Front Row

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 guitarist Sean Shibe's critically acclaimed work brings a new approach to the classical guitar by experimenting with instruments and repertoire. His new album Bach: Pour La Luth Ò Cembal, featuring works written for the lute but played on guitar, is number one in the Official Specialist Classical Chart.

PlacePrints is a series of audio plays by David Rudkin invoking the hidden stories imprinted on ten different locations around the UK, and spanning time from the Stone Age to the present day. Jack McNamara, director of theatre company New Perspectives, has been recording these vignettes over four years with actors including Josie Lawrence, Toby Jones, Stephen Rea, Juliet Stevenson and Michael Pennington. Theatre critic Susannah Clapp reviews this ambitious endeavour.

Alison Brackenbury is Front Row’s poet-in-residence this week taking inspiration from her travels around the country. Wherever she goes Alison visits museums and galleries. Their current closure this has inspired her to write new poems about some of the museums she has visited, and so, imaginatively, open them up. Today she takes us back to the 16th century and to Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. Here Mary, Queen of Scots, witnessed her husband murder her secretary, and confronted John Knox who objected to rule by ‘the monstrous regiment of women’.

Presenter: John Wilson

Main image: Dame Vera Lynn

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 young man trying to get his life together after the death of his fire-fighter father.

Today the damage to UK theatre caused by the Coronavirus has really begun to show: major producer Cameron Mackintosh has announced redundancy consultations for staff on blockbuster shows, including Hamilton and Phantom Of The Opera. Additionally, a hundred leading creative figures have signed a letter calling for government action to save the sector. We talk to Matthew Hemley, News Editor of theatre magazine The Stage, about the crisis faced by UK theatre.

We announce the 2020 winners of the CILIP Carnegie Medal for writing for children and the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration for children, and speak to the winners about their work.

Plus Alison Brackenbury, Front Row’s virtual poet-in-residence for the week. She's been inspired by the museums and galleries she visited before lockdown and is sharing a poem a day from her Museums Unlocked series. Today’s is about buried treasure and takes us to Birmingham Museums’ Staffordshire Hoard exhibition, and back to the age of the Anglo-Saxons.

Main image: Pete Davidson in The King of Staten Island

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

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 to be broadcast on Radio 4. We speak to playwright Janice Okoh and score composer, soul singer Carleen Anderson.

Today is Bloomsday, when Dubliners celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses, the novel about Irish newspaper advertising salesman Leopold Bloom wandering round the city. As Ireland is emerging from lockdown events are moving online and for Zoomsday actor Seán Doyle is MC-ing a Joycean Punk Cabaret with an alternative presentation of extracts, songs, poems as well as Joyce’s saucier love letters. Seán joins us from Dublin just before the event begins.

Lockdown came quickly and affected arts organisations around the country with barely any warning. Venues closed their doors and hung up the “closed until further notice” signs. But what’s happening behind the closed doors? We speak to Joanna Meacock from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow and Anna Renton from Penlee House in Penzance.

For one week only Alison Brackenbury is Front Row’s poet in residence. The colsure of museums during Coronavirus has inspired Alison to write new poems about some of those she has visited. Every day this week we will be hearing one of her Museums Unlocked poems. In today’s Alison takes us to Aghanistan via a painting in the Museum of Somerset in Taunton Castle.

Presenter: John Wilson

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 Brackenbury is Front Row's new Lockdown Poet in Residence. She's written a series of poems inspired by the museums throughout the country which have been shut for months. From Taunton to Edinburgh, Alison opens up these museums in her imagination, beginning tonight with a strange meeting in the Handel and Hendrix Museum.

As shops begin to reopen today, bookshops have introduced ‘book quarantine’ bins where books that have been picked up are placed to avoid cross-contamination. So are we now more likely to judge a book by its cover? Designer Jamie Keenan on the secrets behind a good book cover.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

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 to create this drama based on real events, and the resonance of the story with the government's response to the pandemic.

Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, Front Row’s Lockdown Artist in Residence, has been entertaining us each week with a live performance from the empty Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík. For his eleventh and final performance Víkingur plays Debussy’s The Snow is Dancing from the Children’s Corner.

The historian Tom Holland and film critic Hanna Flint give their verdicts on Pilgrims, the latest novel by Matthew Kneale, recounting the journey of a disparate bunch who set off for Rome in 1289. His earlier book English Passengers won the Whitbread Book of the Year. They also watch Banana Split, a high school movie with a difference, starring and co-written by Hannah Marks. It foregrounds the friendship of two teenage girls who’ve gone out with the same boy.

We announce the winner of the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Presenter Tom Sutcliffe

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 cameras to direct his first feature film. Simon joins Front Row to discuss Days of the Bagnold Summer.

The death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minnesota Police has led to worldwide protests and calls for the end of systemic racism. What part can white artists and writers play to illuminate a subject that so many white people find difficult to understand and address? Playwright and performer Professor Eliza Bent, and writer and author Professor Jess Row discuss the subject of Whiteness and how it obscures racism.

Musicians have been deeply affected by the loss of concerts, shows, and tours but an overlooked area has been Artist-In-Residencies programmes which many of our national music institutions offer to musicians for their career development. Ruth Patterson, lead singer of Newcastle-based folk-rock band Holy Moly & The Crackers, was an Artist-In-Residence at Sage Gateshead this year to enable her to develop as a solo performer. She joins Front Row to discuss her debut single as a singer-songwriter, performing as a musician in wheelchair, and she’ll be singing live on the show.

As the lockdown eases for some next week, those heading into Manchester city centre will see posters featuring a new poem by Tony Walsh, aka Longfella, called The Sum of Us. Tony came to public attention with the poem, This Is The Place, that he performed in the city in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing. He joins Front Row to talk about the new work and perform an extract from it.

Presenter: Katie Popperwell

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 during the Great Plague that swept Britain in the mid 17th Century.

Director General Tony Hall discusses the BBC’s renewed commitment to the arts with its Culture in Quarantine initiative, and the serious situation currently facing the arts in the this country.

How to write a new musical? In the second of a series going behind the scenes in the creation of a musical about the climate crisis called House Fire, Edwina Pitman talks to writer / director Poppy Burton Morgan and composer Ben Toth.

Presenter: John Wilson

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 resonant many of its issues are particularly now, in the week of its release.

Dr Daisy Fancourt is leading the UK’s biggest study looking at the impact the coronavirus crisis has had on our mental health. In recent weeks the team has been looking at the effect of participating in arts and crafts on our wellbeing during this turbulent time. She explains the findings.

Hope Mirrlees' Paris – A Poem is a modernist masterpiece that is little known today. It was published in 1920, two years before TS Eliot’s The Waste Land - which might well have been influenced by it. A century later Paris - A Poem has been published again. Neil Gaiman, a big fan, and Sandeep Parma, who is working on a biography of Mirrlees, reveal the importance of this lost poem, illustrated by extracts read by Charlotte Rampling and Lambert Wilson.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

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 her.

Yesterday in Bristol the statue of Edward Colston, who made his fortune from slavery, was noosed, pulled from its plinth, dragged and rolled through the streets of Bristol and dumped in the harbour. We hear a personal account from local artist and journalist Jasmine Ketibuah-Foley who was there. Jasmine reflects on the event and its meaning and writer Ekow Eshun, who is chair of the committee that commissions the art that goes on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, further considers the cultural significance of the toppling of the statue, and what should now happen to the remains.

Today the shortlist for the UK and Ireland’s only awards to shine a light on funny writing by women - The Comedy Women in Print Prize – has been announced. It’s the award’s second year and the shortlisted stories demonstrate the unique way humour can tackle hard-hitting subjects such as mental health, addiction and gender discrimination. Kirsty is joined by one of the panel of judges, comedian Lolly Adefope.

Presenter Kirsty Lang

Main image: Michaela Coel as Arabella in BBC1's I May Destroy You series

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.

David Greig talks about his new play Adventures With The Painted People - a first century romcom between a Pict and a Roman - which was to have opened Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s summer season, and has now been adapted for Radio 3, as part of the BBC's Culture in Quarantine project.

For our Friday review, we watch El Presidente- a new Amazon Prime comedy drama about the FIFA corruption scandal, scripted by Birdman writer Armando Bó. And Lily King’s novel Writers and Lovers comes with accolades from Elizabeth Strout and Tessa Hadley. What will critics Carl Anka and Alex Clark make of its consideration of grief, love, writing... and waitressing?

Following the death of George Floyd there’s been a dramatic increase in sales of books which help explain structural racism. Knights Of - a small publisher specialising in titles tackling prejudice - was facing financial crisis due to the Coronavirus, but now a crowdfunding appeal to help publishers like them has smashed its £100 000 target. Knights Of’s co-founder, Aimee Felone, on publishing during the pandemic and the Inclusive Indies fundraising campaign.

Presenter: John Wilson