Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Natalie Jamieson and Matt Cain to review: Cher, The Memoir, Part one - the pop icon and Oscar winning actor tells the story of her childhood and early success. The film version of Wicked is the long awaited film adaptation which is also the first of two parts, starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo and telling the story of the Witches of Oz. Maddaddam: renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor has brought Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of sci fi novels to the stage with a bal...
Nov 21, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream speaks about Come Ahead, the band's first new album in eight years. We discuss how the publication of books for children by celebrities affects the wider industry and reading trends. And as an exhibition of work by Maud Sulter opens in Glasgow, the curators talk about the widespread influence of this artist, poet, photographer and gallerist, who died in 2008. Presenter: Kirsty Wark Producer: Mark Crossan
Nov 20, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kathryn Tickell talks about her new album Return to Kielderside, which reinterprets and updates the tunes and themes of her debut album, On Kielderside, which she released 40 years ago at the age of sixteen. Nihal is joined by Amrou Al-Kadhi, whose directorial debut feature film Layla tells the story of a British-Palestinian drag queen navigating life and love in London. As Massive Attack prepares to headline in Liverpool this month, Robert Del Naja, aka 3D, discusses the band's attempts to beco...
Nov 19, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Malala Yousafzai talks to Front Row about her new film Bread & Roses, which documents the fight for women’s rights in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover, alongside the director Sahra Mani. We hear from actress Rebecca Hall about haunting new BBC drama The Listeners. And what are the ingredients for writing about food? Is it an exact science or a literary art form? Food writer Bee Wilson and head chef of Quo Vadis Jeremy Lee chew over writers’ recipes. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Sa...
Nov 18, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tom Sutcliffe talks to Paul Mescal about slipping into Russell Crowe’s sandals in Gladiator 2 – as well as reviewing the film itself with classically-trained Guardian journalist Charlotte Higgins and film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh. They also talk about Haruki Murakami's first new book for six years, The City and Its Uncertain Walls and the Netflix drama Joy, about how beginnings of IVF. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Paula McGrath
Nov 14, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast American guitarist Pat Metheny on how the discovery of a particular Argentinian guitar string took his latest album Moondial in a new direction. As a school by the renowned Victorian architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh comes to the open market, we discuss whether Glasgow does enough to look after its built heritage. Plus actor Dame Janet Suzman and directors Tom Morris and Mike Taylor remember actor Timothy West, whose death was announced earlier today. Presenter: Kirsty Wark Producer: Mark Cros...
Nov 13, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Samira Ahmed is live from the Booker Prize 2024 ceremony. As well as hearing from the six shortlisted authors, Samira speaks to judges novelist Sara Collins and musician Nitin Sawhney. Campaigner for social justice Baroness Lola Young talks about the transformative power of literature. Chair of judges, artist and writer Edmund de Waal announces the winner of this prestigious award for fiction. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Claire Bartleet
Nov 12, 2024•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ahead of tonight's Booker Prize ceremony, Front Row hears from all of the shortlisted authors: Percival Everett, Samantha Harvey, Rachel Kushner, Anne Michaels, Yael van der Wouden and Charlotte Wood. Then at 9.30pm, in a special extra edition of Front Row, Samira Ahmed hosts the ceremony. Find out who will win the prestigious literary prize. Producer: Claire Bartleet Presenter: Samira Ahmed
Nov 12, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rolling Stones guitarist, Ronnie Wood discusses his parallel career as an artist. As a new exhibition of his work opens at the Andrew Martin showroom in London, Ronnie talks about how he has drawn inspiration from Delacroix, Caravaggio and Picasso. As a new three part series Boybands Forever starts on BBC2 and the iplayer, we explore what was behind the rise and fall of the boybands of the nineties and noughties with Richie Neville of Five and Hannah Verdier from Smash Hits. And, keyboard music ...
Nov 11, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nancy Durrant and Nii Ayikwei Parkes join Tom Sutcliffe to review The Piano Lesson, the latest August Wilson play to be adapted for the screen by the family of Denzel Washington. Directed by Malcolm Washington and starring John David Washington, Samuel L Jackson and Danielle Deadwyler, a brother and sister argue over the future of an heirloom piano. We discuss Jonathan Coe's return with new novel The Proof of My Innocence, a satirical murder mystery. Florence in 1504 is the backdrop for the Roya...
Nov 07, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast As a documentary about her life reaches cinemas, musician and activist Pauline Black, the lead singer in 2-tone hit band The Selecter, talks about her career. We hear from the curators of the Waters Rising exhibition at Perth Museum, which features representations of flooding in literature and art over many centuries. And as an unfinished play by award-winning writer Oliver Emanuel comes to Radio 4, and an unstaged play by writer, poet and musician Beldina Odenyo is produced in Glasgow, we discu...
Nov 06, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui talk about their new documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, which uses never-seen-before family archive to tell the story of the famed Superman actor. He became a champion of disability rights after being left paralysed from a horse riding accident. The final of Front Row's interviews with the authors on this year's Booker Prize shortlist - Samantha Harvey on her novel Orbital. As a banana stuck to a wall with duct tape is presented for aucti...
Nov 05, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Actors Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch on their modern day remake of The Day of the Jackal. Political satire in the US Elections: Helen Lewis of the Atlantic and Mike Gillis of the Onion discuss. We take a look at how to write a novel with Hattie Crisell and Sara Collins. and remember the music producer and innovator extraordinaire, Quincy Jones, who’s died at the age of 91. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Corinna Jones
Nov 04, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Arifa Akbar and Peter Bradshaw join Tom Sutcliffe to review the film Anora which was written and directed by Sean Baker. Set in contemporary New York the romantic drama won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. They also review the stage production of Dr. Strangelove. The original film version of the black comedy starred Peter Sellers in three roles, in this version Steve Coogan takes on four parts. And they discuss Ali Smith's 13th novel Gliff which focuses on a brutal surveillance state in the future. Plu...
Oct 31, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Actor Billy Crystal talks about his role as a child psychiatrist in Before, the new thriller series from Apple TV. Marina Diamandis on pivoting from songwriting to poetry, as she publishes her first collection, Eat the World. Live music from performers at the Nordic Music Days festival which celebrates contemporary classical music and is in Scotland for the first time. Plus response to Rachel Reeves' first budget, from the BBC's Media & Arts Correspondent David Sillito. Presenter: Kirsty War...
Oct 30, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hugh Grant talks about his new psychological thriller Heretic, where he plays a man who lures two young female missionaries into his home for an intense debate about belief and faith that takes increasingly sinister turns. The Government has pledged to build 1.5 million new homes by 2029 - but what will they look like? Winner of the Royal Institute of British Architects' 2024 Neave Brown Award for Housing, architect Jessam Al-Jawad and the Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore discuss the f...
Oct 29, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Steve McQueen talks about his new film Blitz, starring Saoirse Ronan and set in London during the Second World War. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael are among the artists on show in the UK's largest exhibition of drawings from the Italian Renaissance, at the King's Gallery, Buckingham Palace. Samira is joined by the curator Martin Clayton and Renaissance historian Maya Corry. Booker shortlisted author Rachel Kushner on her novel Creation Lake, about an American spy-for-hire. Presenter: Samira Ahm...
Oct 28, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Critic and film producer Jason Solomons and BBC New New Generation Thinker Jade Cuttle join Tom Sutcliffe to review Emilia Pérez. The musical thriller follows a drug cartel leader who wants to fake their death and change gender. They also review Dahomey, an award winning documentary which follows 26 plundered artefacts as they are returned to their African home of Benin. Tim Burton talks about turning his life's work into an exhibition at the Design Museum, which includes childhood drawings, set...
Oct 24, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Musician and novelist Malachy Tallack talks about his new novel That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz, and performs live from the accompanying album. To mark 20 years since Edinburgh became the world's first Unesco City of Literature, we hear about the growth of this international network which celebrates reading, writers and storytelling. Plus a visit to a new exhibition of magnificent textile art drawn from National Trust of Scotland properties, which showcases this intricate artform and represents th...
Oct 23, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast William Kentridge is one of the major figures in the contemporary art world with an award-winning body of work that includes drawings, films, theatre and opera productions. His latest creation -Self Portrait As A Coffee Pot - is a nine part televisual work of art which, filed with images, music, dancers, and actors, explores the joy and power of making art. Robert Laycock, CEO of Marlow Film Studios and Isabel Davis, Executive Director of Screen Scotland discuss the challenges of expanding the s...
