Golding’s classic novel Lord of the Flies, the group of schoolboys stranded on a remote island have all been reimagined as girls. Critic Gary Raymond reviews. Forty playwrights and actors have accused National Theatre Wales of favouring English artists and companies over Welsh ones. In an open letter on the Wales Arts Review website, the Welsh artists also claim that the company is staging too few productions and say that non-Welsh artists and companie...
Sep 27, 2018•29 min
Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie - The Goodies - join Samira to look back at their 1970s cult comedy series. As a complete box set of every episode is released, they reflect on their comedy writing that tackled police brutality, redefined comedy music and introduced television audiences to the little-known Lancastrian martial-art Ecky Thump. This week marks the centenary of the first performance of Gustav Holst's hugely popular orchestral suite The Planets. Composer and pianist Da...
Sep 26, 2018•29 min
Oceania at the Royal Academy is the first ever major exhibition in the UK of art from the Pacific. It is very ambitious, showing 200 works from across that vast ocean, from Hawaii to New Zealand, New Guinea to Easter Island. It spans time, too, the earliest piece being about 500 years old, the latest completed last year. A Hawaiian writer, Vanessa Lee Miller, and a western maritime historian, Robert Blyth, assess the exhibition. As the former Britpop band Suede release their eighth studio album,...
Sep 26, 2018•28 min
Cary Fukanaga, recently announced director of the next James Bond film, discusses his new Netflix series Maniac. The show explores the minds of two strangers, played by Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, who take part in a mysterious drug trial in the hope of changing their lives for the better. The Royal Opera House has unveiled the results of its £50m, two-and-a-half-year Open Up project. For the first time it will be open to the public daily, with a new programme of free and ticketed events. Royal Op...
Sep 21, 2018•29 min
New documentary Matangi/Maya/MIA about the political rapper MIA, uses self-filmed archive footage of the outspoken and ‘controversial’ Sri Lankan immigrant artist who took up the Tamil cause. So how does the film by director and friend Stephen Loveridge help us understand her life and music? Journalist Kieran Yates reviews. The Man Booker Prize 2018 shortlist of six books has just been announced and features two debuts, the youngest ever writer to make the list, a novel in verse and four women a...
Sep 20, 2018•29 min
Eileen Atkins talks about her latest stage role in Florian Zeller’s The Height of the Storm, a play about a couple who have been in love for 50 years. The actress, who began her career in the 1950s explains the challenges of Zeller’s writing and her preference for new theatre. 10 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, John Kampfner, co-founder of the Creative Industries Federation, and arts journalist Jo Caird discuss the impact of the financial crisis on the arts. Today it was announced t...
Sep 19, 2018•29 min
Director Lenny Abrahamson on his film adaption of Sarah Waters’ novel The Little Stranger, a ghost story set in a dilapidated English manor in the 1940s. Abrahamson, who was Oscar nominated for his previous film Room, explains the how it is more than just a ghost story and talks about the challenges of adapting an unreliable narrator from the book onto screen. As the days get shorter and the light starts to fade, three artists discuss the appeal of darkness and how they use it as a source for th...
Sep 18, 2018•29 min
The French musician Christine and the Queens discusses bringing ideas about gender fluidity to the mainstream with a confident new persona, eighties influences, and her second album, named simply Chris, and released in both English and French versions. Writer Anil Gupta and director Iqbal Khan discuss turning Molière’s 17th century French comedy Tartuffe - which turned its fire on the hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic hierarchy of the day - into a 21st century Brummie farce with a British Pakistan...
Sep 17, 2018•35 min
Killing Eve is the next thing to come from the pen of Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It is a thriller, steeped in her stylistic black humour, about a psychopath, played by Jodie Comer, who's pursued by Sandra Oh as an unassuming detective. Audiences in America have loved it, and it's has been nominated for two Emmy Awards, but what will the UK audience make of it? Arts journalist Sophie Wilkinson joins Shahidha to give her verdict. The BBC National Short Story Award is in its 13th year an...
Sep 14, 2018•29 min
Touching The Void. Memoir, documentary, now theatre performance - at the Bristol Old Vic. Written by David Greig , it's an adaptation of Joe Simpson's bestselling 1988 mountaineering memoir and the subsequent 2003 docu-drama detailing Simpson's disastrous 1985 attempt to make a first ascent of a mountain in the Andes. Theatre director Tom Morris talks to Kirsty about the challenges of transferring the story to the stage. And as the Bristol Old Vic prepares to re-open after a major refurbishment,...
Sep 13, 2018•29 min
Hollywood legend Sir Michael Caine returns to the big screen in King of Thieves, the second cinematic adaptation of the infamous Hatton Garden burglary in 2015. The south London born actor looks back at his varied career, which he has seen him act alongside Sean Connery, Sylvester Stallone and even the Muppets and also become synonymous darker criminal roles, in films such as Get Carter, Harry Brown and the Italian Job. When Israel Public Radio recently broadcast part of Wagnar's Gotterdammerung...
Sep 12, 2018•32 min
The Irish writer Sally Rooney's second novel Normal People, the story of a relationship between two young people from very different backgrounds, has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and is winning ecstatic reviews. She talks about structure, being true to her characters, and the pleasure and pressure of praise. TV critic David Butcher, reviews Trust, a new drama investigating the true story of the kidnap of the grandson of one of America's wealthiest families, the Getty's. Donald Suther...
Sep 11, 2018•29 min
Nick Payne, the writer of new BBC One series Wanderlust starring Toni Collette and Steven Mackintosh, discusses adapting his play on modern sexual relationships into a sexually upfront series for mainstream TV. In 2015 the Grand Hall of Battersea Arts Centre in London was devastated by fire. It was rebuilt and last week reopened - with the show that was in the space when it was destroyed. The architect Steve Tompkins and artistic director David Jubb show Samira (who used to dance there in her yo...
Sep 10, 2018•32 min
BONUS EDITION: As part of the Inspire season, Front Row commissioned three artists to create works especially for the programme. Poet Alison Brackenbury was challenged to write a villanelle based on her great uncle, crime-writer Vaseem Khan would pen the first page of his new volume, and rapper and beatboxer Testament would produce a brand new track. This special edition of the Front Row podcast looks back over the five week challenge and reveals the final works. Presenters: Kirsty Lang, Morgan ...
Sep 07, 2018•35 min
As Front Row's Inspire season draws to a close, three artists unveil the artworks they were commissioned to create, and discuss the inspiration behind them. Alison Brackenbury has written a poem based on her Great-Uncle; crime-writer Vaseem Khan, author of the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency novels, reads the first page of his new volume; and rapper and beatboxer Testament performs his new composition. And for the Front Row presenters' challenge, Stig Abell has written his first sonnet, Samira Ahme...
Sep 07, 2018•34 min
Award winning Doctor Foster writer, Mike Bartlett, discusses his new show Press alongside one of its stars, the Peaky Blinders actor Charlotte Riley. The programme centres around two competing papers, a broadsheet and a tabloid, both struggling to find their place in a changing world of print journalism. Award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, rapper and recording artist Kate Tempest on her new poetry collection Running Upon The Wires - an intimate look at the end of a relationship, the beginn...
Sep 06, 2018•29 min
To celebrate her 50th birthday, the composer Roxanna Panufnik discusses her new album Celestial Bird which showcases the variety of her work, from religious choral music to an adaptation of a poem by the Indian polymath Rabindranath Tagore, as well as two major new commissions, one of which - Songs of Darkness, Dreams of Light - will have its world premiere at the Last Night of the Proms on Saturday. Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, discusses his new illustrated book which is a respon...
Sep 05, 2018•29 min
As two new productions prepare to take on Shakespeare in fresh and unexpected ways, the women behind them - Jeanie O'Hare, creator of new play Queen Margaret, and Jude Christian creator of OthelloMacbeth - discuss developing new dramas from Shakespeare's canon. Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull is a theatre classic that has been produced in many different ways for stage and screen since its premiere in 1896. Now it's been turned into a film with a stellar cast led by Annette Benning. Critic, broa...
