Front Row

Diana Rigg has died aged 82. Her breakthrough role was as Mrs Emma Peel in The Avengers, going on to have a distinguished career across film, theatre and television with roles including as a Bond Girl in Her Majesty's Secret Service, Lady Macbeth at the National Theatre and Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. Charles Dance remembers the actress alongside Mark Gatiss who wrote an episode of Doctor Who for Diana especially.

On the line from Beijing, Chinese pianist Lang Lang discusses his new recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the culmination of a 20-year musical journey for the musician. One version was recorded in the studio, the other in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, where Bach worked and is buried.

Cinemas have faced huge disruption through this pandemic - closing and now re-opening, so how have film distributors managed to get their movies seen? Kirsty asks film producer Julie Baines and Hamish Moseley of the independent distributor Altitude whether the altered landscape of the cinema industry is here for good.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

Tonight the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction is announced at a special virtual ceremony – the judgement delayed because of Covid 19. We talk to the winner live on air.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Andrew Lloyd Webber told MPs today that the arts are at the "point of no return". Also speaking to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee was Rebecca Kane Burton, chief exec of LW Theatres, who joins us to discuss the crisis, and Lucy Noble, chief exec of the Royal Albert Hall. Will performing venues be saved by the government's recently announced Operation Sleeping Beauty?

Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel, Mayflies, is the story of two young friends in a small Scottish town who spend the summer of 1986 escaping from the world of their fathers and into the freedom of a magical weekend in Manchester. Thirty years after that, one calls the other with devastating news. O’Hagan talks about how the novel was inspired by the joy and sadness of a real-life friendship.

A Christopher Hampton adaptation of J G Farrell’s 1978 novel The Singapore Grip starts on Sunday on ITV, starring David Morrissey, Jane Horrocks, Charles Dance and Luke Treadaway. Set in the Second World War it tells of the fortunes of a family of rich rubber planters in the months before and during the Japanese invasion of Singapore. Actor and writer Daniel York Loh reviews.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

The Venice Film Festival is currently underway, featuring films we’ll be seeing on our screens over the coming months. Jason Solomons is just back from the city and discusses the films to look out for and which to avoid!

In light of some of the critical reaction to Christopher Nolan's new film Tenet, which found the film to be confusing and difficult to follow, we ask how much do you have to understand a work of art, be it a film, a complex poem, a piece of atonal music to enjoy enjoy it? Novelist Louise Doughty, music scholar and critic Alexandra Coghlan and film critic Jason Solomons discuss.

When Benjamin Grosvenor first played at The Proms in 2011, he was just 19 and the youngest musician to give a solo recital. On Wednesday he’ll be back at London’s Royal Albert Hall performing Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #1 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra but under Covid 19 restrictions – a socially distanced orchestra and without an audience. Benjamin talks to Front Row about taking a break from the piano under lockdown, setting up his own music festival in Bromley, South London, Shostakovich and the thrill of playing live.

Presenter: John Wilson

The much-loved story of the Chinese warrior Mulan is the latest Disney animation to get a live-action remake. Its less a direct remake of the 1998 original and more a retelling of the Chinese folk legend of Hua Mulan with an all-Asian cast. There have been changes - no cute animated dragon or songs - are we going to love it as much? Find out with critic Gavia Baker Whitelaw.

Lorna Sage was a much admired literary critic but it was her memoir Bad Blood that made her a household name. Bad Blood examines Lorna’s childhood and adolescence in a small Welsh border town and is an exploration of thwarted desires, marital disappointment and the search for freedom from the limits and smallness of family life. The critic Frances Wilson has written an introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition and discusses the legacy of what is one of the most critically acclaimed memoirs ever written - vividly bringing to life Lorna’s dissolute but charismatic vicar grandfather, her embittered grandmother and her domestically inept mother.

Hull’s annual Freedom Festival begins this weekend. Its an event rooted in the legacy of the Hull-born anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce and usually brings thousands onto the streets to celebrate. This year due to Covid 19, its moving online, but its keeping its strong commitment to “art that helps build a stronger and fairer society”, fuelled by current affairs from Black Lives Matter to the virus itself. But if artists have a political aim, does that affect the quality of the art? Should Art be valued for its political engagement even if we don’t rate the artwork itself? We'll be debating these questions with the director of the Design Museum Tim Marlow, Jazz saxophonist Soweto Kinch and artist Davina Drummond, part of the duo Yara and Davina.

Across the country independent music venues are in serious crisis. They’re having to keep their doors closed - in spite of a cash injection of £3.36m from the government’s Cultural Recovery Fund - because they simply don’t have the room to operate within social distancing guidelines. Passport: Back to Our Roots is a campaign that aims to raise money for these stricken venues by asking some of the UK’s biggest bands to commit to playing small local gigs. All fans have to do is make a minimum £5 donation to be entered into a prize draw to see these artists, should the gigs go ahead. We find out more from Ash drummer Rick McMurray and campaign co-founder Sally Cook.

Presenter Katie Popperwell

As major City firms and the likes of Facebook and Google allow their employees to work from home for the foreseeable future, does it herald the end of the office as we know it? And what does it mean for culture? From Working Girl to The Office, The Bell Jar to Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came To An End, the office has provided rich inspiration for the arts. We discuss the history of the office in culture and contemplate what comes next with writer Jonathan Lee and film and TV critic Hannah McGill.

