Front Row

By BBC Radio 4

Society & Culture

What's Front Row about?

Live magazine programme on the worlds of arts, literature, film, media and music

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Theatres in pink, David Pic...

07.03.2020

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 Collins and actor Daniel York Loh make up our Friday Review panel. They’ve watched the ...

Front Row episodes:

07.03.2020 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 Collins and actor Daniel York Loh make up our Friday Review panel. They’ve watched the ...
07.02.2020 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 whose pregnancies are not quite what they seem. Former culture minister ...
07.01.2020 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 project, Family Romance LLC, a fictional film set in Tokyo about a real company that ...
06.30.2020 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 other arts organisations unless the government provides signficant financial support. The state of UK ...
06.29.2020 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 worlds of uber-rich New York and Capri, and is ...
06.26.2020 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 round up the week's big arts stories. The Last of Us ...
06.25.2020 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 the devastating impact on staff and the region, the threat ...
06.24.2020 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 theology. This year the 6 million Norwegian kroner prize (approximately £500,000) has been awarded to ...
06.23.2020 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 along with warnings of 400,000 jobs lost. But does this terrible crisis ...
06.22.2020 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 re-created with actors including Jodie Comer, Sarah Lancashire and Lucian Msamati. Theatre critic Sam Marlowe reviews these ...
06.19.2020 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 wins a big cash prize. The death was announced today of ...
06.18.2020 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 announced today, composer and author Neil Brand explores her unique musical gifts. Scottish ...
06.17.2020 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 with Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson. Pete plays a ...
06.16.2020 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 work of The Harlem Renaissance. A new radio adaptation is ...
06.15.2020 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 Thrive on Solitude, the first time White Cube gallery has mounted an online exhibition. Alison ...
06.12.2020 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 community. Writer Declan Lawn describes how his years as an investigative reporter for Panorama primed him ...
06.11.2020 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 but now the star of these successful sitcoms has stepped behind the ...
06.10.2020 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 drama The Roses of Eyam, about the village that voluntarily put itself into lockdown ...
06.09.2020 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 their fallen squad leader. The writer and director discusses the Netflix film and how ...
06.08.2020 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 story about one young woman’s date rape and her attempt to piece together what happened to ...
06.05.2020 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 Residence. Tonight Víkingur plays his own transcription of J.S Bach’s cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde, BWV 54. ...
06.04.2020 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 unidentified radio signals which is a loving homage to the sci-fi ...
06.03.2020 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 lockdown. Comedian and writer Viv Groskop reviews. The National Museum of African American ...
06.02.2020 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 - joins Front Row to discuss the role of art in response to tragedies such as the death of ...
06.01.2020 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 decades, were denied legal rights, threatened with deportation and some were ...
05.29.2020 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 essay A Room of One’s Own. On the ...
05.28.2020 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 theatres, museums, galleries, independent music venues and concert halls. With such vastly reduced capacity - as ...
05.27.2020 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 has been murdered during a hurricane. There are currently over 300 million John ...
05.26.2020 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 1983, for her sitcom Black-ish. She tells us about her ...
05.25.2020 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 Kingsolver and Zadie Smith. Kirsty Lang has been finding AM's darkly comic novels and ...
05.22.2020 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 Ng’s bestselling novel set in 1997 suburban America and raising questions around class and race, has ...
05.21.2020 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 playwrights the unacknowledged reporters of the coronavirus crisis. Playwright April de Angelis and Jeremy ...
05.20.2020 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 that serve an audience in a confined space, such as theatre, music and dance, ...
05.19.2020 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 farthest reaches of unchartered space, filmed in Supermarionation and in Super-Isolation. Creator Stephen La Rivière ...
05.19.2020 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 guest. Inua Ellams is all of these. This week the National ...
05.15.2020 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 Laura Haddock, Daniel Mays and Angela Griffin. For our Friday Review, Rowan Pelling and Gaylene ...
05.14.2020 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 face on television, not least in Peaky Blinders, set in his home city of ...
05.13.2020 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 former artistic director of London’s Southbank Centre discusses this weekend’s WOW ...
05.12.2020 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 her early years growing up in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, and her success in the ...
05.11.2020 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 effects of the lockdown on the TV landscape, and how it will look in the ...
05.08.2020 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 collaborative, his work spans music, documentaries, posters, installations and historical re-enactments. From convincing a brass ...
05.07.2020 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 concert hall in Reykjavik. Tonight Víkingur will play The Arts and the Hours by Rameau, an interlude from ...
05.06.2020 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, You, Me and Everything We Know, that brought her to public attention. As a ...
05.05.2020 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 small town America, the film explores the Asian American ...
05.04.2020 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 violin concerto. A new BBC initiative - Music Memories - has been launched to help ...
05.01.2020 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 Reykjavik. Tonight he plays an energetic piece by the American minimalist composer Philip Glass, Etude No.9. What has ...
04.30.2020 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 Thorne. Dame Emma Thompson reads one of her favourite poems and discusses her new short film Extinction, ...
04.29.2020 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 multiple Brits and been nominated for three Grammys. He was recording his third album when ...
04.28.2020 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 London’s Young Vic last week. Sinéad Gleeson pays tribute to the great Irish ...
04.27.2020 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 music. His latest release, ‘Stay Away’, is a charity single to raise ...