Sep 04, 2018•29 min
John Simm stars in new ITV drama Strangers as a man who has to fly to Hong Kong to identify his wife's body, only to discover she has a secret other life. We talk to the actor about filming the thriller in Hong Kong and why he's so often cast as an everyman figure. In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab vows vengeance against the white whale which took his leg and chases him around the globe. In his new book for young adults, And the Ocean was Our Sky, the award-winning novelist Patrick Ness inverts this. B...
Sep 03, 2018•29 min
After a devastating fire at the newly-opened Alexandra Palace in London in 1873, a new building was designed and built which included an elaborate and elegant theatre, and the opening concert was of the early Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, Trial by Jury. The theatre hasn't been used as a performance space for 80 years, but tomorrow the BBC Proms will be broadcast live from the newly-restored space in all its faded grandeur, featuring the very same operetta. Alexandra Palace's Emma Dagnes and c...
Aug 31, 2018•29 min
Television drama Mother's Day charts the aftermath of the 1993 Warrington bombing, telling the stories of Colin and Wendy Parry (played by Anna Maxwell Martin and Daniel Mays), the parents of Tim Parry, one of two young boys who died in the attack, and Dublin housewife Sue McHugh (Vicky McClure). The BAFTA award-winning writer Nick Leather, who grew up in Warrington and who was a teenager on his way into town when the bombs exploded, discusses his drama. Natasha Carthew is a working-class writer...
Aug 30, 2018•29 min
Idris Elba is a man of many parts - actor, DJ, kick-boxer and now film director. He discusses his first feature, Yardie, based on the hit novel of the same name, by Victor Headley which, in 1992, told the tales of "D", a Jamaican in London engaged in the super-violent drugs trade of the 1970s. The former Raleigh Cycle Company headquarters in Nottingham recently became the 400,000th listed building in England. Deborah Mays, Head of Listing Advice at Historic England, writer and architect Douglas ...
Aug 29, 2018•29 min
Andrew Miller, who won the Costa Book of the Year Award for his novel Pure, discusses his new book Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, an adventure story set during the Napoleonic wars. We consider how the idea of the artist's muse has changed over time, and ask what makes a modern muse? With art critic Louisa Buck, novelist and critic Matt Thorne and Andrew Miller. As the latest TV adaptation of William Thackeray's Vanity Fair hits our screens this weekend, Emma Bullimore reports from the set, where...
Aug 28, 2018•29 min
Poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan takes us on a guided tour of Darfield churchyard near Barnsley, as part of Front Row's Inspire season. Patrick Gale, who wrote last year's TV drama Man In An Orange Shirt, discusses his new novel Take Nothing With You, a coming-of-age story as a young boy obsessed with the cello realises how messy adult life can be. Are internet horror movies becoming a new genre? In the wake of the recent release of several films using it as inspiration and a plot device, inclu...
Aug 24, 2018•29 min
Monday sees the performance of a ‘Relaxed Prom’ at the Royal Albert Hall, offering an informal environment for children, young people and adults with autism, sensory and communication impairments, learning disabilities and other challenges. The Prom will feature the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and its ensemble BSO Resound, comprising six disabled musicians led by conductor James Rose who has cerebral palsy. James Rose and violin and viola player Siobhan Clough discuss the practicalities of co...
Aug 23, 2018•29 min
Jed Mercurio's new drama Bodyguard follows Richard Madden as a troubled war veteran assigned as protection officer to the Home Secretary played by Keeley Hawes. TV critic Alison Graham reviews this latest offering from the writer of police thriller Line of Duty. As a One Direction themed fanfiction is now being turned into a feature film; we ask if fanfiction has finally gone mainstream with books journalist Sarah Shaffi and fanfiction writer and novelist RJ Anderson. The Lovely Bones is a bests...
Aug 22, 2018•29 min
