Front Row

Front Row celebrates some of the art that brightened a dark year.

British violinist Tasmin Little has hung up her violin and retired from the concert stage in 2020. It’s the last night of the last year of her performing career - she looks back, and says goodbye to the year in style.

Satirist Craig Brown won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction this year for his Beatles book, One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time.

Rochenda Sandall has been praised for powerful performances in the lockdown Talking Heads which then went briefly on stage at the Bridge in London, and as activist Barbara Beese in Small Axe - Mangrove.

And cultural commentator Elle Osili-Wood joins John in the Front Row studio to look back at some of the year's highlights.

Presenter: John Wilson

The family you choose, rather than the family you’re born into, is fertile territory for writers. From Henry V, to The Lord of the Rings, to Josie and the Pussycats, family dynamics between those who start as strangers keep storytelling going. Playwright Temi Wilkey and screenwriter Sarah Dollard join Samira to talk about the enduring and endearing nature of the chosen family story.

Inspired by real events, BBC One’s New Years Day drama The Serpent tells the story of how the conman and murderer Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim) was brought to justice. Posing as a gem dealer, Sobhraj and his girlfriend Marie-Andrée Leclerc (Jenna Coleman) travelled across Thailand, Nepal and India in 1975 and 1976, carrying out a spree of crimes on the Asian ‘Hippie Trail’ until Herman Knippenberg (Billy Howle), a junior diplomat at the Dutch Embassy in Bangkok, unwittingly walks into his intricate web of crime. Samira Ahmed talks to the director of The Serpent Tom Shankland.

Percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie is the first full time solo percussionist. A career built in part by expanding the percussion repertoire by more than 200 pieces created alongside major composers, orchestras and musicians. In January she’s releasing two new albums. She talks to Samira about working with composers, listening in Lockdown, and demonstrates some of her over 2000 instruments.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

The pianist Lang Lang this year released his first recording of Bach's 1741 keyboard masterpiece, Goldberg Variations, feeling he was finally ready to do so 20 years into his own musical career.

At the piano from a studio near his home in Beijing, Lang Lang discusses the work originally written for harpsichord, what a challenge it presents for a performer, and why he chose to release two versions of the 31 works, - one recorded in one take in St Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany - Bach’s workplace for almost 30 years and where the composer is buried - and the second a studio version recorded shortly afterwards.

Presenter Kirsty Lang

The pandemic is having a profound impact on the arts. But you don't need to go anywhere, involve other people or need many materials, to write or read poetry, and during the lockdown people have turned to verse. In an extended edition of Front Row devoted to poetry Samira Ahmed hears from the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, about his recent writing life - composing lyrics for Huddersfield Choral Society. Vanessa Kisuule, City Poet of Bristol, talks about her collaboration with the Old Vic and local groups, creating modern work inspired by medieval mystery plays. Em Power, three times Foyle Poet of the Year winner, reveals how poetry is a communal art. And they all read their work.

Even before the lockdown there was a surge in sales of poetry books, driven by the internet. Anthony Anaxagorou and Vanessa Kisuule chart their journeys as poets via YouTube to the printed page.

They discuss poetry addressing politics - Kisuule's poem on the toppling of the Colston statue went viral - and poets' engagement with the environment. Armitage launched the Laurel Prize to encourage this. In March Daphne Astor started the Hazel Press whose books about the natural world are created from it using local recycled paper, printed with vegetable inks. Anna Selby writes poems about the underwater world - while underwater.

The prospect of inoculation against Covid gave rise to'vaccination nationalism'. When Edward Jenner pioneered smallpox vaccination in 1796 he was determined his discovery would benefit people around the globe. Several poets, including Robert Southey, wrote poems in his honour. Front Row has commissioned Anthony Anaxagorou to do the same for the developers of the Covid vaccine, and he reads his new poem.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Tim Minchin, the Australian stage performer with unkempt long hair and black mascara eyes, looks back over his career since his early days trying to scrape a living in Perth and Melbourne.

As he releases his first ever solo album Apart Together at the age of 45, he reflects on his early struggle to make a living through music, the success of his stage performances with a full orchestra, the RSC's Matilda the Musical for which he composed the score and wrote the lyrics, getting burned in Hollywood, writing, directing and starring in his TV drama series Upright, and his unsettling return to his homeland after four years in Los Angeles.

Presenter Tom Sutcliffe

Black Mirror creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones discuss their new Netflix mocumentary Death to 2020, a documentary-style film that tells the story of the year we’ll be glad to put behind us, featuring fictitious figures played by the likes of Hugh Grant, Samuel L Jackson and Tracey Ullman.

Opera diva, drag artist and cabaret turn Le Gateau Chocolat concludes our increasingly wistful festive series on the best parties on screen with an ode to the don of the movie party, Baz Luhrmann.

John talks to Neil Gaiman about his latest Radio 4 drama adaptation, The Sleeper and the Spindle, a Christmas-time fairy tale brought to life by award-winning dramatist Katie Hims. Starring Penelope Wilton, Gwendoline Christie and Ralph Ineson as well as Neil Gaiman himself, it's a new tale drawing on traditional folk stories, interweaving Snow White and Sleeping Beauty in an enchanting drama that puts the women firmly centre stage.

In September Radio 3 challenged listeners to compose a tune for the poem ‘Christmas Carol’ by Paul Laurence Dunbar. More than a thousand people entered. Tthe judges whittled these down to a shortlist of six, listeners voted and the winner is James Walton. We’ll hear his carol, sung by the BBC Singers, and reveal more about Paul Laurence Dunbar, the pioneering black American writer who wrote the lyrics.

Presenter: John Wilson

Image: Tracey Ullman (QUEEN ELIZABETH II) in Death to 2020

Mackenzie Crook talks about Saucy Nancy, the latest episode in his festive revivals of the children’s TV series Worzel Gummidge, which originally aired in the late 1970s. Saucy Nancy sees the children visit a scrapyard, where they meet Worzel's old friend Saucy Nancy. She's a carved ship’s figurehead, and wants their help to get back to the sea.

As tensions run high in houses all over the country where people are cooped up over the Christmas period, writer and board gamer Natasha Hodgson reveals the world of cooperative board games: games where the players work together towards a goal, rather than trying to crush or bankrupt your dear mum. With many titles and styles to choose from, are the days of shouting over the Monopoly board over?

In May, comedian Janey Godley was one of the Scottish actors and writers who took part in the National Theatre of Scotland’s project Scenes for Survival. Janey’s video short featured her as a character called Betty whose difficult relationship with her husband came to a head under Lockdown. It was one of the most viewed in the series and led to a follow-up. Now for Christmas and New Year, Janey revisits Betty.

As festive party season is well and truly cancelled this year, Front Row is celebrating the best parties in culture. Today it’s Vice’s Zing Tsjeng on Euphoria and the dark side of teen parties.

Main image: Mackenzie Crook as Worzel Gummidge

Creator Chris van Dusen on Bridgerton, Netflix’s new drama series set in Regency England, about the daughter of a powerful family as she makes her debut onto London’s competitive marriage market.

Award-winning novelist Rachel Joyce has created “Christmas by the Lake”, a new drama for BBC Radio 4. It’s a story with a twist on the Christmas theme and it's classic Rachel Joyce territory: relationships, loss and ordinary people doing extraordinary things. She joins Nick to talk about those chance encounters, and why Christmas is a perfect time for stories.

While many of our concert halls, theatres, galleries and museums have been empty for much of 2020, dedicated teams take centre stage to make sure venues are ready for the public’s return through various stages of lockdown. Kieron Lillis Head of Facilities at the National Theatre in London and Jessica Yung Visitor Assistant at the World Museum in Liverpool give Nick a behind the scenes look at their empty buildings and talk about the vital role of those who take care of them for us during one of the most challenging periods in our nation’s cultural history.

Presenter: Nick Ahad

Image: Regé-Jean Page (SIMON BASSET) and Phoebe Dynevor (DAPHNE BRIDGERTON) in Bridgerton

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

Director George C. Wolfe on his new film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, in which Viola Davis stars as the legendary “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey, alongside the late Chadwick Boseman, in his final role. It’s adapted from August Wilson’s play which is part of his ten play cycle chronicling African American experience in the 20th Century.

Pianist Winifred Atwell was the first Black British artist to reach number 1 in the UK charts. She had a string of hits throughout the 50s and is still the only woman to have an instrumental International Number 1. On the day a new plaque is revealed at the site of the hair salon she founded in Brixton, we talk to music journalist and academic Jacqueline Springer about her legacy and influence.

Secret Country is the new digital theatre show from Re-Live, a company who specialise in Life Story theatre work and who are based in Cardiff. Their new show is created and performed by a nine-strong company aged from 72 to 93, and is a candid, raucous and hopeful look at what life in lockdown has meant for our elderly community. Front Row hears from Karin Diamond, artistic director of Re-Live, and participant Terri Morrow.

Kevin Costner won a heap of Oscars for his 1990 directorial debut Dances With Wolves including one for his direction. He now stars in Let Him Go, the story of a couple in their 60s who have to rescue their former daughter in law from the poisonous embrace of a violent new relationship. Playwright Daniel Ward and poet Laura Horton review the film and talk about the week's news in culture.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

Main image: Viola Davis in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom