Saxophonist Soweto Kinch has curated this year’s Koestler Arts exhibition, Another Me, featuring 150 artworks by inmates from a number of prisons and secure units across the UK. Kinch discusses the works, and performs a piece from his forthcoming album The Black Peril. As plans are unveiled for Galway’s year as 2020 European Capital of Culture, John talks to film producer Arthur Lappin and creative director Helen Marriage. Sam Fender’s album is set to be number one this week. The 25-year-old fro...
Sep 18, 2019•28 min
A solid gold toilet reputedly worth £4.7 million has been stolen from Blenheim Palace. It's part of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's new exhibition Victory is Not an Option which remains open and combines a retrospective of his work along with some new pieces made especially for the Palace. Art critic Jacky Klein reviews and reports on the latest from the theft. Brad Pitt stars in the film Ad Astra as an astronaut on a mission to Neptune in order to save the planet from destruction. Larush...
Sep 17, 2019•28 min
Alex Kingston, best known for her TV roles in Dr Who and ER, discusses her new role in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People on stage at the Nottingham Playhouse. Kingston plays Dr Stockman, who is punished by the authorities for saying the unsayable as she attempts to make a stand against corruption. Criminal is Netflix's new crime drama, with each episode focused on one suspect and all filmed in and around the interrogation room. There are four series of three episodes filmed in Britain, Germa...
Sep 16, 2019•28 min
Downton Abbey hits the big screen this week as the Crawleys host the none other than King George V himself in a new film edition of the hit television show. Critic Sarah Crompton considers if it’s a success. Comedian Alexei Sayle discusses the return of his Radio 4 comedy series Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar, a mixture of stand-up, memoir and philosophy. The 16th Istanbul Biennial, subtitled this year ‘The Seventh Continent’, is about to open its doors to the public. Critic Louisa Buck h...
Sep 13, 2019•28 min
Lucy Prebble’s play A Very Expensive Poison opened last week at the Old Vic in London. It tells the story of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 with a treatment ranging from the high theatricality of song, dance and puppetry to simple direct address to the audience - and has a love story at its core. Lucy Prebble joins Front Row to talk about putting truth on stage. Mark Strong and Daniel Mays star in new Sky One drama Temple, set in a disused underground station being used as a cover...
Sep 12, 2019•28 min
John Wilson presents Front Row from the BBC Proms, with the American mezzo soprano Jamie Barton, about to perform as the soloist at the Last Night of the Proms, singing Verdi, Bizet, Saint-Saens and paying tribute to Judy Garland with Over the Rainbow. Composer Daniel Kidane talks about his new piece, commissioned to open the Last Night of the Proms this Saturday, which is called Woke. How will Brexit impact Classical Music? John is joined by the Association of British Orchestras director Mark P...
Sep 11, 2019•28 min
Ten years ago when the first British Ceramics Biennial took place, things didn't look good for pots or Stoke-on-Trent, known as 'the potteries' of the UK. The 240-year-old Spode factory had shut, ceramics had a dusty image and the pot-making artist Grayson Perry said the art world had more of a problem with his being a potter than with him wearing a frock. In Front Row this evening Kirsty will hear how things have changed. Now the old Spode works hosts artists studios and a boutique hotel and th...
Sep 10, 2019•28 min
For Sama is a prize-winning documentary by female Syrian filmmaker Waad al-Kateab, recording life in Aleppo for her young daughter who was born shortly after the conflict began there. Film critic Hannah McGill reviews and reports on the winning films at this year's Venice Film Festival. Lucy Caldwell has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award with The Children. Her story is about the Victorian social reformer Caroline Norton, who successfully campaigned for women to have the aut...
Sep 09, 2019•28 min
A celebration of the short story as chair of judges Nikki Bedi joins Front Row to reveal the 2019 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University and we hear from the first shortlisted author. Steve Knightley, half of the popular duo Show of Hands, has teamed up with historian Michael Wood to celebrate one of England’s great musical traditions - songs of social protest. In the year of the Peterloo anniversary, they explore songs from the Peasants' Revolt right up to the present day. Ste...
Sep 06, 2019•28 min
Margaret Atwood's long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale - The Testaments - is due to be published next Tuesday, but following the release of a number of copies by Amazon, reviewers have managed to obtain early copies. M J Hyland reviews Atwood's sequel which takes place 15 years after the original tale of Gilead. In 1958 Alvin Ailey, aware that there were few opportunities for African-American dancers and choreographers, founded a company to tell the stories of black people through movement...
Sep 05, 2019•28 min
Proceedings in the House of Commons yesterday drew an unusual degree of public attention, with set pieces from Boris Johnson (interrupted by the defection of one of his MPs, crossing the floor to join the Liberal Democrats), the Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg lying supine, humour from Kenneth Clarke and a range of colourful interventions from Mr Speaker, it represents one of the most colourful and dramatic days in the Commons in recent memory. Newsnight Culture Correspondent Stephen Smith a...
Sep 04, 2019•28 min
William Feaver discusses the first part of his comprehensive biography of the great British figurative painter Lucian Freud, who died in 2011. Feaver first got to know the mercurial artist in 1973 and had regular conversations and meetings with him over the decades. The former Observer art critic's two detailed biographies – Youth and Fame - are the result of 20 years’ work. Earlier today the shortlist for the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction was announced. Critics Arifa Akbar and Toby Lichtig give...
Sep 03, 2019•28 min
BBC One’s big autumn thriller serial is The Capture. Telling the story of former soldier Shaun Emery, whose conviction for an unlawful killing during active duty is overturned because of flawed video evidence. The drama delves into the increasing reality of misinformation and fake news. Scriptwriter Ben Chanan talks to Samira about the manipulation of video evidence in our criminal justice system. Venice Film Festival is well underway where the films coming to our screens in the autumn compete f...
Sep 02, 2019•28 min
Sir Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has twice been named the Best of Booker. Now his new novel Quichotte, a modern take on Cervantes' classic that is both a satire of modern politics and a consideration of familial love, has been Booker longlisted. Rushdie discusses writing about the new politics, family, and keeping up with popular culture. Director Joanna Hogg discusses her new film The Souvenir, in which a young film student in the early '80s becomes romantically involved with a complica...
Aug 30, 2019•28 min
Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave star in Mrs Lowry and Son, a new film about the Pendlebury painter LS Lowry and his mother. Critic Sarah Crompton reviews. Singer and electric guitarist Anna Calvi has written the music for the latest series of the gangster TV drama Peaky Blinders. Along with the director Anthony Byrne she talks about how they created the soundtrack. Anna also discusses her latest album Hunter and performs a track from it live in the studio. The poet Stephen Sexton’s first coll...
Aug 29, 2019•28 min
Playwright James Graham, author of Brexit: the Uncivil War and The Coalition, talks about making drama out of a constitutional crisis and how soon is too soon to begin fictionalising current political events. Jeff Pope’s writing credits include a number of high-profile factual TV dramas for ITV including Pierrepoint and See No Evil: The Moors Murders, as well as Philomena and Stan & Ollie for the big screen. The writer and producer discusses his new ITV drama series A Confession, starring Ma...
Aug 28, 2019•29 min
Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, about slaves escaping from the southern states and seeking sanctuary in the north. The author discusses his new novel The Nickel Boys, which follows the misfortunes of a young black boy, Elwood Curtis, who finds himself being sent to the brutal Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school where the threat of severe - and sometimes fatal - punishment beatings is a constant fear for all the pupils. Prior to Thursday...
Aug 27, 2019•28 min
A Front Row for Bank Holiday Monday: Kirsty Lang interviews the writer Edna O'Brien about her new novel, her first novel and her career in between, spanning almost sixty years, 25 works of fiction, as well as biographies and plays. Radio 4 is now broadcasting an adaptation of The Country Girls trilogy. Edna O'Brien's stories of Kate and Baba as they leave rural Ireland for Dublin then London, find work, meet men, and have sex caused scandal when they were published in the 1960s. Her books were b...
Aug 26, 2019•28 min
Screenwriter Andrew Davies talks to Samira Ahmed about his latest period drama, Sanditon, based on an unfinished novel by Jane Austen. They discuss what attracted him to the seaside tale, how lead character Charlotte Heywood is a very different kind of Austen heroine, and why he felt it was important to raise the issue of racial prejudice in Regency Britain. Writer and reviewer Vic James looks at Netflix’s reboot of the 1982 Jim Henson puppet film The Dark Crystal which is accompanied by an exhi...
Aug 23, 2019•28 min
The Bafta winning writer Danny Brocklehurst tells Front Row about the new Sky One comedy drama Brassic. It focuses on Vinnie O’Neill whose incompetent criminal crew is involved in everything from illegal boxing matches to an underground fetish club and stealing a Shetland pony. How did he shape some of lead actor Joe Gilgun’s teenage experiences into a six-part series? Photographer Craig Easton discusses his new exhibition, Fisherwomen, which opens this week at the Hull Maritime Museum. From She...
Aug 22, 2019•28 min
Composer Erich Korngold was best known for his swashbuckling film scores like The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood. A child prodigy, he was already a well-established writer of concert music and operas in his native Austria before he went to Hollywood in the 1930s and continued to compose after he left the movie industry. The conductor John Wilson assembled a special orchestra, the Sinfonia of London, to perform some of his later works, including a symphony, for a new recording entitle...
Aug 21, 2019•28 min
Antonio Banderas on playing Pedro Almodóvar in Pain and Glory - Almodóvar's film based on his own life. Tom Shakespeare talks to Antonio about how the actor's heart attack affected the performance, the differences between acting in Hollywood and European cinema and how the film is the best depiction of back pain he's seen. Witches have always been a popular subject in fiction but recent months have seen a particular flowering. Why? And how do authors choose whether to set their work in the past ...
Aug 20, 2019•28 min
Louise Doughty, author of Apple Tree Yard, has a new novel: a thriller with a difference. Platform Seven’s narrator is dead – and she haunts the eerie half-light of Peterborough Railway Station weaving her way through the lives of the commuters and staff. The spirit of the late Lisa Evans pieces together a backstory which reveals the reality of an abusive relationship, but also offers an uplifting perspective on the dignity of the lives being lived in a place of transition. Theatre director Robe...
Aug 19, 2019•28 min
Live from the Edinburgh Festivals : Ian Shaw, son of actor Robert Shaw, discusses his play, The Shark is Broken, based on Jaws. Using his father’s diaries, it’s the story of how Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss are tortuously confined together on the boat Orca while filming - enduring endless delays, studio politics, foul weather and a constantly broken mechanical shark called Bruce. The show's getting five star reviews - they’re going to need a bigger venue. Benjamin Zephaniah is one of ...
Aug 16, 2019•28 min
Musical impressionist Christina Bianco reveals how she captures the voice and style of so many different musical divas like Shirley Bassey and Celine Dion, with a special performance on the Front Row stage. The surprise hit of this year’s Fringe has been Basil Brush Unleashed. The children’s TV icon is celebrating fifty years in showbusiness with a chat show aimed at adults. Basil talks to Kirsty about his career highlights, and his Edinburgh show and how keeps it the right side of PC. Edinburgh...
Aug 15, 2019•42 min
Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio discuss their new film Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. In the ninth film directed by Quention Taratino, set in the late 1960s, DiCaprio plays an actor in the twilight of his Hollywood career, with Pitt as his buddy and stunt double. The Chief Conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo, guides Stig Abell in on what to listen out for when listening to a symphony. Oramo will conduct the annual Proms performance...
Aug 14, 2019•28 min
Live from the Edinburgh Festivals - comedian Henning Wehn is the self-styled German Ambassador of Comedy. Henning came to the UK seventeen years ago to improve his English and decided to stay due to the good weather and tasty food. His show is called Get On With It which he describes as an unbiased look at Brexit: light on facts and heavy on casual xenophobia. After someone threw a burger at them and shouted a transphobic slur, performance artist Travis Alabanza became obsessed with burgers, and...
Aug 13, 2019•28 min
Poet Lemn Sissay discusses his new memoir, My Name Is Why, which tells the story of his fractured childhood within the now infamous Wigan care system in the '60s and '70s. Since then he has gone on to become the official poet of the London 2012 Olympics, the Chancellor of the University of Manchester, and most recently won this year's PEN Pinter Prize. This Friday the BBC Proms celebrates the 200th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s birth with a concert featuring Stephen Hough who will be playing V...
Aug 12, 2019•28 min
Bohemian Rhapsody, The Crown and a new production of Equus have all used Movement Directors to capture the physicality and movements of their characters. But how do they do it and why is it a role in demand? Polly Bennett, who has worked with Rami Malek and Oliva Coleman, and Shelley Maxwell, who is helping the actors in Equus capture the movement of horses, discuss the role of the Movement Directors. The stormy weather is taking its toll on Britain's festivals with announcements this week that ...
Aug 09, 2019•28 min
Martyn Brabbins, the Music Director of English National Opera, is turning 60 next week and to celebrate he’ll be conducting a new take on Elgar's Enigma Variations at the Royal Albert Hall. He discusses the mystery theme to the original version and the importance of cultural exchange with international musicians. Playmobil: The Movie is the next in the long line of toys-to-screen animated films. Daniel Radcliffe, Anya Taylor-Joy and Meghan Trainor lend their voices to the film where two orphaned...
Aug 08, 2019•28 min
