Coming under the Front Row spotlight today are: Kenneth Branagh’s new stage production of King Lear, in which he both stars and directs, and How to Have Sex, a new coming of age film about the trend for post-exam holidays abroad, by first time director Molly Manning Walker, and which won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes this summer. Theatre critic Susannah Clapp and journalist and Good Bad Billionaire podcast host Zing Tsjeng review. A new track by The Beatles dubbed their “final song” has ...
Nov 02, 2023•42 min
From 1974 to 1984 Henry Winkler played the character of Arthur Fonzarelli, “The Fonz”, in the hit American sitcom, Happy Days. The role dominated the public’s perception of him, but despite being seen as the epitome of cool, he had many of his own demons to wrestle with. Henry joins Front Row to discuss his new autobiography, Being Henry: The Fonz…and Beyond. The composer David Fennessy on his piece Conquest of the Useless which is being performed in Glasgow this weekend. It was inspired by Wern...
Nov 01, 2023•42 min
To mark Halloween, Duran Duran have released Danse Macabre, a “spooky concept” album. Samira talks to Simon Le Bon and John Taylor about working with Nile Rogers, covering The Specials’ Ghost Town and taking pop music seriously. This evening Filkin’s Drift play the last of almost 50 concerts, concluding their two month that has seen them travel 870 miles…on foot. The duo has walked from gig to gig, carrying their instruments. As they reach Chepstow they tell Samira about their approach to sustai...
Oct 31, 2023•42 min
Backstairs Billy is a new play about Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, the Queen Mother, and her loyal, camp and working class servant, William Tallon. Penelope Wilton, who plays the Queen Mother, and Luke Evans, who plays her Steward and Page, talk to Tom Sutcliffe about creating these characters. Jonathan Escoffery has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel If I Survive You. Through a series of interlinked short stories it explores issues of race, masculinity and living in t...
Oct 30, 2023•43 min
The Killer, starring Michael Fassbender, has been hailed as a return to tense and stylish form for the director David Fincher. Critics Rhianna Dhillon and John Mullan join Tom Sutcliffe to give their views on this new take on the assassin genre. They also venture into uncanny realms with a review of Fantasy: Realms of Imagination, a new exhibition at the British Library which charts tales of fairies, folklore and flights of fancy from Ancient Greece to the modern day. Comedian and gamer Ellie Gi...
Oct 26, 2023•43 min
Daniel Rachel’s book Too Much Too Young: The 2 Tone Records Story is a new history of the iconic record label. He’s joined by Pauline Black, lead singer of The Selecter, to discuss the cultural impact of the Ska music it released. Actor Martin Shaw remembers the late, great theatre impresario Bill Kenwright, whose productions included Willy Russell's Blood Brothers and Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, who has died at the age of 78. The game of squash and a fami...
Oct 25, 2023•42 min
Sir Patrick Stewart's memoir Making It So looks back over his long and eclectic acting career encompassing stage, film and television and video games. He has played roles in productions as varied as I, Claudius, Shakespeare and Star Trek: the Next Generation. Samira talks to him about his journey from a poor childhood in Yorkshire to Hollywood. The history and culture of the skateboard is the subject of an exhibition at London's Design Museum. Associate curator Tory Turk and film-maker and skate...
Oct 24, 2023•42 min
Aviva Studios, a reportedly £240 million pound arts complex, has opened in Manchester with Free Your Mind, an immersive stage version of The Matrix from Oscar winning director Danny Boyle. Joining presenter Nick Ahad to discuss the arrival of the UK’s biggest new cultural venue - and its inaugural production- are playwright and critic Charlotte Keatley and architecture writer and lecturer Paul Dobraszczyk. The Chemical Brothers- AKA Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons- reflect on their 30 year journey fr...
Oct 23, 2023•42 min
Film critic Ryan Gilbey and music and club culture writer Kate Hutchinson deliver their verdict on Hackney Diamonds - the first new Rolling Stones album for 18 years – and Garth Davis’ film Foe, which is based on a sci-fi novel by Iain Reid and stars Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal. Lessons in Chemistry was 2022’s hit novel about a thwarted chemist who becomes an early TV cook. It’s now been turned into a series for Apple TV, starring Brie Larson, complete with authentic 1950s food. Chef and cookb...
Oct 19, 2023•42 min
Musical theatre legend Bonnie Langford performs Stephen Sondheim's I'm Still Here from the musical Follies, in tribute to the late composer and lyricist. The actress, singer and dancer reflects on her career from West End child star to appearing in Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends, the starry revue show running at London's Gielgud Theatre. Documentary filmmaker Maysoon Pachachi makes her feature film debut with Our River…Our Sky, set in Baghdad during the winter of 2006, three years after the US-l...