Oct 22, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The acclaimed Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovor talks about this new film The Room Next Door, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival the Golden Lion and stars Tilda Swinton as a woman dying of cancer who enlists her friend Julianne Moore to help her end her life at a time of her choosing. The Bloomsbury Group of writers and thinkers that included the likes of Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell and John Maynard Keynes has enduring appeal, so as a new exhibition at the MK Gallery in Milton Keyne...
Oct 21, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mel Giedroyc and Sarah Crompton join Samira to review The Franchise, the new comedy series from Armando Iannucci offering a behind the scenes look at the filming of a superhero film franchise. They also review Tim Winton’s epic new novel Juice, set in the future of a climate change ravaged Australia. And Francois Ozon's new comedy film The Crime is Mine, which sees an actress charged with murder finding the courtroom the perfect place to launch her career starring Isabelle Huppert. Presenter: Sa...
Oct 17, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Actor Rupert Everett on his debut collection of stories, The American No. Carla J Easton talks about her music documentary Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands. And Lung Leg perform in the studio. And artist Everlyn Nicodemus on her belief that "art is resurrection" at her first retrospective, at the National Galleries of Scotland. Presenter: Kirsty Wark Producer: Mark Crossan
Oct 16, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jodie Whittaker talks to Tom Sutcliffe about returning to the stage for the first time in over a decade to star in an updated version of John Webster's 17th-century revenge tragedy The Duchess [of Malfi]. The super-realism of Japanese food replicas is on show in London exhibition Looks Delicious! Curator Simon Wright and Japanese food expert Akemi Yokoyama reflect on this distinctive art. Baroness Ludford discusses buying single theatre seats. Canadian writer Anne Michaels talks about her Booker...
Oct 15, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Forty years ago Bronski Beat released Age of Consent, a record so loud and proud that it become an era-defining moment of gay liberation. We look back at the record's music, legacy and politics with novelist Matt Cain and Laurie Belgrave, who has produced the new 'The Age of Consent 40' concert at the Southbank Centre. Samira talks to Percival Everett about his Booker-shortlisted James, a potent retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which offers a new voice to the enslaved cha...
Oct 14, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tom Sutcliffe and his guests journalist Stephen Bush and theatre critic Kate Maltby review the latest cultural releases. These include Apple TV's thriller Disclaimer which stars Cate Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen, Alice Lowe's comedy sci-fi film Timestalker and Alexander Zeldin's modern reworking of Antigone at the National Theatre, The Other Place. And after today's announcement that Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her former editor at Granta Magazine, the author Max Porter t...
Oct 10, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Booker Prize-shortlisted author Charlotte Wood talks about her novel Stone Yard Devotional. In the month that marks 100 years since the publication of poet André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism, artist Gavin Turk and art historian Professor Alyce Mahon discuss the significance and impact of surrealism on art over the past century. And playwright Tim Price on Odyssey '84, an epic retelling of the 1984 Miners' Strike, inspired by Homer's Odyssey, which is being staged at Cardiff's Sherman Theatre...
Oct 09, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rick Astley on his new autobiography, Never, which reflects on hitting the big time twice courtesy of his debut hit single, Never Gonna Give You Up. The West Wing is 25 - television critic Scott Bryan and columnist Sonia Sodha discuss why the glossy American political drama series continues to inspire politicians worldwide. Artist Barbara Walker on drawing the Black British experience in her new exhibition, Being Here, at the Whitworth. Presenter: Nick Ahad Producer: Ekene Akalawu...
Oct 08, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Alison Moyet joins us in the studio to talk about her career, from Yazoo to going solo and a new album. Fashion renegades of the 1980s via Leigh Bowery, Taboo and the Blitz nightclub, we take a look at a new exhibition with Pam Hogg and Sue Tilley. War Horse composer Adrian Sutton on going back to his classical roots with his latest composition, a violin concerto. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Corinna Jones
Oct 07, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week's big cinema release Joker: Folie a Deux is under scrutiny from Tom Sutcliffe's reviewers, broadcaster Ayesha Hazarika and film critic Tim Robey. They have also read Alan Hollinghurst's new novel Our Evenings. Gramophone Artist of the Year soprano Carolyn Sampson performs in the Front Row studio - and on National Poetry Day Tom and the critics pick their favourite poems. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Paula McGrath
Oct 03, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