Older episodes

Front Row

What's Front Row about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Front Row episodes:

Theatres in pink, David Pickard on the BBC Proms, Friday Review on Hamilton, Decolonising arts curriculum in school

The Secrets She Keeps, Fyzal Boulifa, Urdu poetry in Bradford

Director Werner Herzog, actor Danny Sapani, Watford bookclub

The Arts in Crisis

Kevin Kwan, Annilese Miskimmon of ENO, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

Michael Palin, The Last of Us Part II reviewed, Anthony Thwaite, Rethink - Nicola Triscott, Roadmap to Reopening Theatres

Crisis in theatre, Stuart Evers new novel, Eurovision the film, Bristol’s Colston statue

Griselda Pollock

Rethink The Arts

Talking Heads, Jarvis Cocker, Thomas Clay

Rebel Wilson, Ian Holm remembered, Bob Dylan, The Luminaries

Vera Lynn remembered, guitarist Sean Shibe, PlacePrints audio plays reviewed, Poetry from Alison Brackenbury

Judd Apatow, Carnegie and Greenaway Medals for children's literature, job losses in theatre, Alison Brackenbury

Jean Toomer's Cane adapted, Bloomsday, Alison Brackenbury, Museums in lockdown

Tracey Emin, Alison Brackenbury, Book Covers

The Salisbury Poisonings, Víkingur Ólafsson, Walter Scott Prize, Pilgrims

Simon Bird, Whiteness, Ruth Patterson, Tony Walsh

Robert Lindsay, Tony Hall, How to make a new musical

Spike Lee; Hope Mirrlees' Paris - A Poem; and are we being more creative in lockdown?

Michaela Coel, The Comedy Women in Print Prize, Bristol's Colston statue

Víkingur Ólafsson, David Greig, El Presidente, Inclusive publishing

Andrew Patterson, Writing about Race, Mark Damazer Chair of Booker Prize Foundation

David Tennant and Michael Sheen in Staged, Ethiopian poetry, Talking About Race

Carrie Mae Weems, Liz Lochhead, How will museums reflect the pandemic

Sitting in Limbo, Joanna Briscoe, Christo, The Uncertain Kingdom

Indira Varma, Víkingur Ólafsson, Snowpiercer and The Lockdown Plays reviewed, DJ Mr Switch, Tom Morris

Can arts venues survive social distancing?

John Grisham, re-opening of museums and galleries, the best of theatre online

Tracee Ellis Ross, Walter Iuzzolino, Southbank Centre

Kirsty Lang talks to American writer AM Homes

The County & Little Fires Everywhere; The Archers; Víkingur Ólafsson; poetry to console

Unprecedented: Real Time Theatre from a State of Isolation, Rubaiyat Hossain, Abigail Pogson, Martin Green

Simon Schama on Rembrandt's The Night Watch, can the performing arts survive coronavirus?

Stephen La Rivière, Nancy Kerr, Silas Marner

Tom Sutcliffe talks to playwright and poet Inua Ellams

White Lines, Víkingur Ólafsson, How to write a play, Eliza Hittman

Benjamin Zephaniah

Jude Kelly, Emma Thompson, how to write a musical, online art games reviewed

Alicia Keys, Vanessa Redgrave

Will Pound, Future of Television, Royal Albert Hall

Jeremy Deller

George the Poet, Víkingur Ólafsson, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Pride and Prejudice

Miranda July, The Fall's Greatest Album? Gemma Bodinetz

Film director Alice Wu, writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, the allure of Golden Brown and baritone Peter Brathwaite remakes paintings

Nicola Benedetti, Music Memories, The Tempest

Crafts in lockdown, Víkingur Ólafsson performs Glass, Netflix series Hollywood and Lionel Shriver novel reviewed

Emma Thompson, Damien Chazelle, Film news

Singer James Bay, film director Pablo Larraín, tribute to actor Irrfan Khan and new drama by disabled writers

Nmon Ford, Eavan Boland, Kit de Waal, London Mozart Players

Randy Newman; song lyrics in Latin; Romeo and Juliet; the NHS on radio and TV

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