Oct 18, 2023•42 min
Two adaptations of Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco open this month, one in Belfast and a Welsh language adaptation in Cardiff. The adaptors Patrick J O’Reilly and Manon Steffan Ros both join Kathy Clugston to discuss how this 1950s play about the rise of Fascism speaks to audiences now. Singer Cara Dillon is known globally for her interpretations of traditional Irish songs. As she performs at the Belfast International Arts Festival, she explains why she’s taking a new direction with her upcoming al...
Oct 17, 2023•43 min
Madonna is still in the spotlight 45 years after bursting onto the pop scene in the 1980s, inspiring fashion, dance and youth culture, as well as being the world’s best-selling female artist of all time. Author of the biography Madonna: A Rebel Life, Mary Gabriel explores what’s behind her enduring influence and music critic Pete Paphides assesses last night’s Celebration tour performance, rescheduled after her recent serious health scare. The latest film from director Martin Scorcese focuses on...
Oct 16, 2023•43 min
Samira Ahmed is joined by critics Anne Joseph and Nancy Durrant to review some of this week’s cultural highlights. They discuss the new series of the classic TV comedy Frasier, which is returning to our screens after nearly two decades, and a new exhibition, Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style. Martin Hayes has gone from playing the fiddle in his father’s ceilidh band in County Clare to performing for President Obama at the White House. Martin brings his band, The Common Groun...
Oct 12, 2023•42 min
Actor Richard Armitage – who starred in North and South and the Hobbit - joins Nick to discuss writing his debut novel, the bio-tech thriller Geneva, which is about to be published in hardback but was originally commissioned as an audio book. Autumn 2023 has seen Opera North launching its first sustainable ‘Green Season’. This includes the world premiere of an ambitious new production, Masque of Might which repurposes the music of composer Henry Purcell in a spectacle of song and dance. We hear ...
Oct 11, 2023•42 min
Nigel Kennedy remains the best selling violinist of all time with a repertoire that spans jazz, classical, rock, klezmer and more. Ahead of his four night residency at Ronnie Scott’s in London this week, Nigel Kennedy and cellist Beata Urbanek-Kalinowska join us in the Front Row studio to perform two reworkings of pieces by Ryuichi Sakamoto and the Polish film score composer, Krzysztof Komeda. Author Christine Coulson discusses her novel ‘One Woman Show’ written entirely through the medium of ar...
Oct 10, 2023•42 min
Kathryn Tickell and The Darkening’s new album, Cloud Horizons, fuses synthesizers with a bone flute, a sistrum – very old Egyptian instrument - and lyrics based on an inscription in Latin carved on a stone in Northumberland nearly 2 millennia ago. Kathryn talks to Samira about this ancient Northumbrian futurism and plays her smallpipes, live. We remember the film director Terrence Davis, perhaps best known for the film Distant Voices, who has died aged 77. Samira spoke to him for Front Row last ...
Oct 09, 2023•42 min
The winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature is Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who is best known for his innovative plays. Playwright Simon Stephens, who has translated his work, talks about the impact of his plays which are widely performed across Europe but little known in the UK. Front Row reviews Golda, which stars Helen Mirren as Israeli prime minster Golda Meir, and an exhibition of work by the artist Philip Guston at the Tate Modern in London. Poet Aviva Dautch and art critic Ben Lukes ...
Oct 05, 2023•42 min
Mike Skinner helped define an era with The Streets' album Original Pirate Material in 2002. Now he's back with not only new music but an accompanying film, The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light. He talks to Nick Ahad about guerrilla filming in nightclubs and the influence of Raymond Chandler. The choreographer, writer and founder of hip hop dance company ZooNation, Kate Prince, tells us about a dramaturg who has been a key influence on her. We hear about the advice and inspiration offered...
Oct 04, 2023•42 min
The actor Patsy Ferran talks to Samira about her transformation from flower girl (with some autonomy) to duchess (with none at all) in Pygmalion at the Old Vic, and a career in which she transformed from Edith, the maid in Blithe Spirit with Angela Lansbury to Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire with Paul Mescal, via Jem in Treasure Island. “Rubenesque” has long evoked a voluptuous image of female nudity in art, but a new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery seeks to explore the comp...
Oct 03, 2023•42 min
The portraits in the National Gallery’s new retrospective of the artist Frans Hals capture his informal and fresh style which contrasted with other masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt. We hear from the exhibition’s curator Bart Cornelis and by the writer Benjamin Moser whose forthcoming book The Upside-Down World describes his lifelong passion for the art of what’s often called the Dutch Golden Age. The enthusiasm of politicians for the spectacular U-turn has reached the cultural sphere; in Scotl...
