Front Row

What will happen with music festivals this year? For Front Row, DJ Emily Dust talks to some of those involved.

Keeley Hawes is one of the most in-demand British actors for TV and film, with exceptional performances in a wide variety of roles. Coming soon for UK viewers there’ll be ITV’s dark comedy Finding Alice; To Olivia – a film about Roald Dahl’s complicated relationship with his wife Patricia Neal; and Russell T Davies’ series for Channel 4, It’s A Sin. She tells Front Row about filming in lockdown, how she chooses her work and about playing an unsympathetic character

WandaVision, the first in a massive slate of high-budget new streaming series set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe takes two of the Avengers - Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) - and plants them in a retro sitcom universe, complete with laugh track. Leila Latif scrutinises this first offering in a new era for mainstream entertainment. In a universe far, far away from that, Gen-Zers on TikTok have discovered the sea shanty in a big way. Music journalist Tom Service explains where the shanty comes from and what it might be doing for us in 2021. And Leila and Tom give their cultural picks.

Presenter: John Wilson

Stardust is the new film about David Bowie’s promotional tour of the United States in 1971 during which he began to develop the concept of Ziggy Stardust. Bowie is played by musician and actor Johnny Flynn and the film has already attracted attention as they were unable to secure the rights to Bowie’s songs. Writer and Bowie fan Mark Billingham reviews.

A vivid 45,500 year old painting of a warty pig, discovered on a cave wall in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is the oldest representational art in the world. What does the striking work tell us about the value of art to the civilisation that created it. With archeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes.

Novelist Jenni Fagan talks about her latest book, Luckenbooth. It opens as the devil's daughter rows to Edinburgh in a coffin to work as maid for the Minister of Culture, a man who lives a dual life. But the real reason she's there is to bear him and his barren wife a child, the consequences of which curse the tenement building that is their home for a hundred years.

How are students whose arts subjects at university or college require them to undertake in-person tuition adapting to the third lockdown? Callum Bruce, a second year musical theatre student at Trinity Laban in London, and Mary Johnson, third year percussion student at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, discuss how the pandemic has affected their studies.

Presenter: John Wilson

As RuPaul’s Drag Race UK returns for a second season and the US series welcomes its first trans man as a competitor, are the ironically gendered boundaries of drag breaking down and what about the other side of drag - the kings? Drag kings Don One and Jodie Mitchell, better known as John Travulva, join Samira to talk about the world of Kings.

Courttia Newland’s new novel A River Called Time has been 18 years in the making and imagines a city a little like London in a world in which colonialism and slavery never happened. The writer discusses imagination, speculative fiction and class – and his co-scripting with Steve McQueen for two of the Small Axe films - Lovers Rock and Red, White and Blue.

You’re back in lockdown, it’s bitterly cold outside and the nights are long and dark. You could order a sad lamp online and hope for the best, or you can lean into it with writer Eleanor Penny’s round up of podcasts for this bleak midwinter. Creepy, desolate, bleak - but gripping and thrilling too. Recommendations include The Sink, The Orbiting Human Circus, and Victoriocity.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Main image above: Drag King John Travulva

Oscar winning actress Regina King tells Kirsty about her debut film as a director, One Night in Miami, inspired by the real-life meeting between Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown on the night that Ali (then still called Cassius Clay) defeated Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight World Champion title.

Europe's first classical music station especially for children was launched yesterday. Fun Kids Classical will play music by composers including Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saens and Grieg; with performances from young artists such as cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, saxophonist Jess Gillam and violinist Jennifer Pike. The pianist Lang Lang, whose International Music Foundation encourages children to engage with music, is the new station's Ambassador. Matt Deegan, Fun Kids Classical's station, manager talks to Kirsty Lang about the need for such a radio station, and his ambitions for it.

This year sees the 100th anniversary of the creation of Northern Ireland. Although the region is synonymous with the poetry of Seamus Heaney or the plays of Brian Friel, its recent literary reputation has tended to languor in the shadow of its southern neighbour. But today, as issues connected to Brexit and the status of the border with the EU have Northern Ireland back in the news, there is also cohort of younger writers from the region demanding attention. Kirsty talks to novelist Jan Carson, who has a new series of short stories, The Last Resort, serialised on Radio 4 alongside memoirist Darran Anderson, whose new book Inventory, is published next month, about what makes the region such a rich setting for fiction and nonfiction now.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

Ben Okri published his poem 'Grenfell Tower, June 2017' in the Financial Times a few days after the inferno. On Channel 4's Facebook page it was played more than 6 million times. This is but one of his poems written in response to current events, politics and people, gathered in his new book, A Fire in my Head: Poems for the Dawn. Okri considers the poet's role to be the town crier, and there are poems about that other fire, at Notre Dame, Barack Obama and the Covid pandemic. But, as he tells Samira Ahmed, his collection also includes the personal, love poems and a tender evocation of a new-born's encounter with life, and the wonder of the world.

A new miniseries, The Pembrokeshire Murders, starts soon on ITV. It tells the real story of the investigation by Dyfed Powys Police into 2 decades-old previously-unsolved fatal shootings, using advances in forensic science to find microscopic clues that were previously invisible to them. We speak to the writer for the series – Nick Stephens – about writing a gripping story when the outcome is already known.

