Front Row

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 Radio 3 by Peter Barnes but never broadcast, is now available online as part of Barnes' People, a collection of the writer's monologues, produced by Original Theatre Company. It imagines the story of a long-serving footman at Buckingham Palace. We talk to actor Adrian Scarborough about the role and why it wasn't broadcast at the time.

We mark the passing of the much loved actor of stage and screen Ronald Pickup. Praised as a great character actor, he also played many lead roles. He found global fame with The Crown and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel following a prolific and acclaimed career. Theatre critic Michael Billington discusses Pickup’s career and interrogates the label of character actor.

Joanna Pocock is the winner of the Arts Foundation Futures Award for Environmental Writing. Her book Surrender is a long-form essay blending reportage, memoir, and nature writing focusing on the ecological crisis in the American West and beyond. Joanna discusses the future of environmental writing in an environment with an uncertain future.

And another Moment of Pleasure as Max Liu celebrates a scene from Annie Baker's play The Flick, an homage to the power of celluloid and the cinema.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

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 more industrious than ever in lockdown and how they hope their fans will experience their art online.

First staged in 2019, Typical is a play based on the true-life story of the last night of Christopher Alder, a 37-year-old Black father of two, computer trainee and former paratrooper. That night out in Hull in 1998 would end with his death in police custody. Playwright Ryan Calais Cameron joins Front Row to talk about the Soho Theatre streaming of his play, a one man show performed by Richard Blackwood and co-produced by Nouveau Riche.

In today’s #FrontRowGetCreative challenge Painter Jadé Fadojutimi gives us her advice on how to start turning an idea into a piece of art. It can be a new idea, or one you’ve had for a while, the important thing is to get yourself into a space where you can start to make something creative. Jadé invites us into her studio at 1:30 in the morning and shows us how she starts a painting.

And we reflect on the life of renowned art detective Charley Hill whose investigative work led to the recovery of one of the world's most iconic paintings Edvard Munch's The Scream, stolen in Oslo in 1984. Charley Hill died earlier this week aged 73.

Presenter: John Wilson

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 such as cinemas and soft play areas, whilst commercial galleries, public libraries, community centres and gyms are allowed to open from 12 April. Sharon Heal, director of the Museums Association talks to Samira Ahmed about the impact the continued classification of museums as "indoor entertainment venues" will have on the sector and whether there might be a shift on behalf of the government.

Folk musician Sam Lee has collaborated with English Heritage on a project called Songs of England, a series of online films of sites from Stonehenge and Tintagel to Hadrian’s Wall and Whitby Abbey accompanied by traditional folksongs performed by members of Sam’s Nest Collective. He talks about the connection between music and location and sings John Barleycorn especially for Front Row. Sam also tells Samira about his fascination with the nightingale which he has turned into a compendium of ornithology, verse, legends and illustration and his plans for open-air concerts where nightingales will sing with the musicians.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

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 bombastic full-figured 80s sound that characterised Total Eclipse of the Heart and some of her other greatest hits. At the age of 69, does the rock veteran feel like the best is yet to come?

Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden summoned 25 heads of England's Museums and heritage organisations to a summit today to discuss the issue of contested history and the government policy of "retain and explain". Duncan Wilson, Chief Exec of Historic England, reports on the meeting.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

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 associated with poets and singers.

As Nick, a prequel to The Great Gatsby is published, we speak to it's author Michael Farris Smith on why the rather retiring character Nick Carraway deserved a backstory and Professor of Literature Diane Roberts joins to discuss the appeal of the genre.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Main Image: Huw Stephens holding a painting by Richard Wilson called Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle.

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 novel Diary of a Film his cinematic knowledge is filtered through the lens of creative anxiety, queer desire, and European city walking. In it, an auteur and his lead actors arrive at a prestigious film festival to premiere his latest film. Alone one morning at a backstreet cafe, he strikes up a conversation with a local woman who takes him on a walk to uncover the city's secrets, historic and personal. A story of love and tragedy emerges, and he begins to see the chance meeting as fate.

Every year the Arts Foundation makes awards of £10,000 to assist artists with living and working costs - helping them to carry on creating. All five of the 2021 winners are talking about their work on Front Row. The fourth is John Barber, Arts Foundation Fellow for Choral Composition. He tells John Wilson about the range of his music making, from a retelling of the Persephone myth for 1500 voices, 10 years running Woven Gold, a choir made up of refugees and asylum seekers and professional musicians, to pieces for small choirs such at The Sixteen. So much choral music is rooted in religious texts and liturgy. But Barber is not religious and he explains his concern with composing music for voices from a secular perspective.

Presenter: John Wilson

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 Brennan presents our latest #FrontRowGetCreative challenge: today it's "blind drawing", which invites us to take a more intimate view of a person or object. You'll need the help of someone you're bubbling with, or you could draw a pet or object.

We pay tribute to the artist Victor Ambrus, who has died at the age of 85. A refugee from Hungary, Ambrus became known for his illustrations of children's books - folktales, history and animal stories - and for his appearances on the TV show Time Team. His powerful images of battles were influenced by his own experience of the Hungarian Uprising.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

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 collection The Oscillations, exploring distance and isolation in the age of the pandemic, refracted through the lenses of neurodiversity and trauma in poems that are bold, funny and open-hearted in their self-discoveries.

Artistic Director of Bristol Old Vic Tom Morris and Matt Hemley from The Stage discuss the viability of touring UK stage shows in Europe post Brexit as the National Theatre announce today that their planned European tour of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time will not go ahead.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

Main image: The K-pop girl group BlackPink on stage

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 novelist Shalom Auslander talks to Tom about his latest novel, Mother for Dinner. Seventh Seltzer is a Cannibal-American who has done everything he can to break from his past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother's last moments he is drawn back into the life he left behind. At her deathbed, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: Eat me. The book explores ideas of legacy, assimilation, the things we owe our families, and the things we owe ourselves.

As the National Gallery in London announces plans for its 200th anniversary in 2024, we discuss how museums and galleries might be different in a post pandemic future. With National Gallery Director Gabriele Finaldi and David Anderson, Director of the National Museums of Wales.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

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 dance to chart the developing bond between these men. The play that begins streaming live from the Almeida Theatre this week.

What do you remember of The Silence of the Lambs? It was released 30 years ago yesterday - on St Valentine's Day. The critic Michael Carlson looks back at this horror classic which uses elements of the rom-com genre, and argues we are wrong to think Lecter is the central figure. Clarice Starling, the FBI trainee, played by Jodie Foster, is the focus, and the film plays out from her perspective.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Main image above: Adrian Lester as Gil in Hymn