Oct 02, 2023•42 min
Front Row reviews two of this week’s cultural highlights. Tom Sutcliffe is joined by writer Hettie Judah and film critic Peter Bradshaw to discuss Happy Gas, a retrospective of work by Sarah Lucas at the Tate Britain, and The Old Oak, which director Ken Loach has said will be his final film. Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, was Front Row’s artist in (remote) residence during the lockdown, playing for us live in the empty Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik. At last Víkingur comes to the Front Ro...
Sep 28, 2023•42 min
Alan Bleasdale’s Boys From The Blackstuff is widely regarded as television drama at its best with a cultural footprint that led to the phrase “Gi’s a job” being heard up and down the country. Forty years on from the first broadcast, James Graham, known for plays such as This House, about the UK’s hung parliament of the 1970s, and Dear England about the England football team, has adapted Alan’s screenplays for a stage production at the Royal Court theatre in Liverpool. He discusses why now was th...
Sep 27, 2023•43 min
The announcement of the winners of the BBC National Short Story Award and the BBC Young Writers’ Award with Cambridge University, live from the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House in London. Joining presenter Tom Sutcliffe to celebrate and interrogate the short story form are the broadcaster and NSSA chair of judges Reeta Chakrabarti, alongside fellow judges and writers Jessie Burton, Roddy Doyle and Okechukwu Nzelu. The shortlisted stories and authors in alphabetical order are: 'The Storm' by N...
Sep 26, 2023•42 min
As the cast of the Archers star in a new adaptation of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford, Samira is joined by actors Louiza Patikas, who plays Helen in the Archers, and Susie Riddell, who plays Tracy, to discuss the two-part Radio 4 drama, now called Lark Rise to Ambridge. Actor and chef turned director Philip Barantini joins Samira to discuss making the sequel for BBC television to his BAFTA-nominated, one-take film, Boiling Point, set in the febrile atmosphere of a high-end restaurant k...
Sep 25, 2023•43 min
Front Row opens this year’s Contain’s Strong Language festival live in Leeds. Nick Ahad talks to Detectorists star Toby Jones about his stage adaptation of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winters Night A Traveller, to the festival poet and rapper Testament about 50 Years of Hip Hop and the choreographer and artist Katja Heitmann about turning the everyday gestures of Leeds citizens into art. Plus poetry from the newly appointed Yorkshire Young Laureate.
Sep 21, 2023•44 min
Writer Joan Smith and art historian Katy Hessel review a retrospective exhibition of the performance artist Marina Abramovic at the Royal Academy and a new ITV drama about the Yorkshire ripper, The Long Shadow. The Russian journalist, novelist and now playwright Dmitry Glukhovsky talks about his stage drama The White Factory telling the story of the ghetto in Łódź, Poland during the second world war. In it he explores the corrosive nature of compromise as the Jews are forced to choose which amon...
Sep 20, 2023•42 min
Birmingham Royal Ballet is celebrating the city’s pioneering heavy metal band in a new production, Black Sabbath – the Ballet. Tom Sutcliffe talks to the director of BRB Carlos Acosta about how the marriage of apparently conflicting cultures came about. He also hears from the composer and arranger Christopher Austin on adapting the music for contemporary choreography and the dramaturg Richard Thomas about creating a narrative structure for an abstract dance form. Today it was announced that Mich...
Sep 19, 2023•43 min
From the enduring legacy of Colin Firth’s wet shirt to the colourful extravagance of Bridgerton, costumes have always been central in period dramas. But how much does adaptation match up to reality when it comes to regency fashion? To discuss this - and what’s revealed by the closet of the real-life Austen - Samira is joined by Hilary Davidson, author of ‘Jane Austen’s Wardrobe’, and the award-winning costume designer Dinah Collin. Radio 4’s first poet-in-residence, Daljit Nagra, discusses his n...
Sep 18, 2023•42 min
When the artist Charlie Mackesy, best-known for his book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, heard Paul Simon’s most recent album, the acclaimed Seven Psalms, he was inspired to create a sketch for each ‘psalm’. They both join us on Front Row. In the last of our interviews with all the authors shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award we talk to Kamila Shamsie about her story Churail. Gabrielle Chanel opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and Das Rheingold, the first ...
Sep 14, 2023•47 min
Katherine Rundell on her new children’s fantasy book, Impossible Creatures. It's a story of two worlds, ours and one where the animals of myth and legend still survive, and thrive. A fantasy which does not shirk from dark themes, and was inspired by the metaphysical poetry of John Donne. The next finalist in the National Short Story Award is South African writer Nick Mulgrew . His story, The Storm, is set in suburban Durban describes a toxic family dynamic against a backdrop of the dramatic and ...
Sep 13, 2023•42 min