Composer, broadcaster and cross bench member of the House of Lords Michael Berkeley is tabling a question to ministers about the issue affecting UK musicians who will no longer be able to viably tour Europe as a result of the recent Brexit deal. He tells Samira about his concerns in light of reports over the weekend that a reciprocal arrangement was offered the British government but was refused.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Main image: Ben Okri

Five years ago, on 10th Jan 2016, David Bowie died, just two days after his 69th birthday. To mark the anniversary, we revisit John Wilson's 2002 interview with him, recorded in New York. Two composers – Hannah Peel and Neil Brand – will also be discussing Bowie’s music and considering its legacy and influence.

Ingrid Persaud has won the First Novel category in the Costa Book Awards 2020 for Love After Love. The author discusses her tale of a mother, her son and their lodger in Trinidad, each living with the burden of a secret they don’t want revealed.

For our Friday Review, writer and journalist Kohinoor Sahota and Isabel Stevens of Sight and Sound give their view of Pieces of a Woman (Netflix). It’s a film that has already won praise for its powerful and realistic first half hour in which Vanessa Kirby plays a woman going through labour and giving birth. They’ll also consider some of the cultural stories of the week and tell us what they’ve been reading and watching.

Presenter: John Wilson

Main image: David Bowie

Pa Salieu, the Gambian-British artist from Coventry, has been named as the winner of the BBC Sound of 2021. His single Frontline was the most played track on BBC Radio 1Xtra in 2020. In 2019 he was shot in the head, but recovered to release his debut mixtape Send Them To Coventry at the end of 2020 and now picks up one of the biggest accolades in new music.

On the fifth anniversary of Walter Presents, the global streaming service dedicated to showcasing award winning foreign language drama, the platform is launching its first ever dramas from Finland, All The Sins and Bullets. Whilst BBC 4 is launching its first ever Finnish drama, the 6 part drama series Man in Room 301. Walter Iuzzolino, curator of Walter Presents, and best selling Finnish crime writer Antti Tuomainen talk to Kirsty Lang about what makes Finnish drama distinctive and why we should be watching.

Natasha Farrant, The Costa Award Children' s category winner, talks about her book Voyage of the Sparrowhawk which, with 12 year old Ben and Lotti becoming friends as they outwit a wicked uncle, a police chase, dogs and a perilous sea crossing in search of people they love, has just about everything a fast-paced adventure story requires.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

On 28th September 1985 Lee Lawrence’s mother Cherry Groce was shot by police during an armed raid on her Brixton home. Lee Lawrence talks to Samira Ahmed about his Costa Biography award winning memoir The Louder I will Sing in which he recounts the devastating impact the shooting had on the family’s life and his courageous fight for justice.

As British musicians warn that costly post-Brexit bureaucracy could decimate European touring, we discuss the potential impact of the recent Brexit Trade Deal on the music industry. With Deborah Annetts from the Incorporated Society of Musicians, Mark Pemberton from the Association of British Orchestras and conductor Paul McCreesh, founder of the Grammy award-winning baroque ensemble, the Gabrieli Consort.

Actor Robert Baddeley, a member of David Garrick’s company at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, created a tradition when he died in 1794. In his will, he left £100 to be invested and each year, the money from that sum be spent on “the purchase of a twelfth Cake or Cakes and Wine and Punch or both of them which it is my request the Ladies and Gentlemen performers of Theatre Royal Drury Lane will do me the favour to accept on twelfth night in every year in the Green Room”. Ever since the company playing has enjoyed Baddeley's largesse on January 6th. Theatre stage manager and author Nicholas Bromley joins us to reveal one of the longest standing British Theatre traditions.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

The Great, a new ahistorical comedy from The Favourite writer Tony McNamara arrives on Channel 4 this month. Describing itself as “an occasionally true story”, it is a satirical drama about the rise of Catherine the Great, staring Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult. McNamara talks period dramas, historical inaccuracies and contemporary characters.

The great Irish poet Eavan Boland has just posthumously won the Costa Poetry Prize. Boland's collection The Historians continues her reflections on the power of history and memory, of secrets and hidden histories, and of centring women’s stories. Tom is joined by Jody Allen Randolph, a friend and leading scholar of Eavan’s work, and actress Niamh Cusack reads from the collection.

The genre that helped define American music and describe the Black American experience is the subject of a new series of album releases which trace the genesis of blues, ragtime, hokum and gospel from the mid-1920s. Matchbox Bluesmaster Series claims to be the most comprehensive survey of the origins of Black American blues music - Kevin Le Gendre assesses the success of its first instalment.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Suzannah Lipscomb, Chair of Judges for the Costa Book Awards 2020, joins us to reveal exclusively the winners in each of category: Novel, Children’s, Poetry, Biography and Debut Novel. This is followed by an interview with the winner of the Best Novel category.

Dante Alighieri wrote The Divine Comedy 7 centuries ago but - like all great literature – it still speaks to us in today’s world. Katya Adler, the BBC's Europe Editor and lover of all things Italian is a fan of the epic poem and has made a 3 part series for Radio 4. She discusses what she's set out ot explore and who she's done that with.

Presenter: John Wilson