Shows / Front Row
Episodes
- Front Row
Alfre Woodard, film Come As You Are and Ellie Goulding album Brightest Blue reviewed, Richard Herring
American actress Alfre Woodard on her powerful lead performance as a death row prison warden in Clemency, written and directed by Chinoye Chukwu, which won the…
- Front Row
Get Carter director Mike Hodges, Tate Bursary artist Oreet Ashery, the plight of arts freelancers in the pandemic
Film director and writer Mike Hodges, of Get Carter fame, on his 1989 film Black Rainbow, starring Rosanna Arquette. Despite being critically acclaimed, it…
- Front Row
Winning back audience trust, the doctor turned novelist, musical collaboration in lockdown
How will community theatre companies help restore audience confidence to go back into theatres after the lockdown? And how do we measure how important they are…
- Front Row
The Chicks, Hammed Animashaun, Liz Johnson Artur
American country group The Chicks (formerly know as The Dixie Chicks), the biggest-selling U.S. female band of all time, talk about Gaslighter, their first…
- Front Row
Anish Kapoor, The Plot Against America, Rachel De-Lahay, drive in comedy
Winona Ryder, John Turturro and Anthony Boyle star in a new Sky Atlantic drama The Plot Against America adapted by David Simon from Philip Roth’s alternate…
- Front Row
The Kanneh-Masons, Minack Theatre, Imran Perretta
The Kanneh-Masons are an extraordinarily musical family of seven siblings who spent lockdown together at their home in Nottingham and were filmed by BBC1's…
- Front Row
Philip Pullman on Northern Lights 25 years on, Mrs America reviewed, Simon Schama
Today is the 25th anniversary of the publication of Northern Lights, the first novel in the His Dark Materials trilogy that introduced Lyra and her daemon…
- Front Row
Katori Hall; cinema after lockdown; documenting empty arts spaces
Katori Hall is a playwright from Memphis, Tennessee, whose story of a Southern strip club and the women who work in it has been adapted for television as a…
- Front Row
Rufus Wainwright, Neil Mendoza, Tate Bursaries, Ringo at 80
Rufus Wainwright joins us to talk about his new album, Unfollow The Rules, lockdown's threat to live music, and his online robe recitals.In the wake of the…
- Front Row
Funding for the arts, Wayne McGregor, Ennio Morricone
Will the government’s £1.57 billion investment in the arts be enough save UK cultural organisations and freelancers? Samira discusses the arts rescue package…
- Front Row
Theatres in pink, David Pickard on the BBC Proms, Friday Review on Hamilton, Decolonising arts curriculum in school
Some of our major theatres are wrapped in pink today as part of the #missinglivetheatre campaign. Designer Tom Piper talks about the project.Novelist Sara…
- Front Row
The Secrets She Keeps, Fyzal Boulifa, Urdu poetry in Bradford
The new Australian TV thriller series The Secrets She Keeps. Felicity Ward reviews the BBC One drama about two women due to give birth on the same day, but…
- Front Row
Director Werner Herzog, actor Danny Sapani, Watford bookclub
Werner Herzog has made over 70 films, from the ambitious feature film Fitzcarraldo to the documentary Grizzly Man. From Los Angeles he discusses his latest…
- Front Row
The Arts in Crisis
Are the arts facing an existential crisis in the UK? Sir Simon Rattle, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, on the imminent threat to orchestras and…
- Front Row
Kevin Kwan, Annilese Miskimmon of ENO, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Kevin Kwan, author of the Crazy Rich Asians novels, which was adapted into the hit film of 2018, talks about his new book Sex and Vanity, a satire set in the…
- Front Row
Michael Palin, The Last of Us Part II reviewed, Anthony Thwaite, Rethink - Nicola Triscott, Roadmap to Reopening Theatres
Michael Palin on staging a version of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot to raise money for The Royal Theatre Fund - and what else he’s been doing during lockdown.We…
- Front Row
Crisis in theatre, Stuart Evers new novel, Eurovision the film, Bristol’s Colston statue
Redundancies at the Theatre Royal Plymouth - over 100 jobs have been announced at risk as income falls by over 90 per cent due to the pandemic. We hear about…
- Front Row
Griselda Pollock
The Holberg Prize is awarded annually to a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law or…
- Front Row
Rethink The Arts
The arts world is facing a “cultural catastrophe” with the impact of Covid-19 leading to the loss of an annual revenue of £74 billion according to one report…
- Front Row
Talking Heads, Jarvis Cocker, Thomas Clay
Alan Bennett's Talking Heads have been remade for television decades after the original series. Alongside two brand new monologues, ten episodes have been…
- Front Row
Rebel Wilson, Ian Holm remembered, Bob Dylan, The Luminaries
Rebel Wilson discusses her new TV series Last One Laughing, where ten comedians are locked in room and if they laugh they get kicked out. The last one standing…
- Front Row
Vera Lynn remembered, guitarist Sean Shibe, PlacePrints audio plays reviewed, Poetry from Alison Brackenbury
We mark the passing of Dame Vera Lynn, the Forces' Sweetheart, whose songs helped raise morale in World War Two. After Dame Vera's death, aged 103, was…
- Front Row
Judd Apatow, Carnegie and Greenaway Medals for children's literature, job losses in theatre, Alison Brackenbury
Judd Apatow - famous for film comedies like Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin, and Trainwreck - on his new film The King Of Staten Island, which he co-wrote…
- Front Row
Jean Toomer's Cane adapted, Bloomsday, Alison Brackenbury, Museums in lockdown
In 1923, African American author Jean Toomer published the novel Cane. It wasn’t a best seller at the time but is now held as a modernist classic and a central…
- Front Row
Tracey Emin, Alison Brackenbury, Book Covers
Tracey Emin discusses the creative burst she has experienced during lockdown, resulting in a series of new paintings created for an online exhibition called I…
- Front Row
The Salisbury Poisonings, Víkingur Ólafsson, Walter Scott Prize, Pilgrims
The Salisbury Poisonings, a new BBC One three-part drama, focuses on the 2018 Novichok poisonings, the public health response, and the heroism of the…
- Front Row
Simon Bird, Whiteness, Ruth Patterson, Tony Walsh
It’s as the clever but put-upon Will Mackenzie in The Inbetweeners or the elder son Adam in Friday Night Dinner that Simon Bird has come to public attention…
- Front Row
Robert Lindsay, Tony Hall, How to make a new musical
Robert Lindsay on his first acting job fifty years ago at the Nortcott Theatre in Devon, in a play which has contemporary resonance: Don Taylor's historical…
- Front Row
Spike Lee; Hope Mirrlees' Paris - A Poem; and are we being more creative in lockdown?
Spike Lee’s new film Da 5 Bloods follows four African-American Vietnam veterans who served together in battle, who return to the country and reunite to locate…
- Front Row
Michaela Coel, The Comedy Women in Print Prize, Bristol's Colston statue
Michaela Coel, the double-BAFTA winning actor/writer/director of the TV series Chewing Gum, discusses her new show I May Destroy You, a 12-parter telling a…
- Front Row
Víkingur Ólafsson, David Greig, El Presidente, Inclusive publishing
Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson continues his weekly live performances from the empty Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, as Front Row’s Lockdown Artist in…
- Front Row
Andrew Patterson, Writing about Race, Mark Damazer Chair of Booker Prize Foundation
Director Andrew Patterson joins us to talk about new movie The Vast of Night, the story of a small New Mexico town disturbed by lights in the sky and…
- Front Row
David Tennant and Michael Sheen in Staged, Ethiopian poetry, Talking About Race
Michael Sheen and David Tennant play themselves in Staged, a new BBC One series of six 15-minute Zoom dramas, in which they play two furloughed actors in…
- Front Row
Carrie Mae Weems, Liz Lochhead, How will museums reflect the pandemic
As public protests continue nationally and internationally, award-winning American artist Carrie Mae Weems - whose work explores race, identity, and power -…
- Front Row
Sitting in Limbo, Joanna Briscoe, Christo, The Uncertain Kingdom
Sitting In Limbo is a new BBC drama telling the story of one man’s entanglement with the Windrush scandal where legal migrants, some of whom had lived here for…
- Front Row
Indira Varma, Víkingur Ólafsson, Snowpiercer and The Lockdown Plays reviewed, DJ Mr Switch, Tom Morris
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1929…
- Front Row
Can arts venues survive social distancing?
Social distancing has become one of the key measures for controlling coronavirus, but implementing it is creating an existential threat to arts venues like…
- Front Row
John Grisham, re-opening of museums and galleries, the best of theatre online
Bestselling author John Grisham on his new novel Camino Winds, a sequel to Camino Island, in which a coterie of crime authors discover one of their colleagues…
- Front Row
Tracee Ellis Ross, Walter Iuzzolino, Southbank Centre
Tracee Ellis Ross is the daughter of Diana Ross and in 2017 became the first African-American woman to win a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV Comedy since…
- Front Row
Kirsty Lang talks to American writer AM Homes
AM Homes won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013 for her novel May We Be Forgiven, beating off stellar competition from Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson, Barbara…
- Front Row
The County & Little Fires Everywhere; The Archers; Víkingur Ólafsson; poetry to console
For Front Row’s Friday review, the author Patrice Lawrence and film critic Hannah McGill consider two new options to stream. Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste…
- Front Row
Unprecedented: Real Time Theatre from a State of Isolation, Rubaiyat Hossain, Abigail Pogson, Martin Green
Percy Bysshe Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. A new series of short plays written as we entered the lockdown aims to make…
- Front Row
Simon Schama on Rembrandt's The Night Watch, can the performing arts survive coronavirus?
How serious is coronavirus for the survival for the performing arts long term? As a government inquiry begins this week, it’s expected that the performing arts…
- Front Row
Stephen La Rivière, Nancy Kerr, Silas Marner
Many TV programmes are on hold during lockdown, but one production house is creating a multi-character series set on board a spaceship travelling through the…
- Front Row
Tom Sutcliffe talks to playwright and poet Inua Ellams
This evening's Front Row is packed: Tom Sutcliffe talks to a poet, a novelist, a graphic artist, a cultural entrepreneur and a dramatist - but he has only one…
- Front Row
White Lines, Víkingur Ólafsson, How to write a play, Eliza Hittman
The new Netflix thriller White Lines takes the viewer to the sunshine and drug-fuelled world of 90s raves in Ibiza. A Spanish-British production, it stars…
- Front Row
Benjamin Zephaniah
As one of Britain’s best known and loved poets, Benjamin Zephaniah's work has long been featured on the school curriculum. Lately he’s also become a familiar…
- Front Row
Jude Kelly, Emma Thompson, how to write a musical, online art games reviewed
Ten years ago, Jude Kelly founded WOW – the Women of the World foundation – aimed at celebrating women and girls and the challenges they face in society. The…
- Front Row
Alicia Keys, Vanessa Redgrave
Alicia Keys, the 15-time Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, best known for her hit Girl On Fire and her vocal on Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind, discusses…
- Front Row
Will Pound, Future of Television, Royal Albert Hall
BBC Director of Content Charlotte Moore – who oversees the BBC’s TV channels, and Stephen Lambert – producer of hit shows including Gogglebox, consider the…
- Front Row
Jeremy Deller
Jeremy Deller is one of Britain’s most celebrated artists, best known for his works We’re Here Because We’re Here and The Battle of Orgreave. Mostly…
- Front Row
George the Poet, Víkingur Ólafsson, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Pride and Prejudice
Continuing his weekly live performances as Front Row’s Lockdown Artist in Residence, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson performs live from the empty Harpa…
- Front Row
Miranda July, The Fall's Greatest Album? Gemma Bodinetz
Award-winning film-maker, artist, and writer Miranda July is known for making art out of the everyday and overlooked aspects of life. It was her 2005 film…
- Front Row
Film director Alice Wu, writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, the allure of Golden Brown and baritone Peter Brathwaite remakes paintings
Writer and director Alice Wu talks to Samira Ahmed about her new film, The Half of It, a queer love triangle that draws on the Cyrano de Bergerac story. Set in…
- Front Row
Nicola Benedetti, Music Memories, The Tempest
Violinist Nicola Benedetti talks about her new Virtual Benedetti Sessions of free online tuition, and her new album of music by Edward Elgar, including his…
- Front Row
Crafts in lockdown, Víkingur Ólafsson performs Glass, Netflix series Hollywood and Lionel Shriver novel reviewed
Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, Front Row’s Lockdown Artist in Residence, continues his weekly live performances from the empty Harpa Concert Hall in…
- Front Row
Emma Thompson, Damien Chazelle, Film news
Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle discusses The Eddy, his new Netflix musical drama mini-series set in a multi-lingual Paris jazz club, written by Jack…
- Front Row
Singer James Bay, film director Pablo Larraín, tribute to actor Irrfan Khan and new drama by disabled writers
James Bay is a multi-award-winning singer-songwriter and guitarist. He has released two albums, Chaos and the Calm, and Electric Light; for which he has won…
- Front Row
Nmon Ford, Eavan Boland, Kit de Waal, London Mozart Players
Panamanian-American baritone Nmon Ford on fusing house music with opera and the legend of Orfeus to create a unique new work which was set to premiere at…
- Front Row
Randy Newman; song lyrics in Latin; Romeo and Juliet; the NHS on radio and TV
Randy Newman is most widely known as the Oscar winning composer of the Toy Story films and he has won armfuls of Grammys too for his Southern States-inflected…