The Orwell Prize-winning writer and teacher Kate Clanchy has spent years with young people helping them to become poets. Some of her students are from migrant or refugee families and have brought with them rich poetic traditions; some from home backgrounds that haven’t traditionally seen poetry as a world open to them. Now she has written a book, How to Grow Your Own Poem, which details the way that she uses existing poems and her students’ lived experience to teach – a method that she believes anyone can follow to write their own poem.

The start of September would always be a busy time for new books, jostling for attention in the run up to the lucrative Christmas buying period. But lockdown saw many publishers freeze releases from March onwards. And today the floodgates were opened meaning the launch of an unprecedented 590 hardbacks, 28% up on last year. To explore what this means for writers, publishers and consumers Samira is joined by Thea Lenarduzzi, commissioning editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and Kit Caless co-founder and editor at independent publisher Influx Press.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Bernardine Evaristo on Girl, Woman, Other - shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize For Fiction. As Front Row continues our interviews with writers on the shortlist, the author talks to us about her Booker prize winning novel which follows 12 characters, most of them black British women, on an entwined journey of discovery.

Ginette Vincendeau reviews Les Misérables, the French entry for the 2019 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Its director, Ladj Ly was raised in Les Bosquets, a febrile housing estate in Montfermeil, and documented the 2005 riots there in his film 365 days in Clichy-Montfermeil. Inspired by an act of real police violence Ly witnessed, the film follows the residents of Les Bosquets as tensions between police and local teenagers escalate.

The celebrated sitar player Anoushka Shankar on her BBC Proms performance this Friday for which she’ll be collaborating with many contrasting musicians including electronic artist Gold Panda. She also talks about collaborations on her latest EP, Love Letters, a set of intimate songs influenced by the theme of heartbreak.

Presenter: John Wilson

Main image: Bernadine Evaristo

Gavin & Stacey writer and actor Ruth Jones joins us to discuss her new novel Us Three, which follows the tumultuous friendship of three women over four decades. She shares the inspiration behind the book, how her screenwriting has influenced her novel writing and whether Gavin & Stacey will return to our screens…

As many theatres remain shuttered due to Covid-19, those looking to get their thespian fix may find some consolation n the form of virtual reality. Tender Claws, an independent games studio in LA, has created a live VR performance of The Tempest which can be watched using an Oculus Rift or Quest gaming systems. Each performance is interactive, as eight participants are linked up with a live, remote actor playing the role of Prospero, guiding them through a virtual landscape. Entertainment journalist Elle Osili-Wood joins us to review this blend of theatre and gaming.

In his new book Expert, Roger Kneebone, Professor of Surgical Education at Imperial College London, makes the case for learning a craft and honing skills – a path that means lacemakers and vascular surgeons have more in common than they might think. He explains the value of expertise in the arts and beyond.

Presenter; Tom Sutcliffe

Robert Macfarlane walks into the mountains, along ancient paths and down into caves and potholes. He has written beautiful and popular books about these - Mountains of the Mind, The Old Ways, Underland. He is concerned about the depletion of the natural world, and the language we use to speak of it. Landmarks is a lexicon of landscape and nature. When a new edition of a famous children's dictionary left out several common nature words - bluebell, conker, kingfisher - he wrote a series of poems, spells to bring them back to use, and with the artist Jackie Morris created a book. The Lost Words: A Spell Book found its way into half the primary schools in England, and every one in Scotland, and has had a profound impact on the education of children about nature. He worked with several musicians, who set the spells to create an album.

Macfarlane is also a campaigner: moved by the felling of trees in Sheffield, and the protests against this, he gave a poem for anyone to use in protests. It has been translated into Telegu and used in India, as well as at HS2 demonstrations.

Now Macfarlane is working with the actor and singer Johnny Flynn, writing songs inspired by the oldest known written story, Gilgamesh. In this Gilgamesh takes an axe to a scared cedar grove in the first act of deforestation. In the month when Donald Trump has finalized plans to allow drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, the earliest story, Macfarlane explains, speaks across 4,000 year to us today.

Macfarlane talks to Kirsty Lang about books, collaborations and work in progress. He is deeply concerned about our treatment of the natural world, but his writing is charged with joy and, he explains, he his hopeful.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

British artist Luke Jerram discusses his new work, In Memoriam, a large-scale outdoor installation designed specifically to be presented in large open and windy spaces, constructed from bed sheets flying from tall flagpoles arranged in a 36-metre wide circular formation. It was created as a temporary memorial to honour those we have lost during the Covid-19 pandemic and also in tribute to NHS staff and key workers.

The Lying Life of Adults is the much-anticipated new novel from Elena Ferrante, the author of the quartet of books known as the Neapolitan Novels. It’s familiar ground as we follow a teenage girl and her negotiation of life both with her middle-class parents and on the rougher side of town – but will it satisfy the Ferrante fans? Critic and writer Thea Lenarduzzi reviews

Love in Colour is the name of a collection of fresh and romantic takes on myths from around the world by self-proclaimed "romcomoisseur" and writer Bolu Babalola. She joins Front Row to talk about decolonising traditional tales and why she believes in the power of love.

As Britney Spears continues her legal battle to remove father as her conservator, music journalist Laura Barton explains the latest and considers other examples of parents exerting control over their high-profile offspring.

Jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker would have been 100 years old tomorrow. He died tragically young at the age of 34 but his genius still exerts a powerful influence over popular music today, including bands like Red Hot Chilli Peppers. British alto saxophonist Soweto Kinch is a fan and tells us why Parker is still so important.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed