Inspired by the real-life story of three men in a lighthouse who mysteriously vanished, Emma Stonex’s novel The Lamplighters is part thriller, part history and part ghost story. She explains why she felt drawn to write about the sea and what we can learn from the solitary lives of lighthouse keepers. David Fincher's film Mank leads the field in today's Oscar nominations, but who else stood out in the announcement? Film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh reflects on the nominations in a year when most ci...
Mar 15, 2021•28 min
The podcast ‘Aria Code’ from WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera aims to pull back the curtain on some of operas most well-known moments. Each episode “decodes” one aria, with academics and opera singers diving in to the music. But there are also a variety of unexpected guests, such as a marriage therapist talking relationships in Carmen or a former sex worker giving perspective on La Traviata. Host Rhiannon Giddens explains what’s coming up in the third series of the podcast. The 2020 film The Lege...
Mar 12, 2021•41 min
The recent death of Lou Ottens - the inventor of audio cassettes who later went on to work on the development of CD technology - gives us the opportunity to look back at the glory days of cassettes, their subsequent decline and the latest unexpected return to fashion, with music journalists Laura Barton and Jude Rogers. Young British poet Luke Wright describes himself as 'a louche poet (who) loves a bit of bathos'. He has a new collection of work, The Feelgood Movie Of The Year, with poems writt...
Mar 11, 2021•28 min
Netflix’s new drama, The One, set five minutes in the future, depicts a world where a DNA test can find your perfect partner. Kohinoor Sahota joins us to discuss its mix of sci-fi and romance, as well as whether this format could be the future of dating. The longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction is announced today. Critic Alex Clark joins Front Row to talk about the themes, highlights, whether there are any surprise inclusions and omissions, and which book might take the prize. At the weeke...
Mar 10, 2021•28 min
The Bafta Film Awards have unveiled a highly diverse nominations list, with 16 of the 24 acting nominees this year coming from ethnic minority groups. This follows criticsm in previous years about shortlists that didn’t reflect modern Britain. Film maker, poet and founder of The Caramel Film Club Be Manzini joins us to ask whether this is the beginning of greater representation. Violinist Hilary Hahn’s new CD ‘Paris’ brings together music inspired by a city that has been pivotal in her career. S...
Mar 09, 2021•28 min
Novelist Oana Aristide discusses her debut novel Under the Blue, about a reclusive artist forced to abandon his home and follow two young sisters across a post-pandemic Europe in search of a safe place. It has been described as eco-fiction and it explores themes of environmental destruction, the melting of the polar ice, eco-terrorism, all within a suspenseful story of three survivors on a terrifying road trip. The British poet Stevie Smith, best known for her work “Not Waving, But Drowning” die...
Mar 08, 2021•28 min
David Mamet's latest play, The Christopher Boy’s Communion is about a couple in New York whose son is facing trial charged with an appalling crime. First performed on the stage in Los Angeles last year, it’s premiers in the UK in the form of a radio play next week. He discusses the tricky issues it deals with and how he adapted a lengthier stage play it for radio (BBC Radio 4, Monday 8 March 8, 1415) In this week’s Friday Review, critics Karen Krizanovich and Jan Asante discuss two films with di...
Mar 05, 2021•41 min
As World Book Day we’re speaking to teacher turned rapper turned internet sensation MC Grammar. He's created lots of videos setting information about grammar to a rap beat. He joins us to explain why it succeeds with school children and we hear the song he's composed specially for the day. Since the arrival of Amazon and online bookselling, independent bookshops have been facing an existential crisis, one that has only accelerated under Coronavirus. Going online to sell books feels like a natura...
Mar 04, 2021•28 min
Pat Metheny has won 20 Grammy Awards, predominantly for his work as a jazz guitarist, but also for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, and Best Instrumental Composition. His latest work is as a composer. The album Road to the Sun has two major works for classical guitar. Four Paths of Light is a four movement suite for a solo instrument, played by Jason Vieaux, and Road to the Sun, a piece in six parts, performed by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. Metheny himself plays his arrangement of Arvo Pä...
Mar 03, 2021•29 min
Your Honour is a new Showtime miniseries starring Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston as a respected New Orleans judge whose son is involved in a hit-and-run. He faces a series of impossible choices questioning how far a Father will go to go to save a son's life. Developed by British Peter Moffat it's a remake of the hit Israeli show Kvodo. Novelist and journalist Lionel Shriver reviews. Stories To Get You Through is a new podcast performed by the people of Doncaster as part of the National Theatre's ...
Mar 02, 2021•28 min
Kazuo Ishiguro has just published his eighth novel, the first to be written since he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 and was knighted. Klara and the Sun is about an Artificial Friend, a robot whose role is to be a companion to the teenage Josie, though it becomes apparent that more may be expected of Klara. With resonances of two of his previous novels Never Let Me Go and of The Remains of the Day, it is a much-anticipated addition to Ishiguro’s body of work. Sameer Rahim, books editor...
Mar 01, 2021•28 min
We review a new biopic of jazz singer Billie Holiday, directed by Lee Daniels, which tells the story of the FBI’s campaign against her. They were afraid that performing her most famous song Strange Fruit, about the lynching of Black Americans, would incite unrest. Andra Day stars as Holiday. Barb Jungr and Be Manzini give their verdict, comment on the week's arts news and give recommendations for what they've been enjoying recently. A True Born Englishman, a monologue written 30 years ago for Ra...
Feb 26, 2021•41 min
Artists Gilbert & George open a new exhibition at the White Cube next week. The pair first met in 1967 whilst studying sculpture at Central St Martin’s art college. They’ve lived and worked together in East London for fifty years. The show - New Normal Pictures - consists of twenty-six new pictures which feature the pair in gritty London landscapes including bin bags, bus shelters and graffiti. It was first due to exhibit in April last year. They join John Wilson to discuss how they’ve been ...
Feb 25, 2021•28 min
As she is awarded one of British crime writing’s top accolades, the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger, Samira talks to crime novelist Martina Cole. Hailed as the Queen of Crime Drama, Cole has written 25 novels and sold 10 million books since records began but her work is rarely reviewed - so what’s her secret? Under the road map unveiled by Boris Johnson on Monday public museums and galleries in England will be allowed to reopen no earlier than 17 May, along with other indoor venues suc...
Feb 24, 2021•28 min
John Keats was just 25 when he died in Rome 200 years ago. To mark the anniversary The Poetry Society has commissioned new work from award-winning contemporary poets responding to Keats’s work, and two of them – Rachael Boast and Will Harris – join us to share their poems and discuss why Keats is still important to contemporary writers 200 hundred years after his death. “The Best Is Yet To Come” is Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler’s 18th studio album. Pushed back by the pandemic, it’s a return to the b...
Feb 23, 2021•29 min
As the Prime Minister sets out his roadmap to ending the Covid lockdown we get reaction from Dominique Frazer, Founder of the Boileroom, a music venue in Guildford, and Hamish Moseley, Managing Director of an independent film distribution company Altitude Film Entertainment, and ask if this offers them enough information to start to plan for the year ahead. Radio Wales DJ Huw Stephens discusses is three part documentary, The Story of Welsh Art, which looks as visual art in the country more assoc...
Feb 22, 2021•28 min
Leicester Curve’s recent award-winning revival of the musical The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker’s novel, has been reimagined, filmed and is being streamed for audiences. Dreda Say Mitchell and David Benedict review. David Rodigan joins us to celebrate the life of the great Jamaican musician U-Roy, who died recently. He was a master of the toasting mic style – the precursor of rapping, MC-ing and freestyling. Niven Govinden studied film before becoming an award-winning writer. In his sixth ...
Feb 19, 2021•41 min
Dame Sarah Connolly sings the role of the goddess Fricka in the Royal Opera House's production of Wagner's The Ring Cycle, currently being broadcast on BBC Radio 3. She discusses the challenge of performing this 15 hour operatic epic. Chris Brandon on writing the new BBC crime drama series Bloodlands - which stars James Nesbitt as a detective - is exec produced by Jed Mercurio (Line of Duty and Bodyguard), and which draws on Brandon's own upbringing in Northern Ireland. Visual artist Jessie Bren...
Feb 18, 2021•28 min
Is listening to K-Pop like buying sweatshop-made clothes? From rigorous childhood performance academies to long, labour-intensive contracts for young idols, does the South Korean music industry have an exploitation problem? High profile suicides, sexual harassment claims and industry standards are complicating the nature of the industry and the fandom as it booms in the English speaking world. Musicologist Haekyung Um and journalist Taylor Glasby weigh in. Poet Kate Fox talks about her new colle...
Feb 17, 2021•29 min
In 2006 a friend of the actor and writer Lorien Haynes died. Haynes's grief has found unusual expression - in a romantic comedy starring Sian Clifford and Nikesh Patel. In Good Grief the central character is dead. Director Natalie Abrahami has created an unusual hybrid of film and theatre, shot in what looks like a rehearsal studio, with a set of cardboard boxes - one marked 'cupboard'. Between scenes we see the crew setting lights and microphones. The critic Alice Saville reviews. Comic novelis...
Feb 16, 2021•29 min
As the nation waits for the vaccine and lockdown restrictions to ease, what can literature teach us about the art of waiting? Writer Rebecca Stott, critic Alex Clark and poet Anthony Anaxagorou discuss the art of waiting, whether cheerfully or 'with a green and yellow melancholy… like Patience on a monument' as Viola says in Twelfth Night. Lolita Chakrabarti’s play Hymn begins at a funeral where two men meet, and begin to form a remarkable bond. Lolita discusses her play that uses music and danc...
Feb 15, 2021•29 min
British jazz pianist and broadcaster Julian Joseph joins us to look at the life and music of his good friend; pianist and composer Chick Corea. Chick began his career in the early 60’s, released his first album in 1968 and over more than 5 decades he played with just about every big name in jazz, winning 23 Grammy awards and was still composing and performing new work just months ago – most recently a concerto inspired by the music of Bela Bartok Elusive pop sensation Sia makes her film director...
Feb 12, 2021•41 min
Screenwriter and novelist Ben Hopkins talks to Tom about his ambitious new novel, Cathedral. It's a portrait of the construction of the medieval period's greatest buildings, featuring a cast of intriguing characters all vying for power - from the bishop to his treasurer to local merchants and lowly stone cutters. Faith, Hope and Glory is a new drama series on Radio 4 which sees British playwrights Roy Williams, Rex Obano, and Winsome Pinnock chart the history of postwar Britain through the inter...
Feb 11, 2021•28 min
Documentary-maker Adam Curtis crafts densely-constructed, visually-fragmented work so packed full of ideas and images that you can’t take your eyes off the screen for a moment. He pulls together disparate images and soundtrack to create a mesmerising hypothesis. He discusses his newest work, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, which debuts on BBC iPlayer this Thursday. Welcome to Your Fantasy and The Missing are two new true crime podcasts swelling the ranks in a genre which continues to feature highl...
Feb 10, 2021•28 min
Tom Hanks stars in Paul Greengrass's new film, News of the World. Hanks plays Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Civil War veteran who crosses paths with Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old taken in by the Kiowa people six years earlier and raised as one of their own. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw gives us her verdict on the western. Songwriter Roger Cook discusses Thursday’s world premiere of Next Year in Jerusalem, the title song of a musical he wrote with Lionel Bart 47 years ago. Roger is now hoping t...
Feb 09, 2021•28 min
Twenty years ago this week, the artist Michael Landy famously destroyed every single one of his 7,227 possessions in an artwork called Break Down. The artist looks back on the 14-day event which took place on an industrial conveyor belt inside a disused department store in Oxford St in London, and considers how the process affected him. Since the now notorious Handforth Parish Council Meeting people have been imagining the film version starring Meryl Streep or Lesley Manville as Jackie Weaver, w...
Feb 08, 2021•28 min
In April the artist Luke Jerram spoke on Front Row about his sculpture of the Covid-19 virus. Since then he has been ill with Covid and has created another sculpture - unveiled today - this time of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Jerram discusses his artistic engagement with Covid, including his piece In Memoriam, 120 flags made of NHS bed-sheets, commemorating those who have died. The Oscar-winning actor Christopher Plummer, whose death at the age of 91 was announced today, is remembered by the film c...
Feb 05, 2021•41 min
Hollywood star Sam Neill joins us from his home in New Zealand to discuss the perils of acting with sheep in his new film Rams, based on an acclaimed Icelandic drama about two estranged brothers and their flocks of a rare horned breed of sheep. A new colour blue has come onto artists’ palettes. Called YInMn it was discovered in 2009 by accident by scientists working on semiconductors but has only just become commercially available. Art critic Waldemar Januszczak looks at why this is significant ...
Feb 04, 2021•28 min
Film critic Leila Latif joins us to discuss today’s Golden Globe nominations, and gives us an overview of some of the highlights from the first ever online Sundance Festival. The folklore of Taiwan is visited and revisited by subsequent generations of women in Bestiary, the debut novel from K-Ming Chang, as a Daughter falls in love and confronts her family’s secrets in America. Shot through with a litany of mythical beasts, it’s a novel that offers a charged narrative of diaspora and beauty in a...
Feb 03, 2021•29 min
The Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald discusses his follow-up to his YouTube film Life In A Day from 2010, where he invited the public to upload their own footage of their lives taken on one specific day. He then edited those contributions to create a finished film to tell the story of a single day on Earth. For Life In A Day 2020 he received over 320,000 submissions from nearly 200 countries. Jakuta Alikavazovic is a Prix Goncourt winning French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. S...
Feb 02, 2021•28 min
