Front Row

Artist and activist Ai Weiwei has designed a flag to be flown across the UK from 24th June to mark the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He has also just screened his latest documentary The Rest, which focuses on the plight of individual refugees in 23 countries. John Wilson visits the artist in his Berlin studio to discuss art, activism and his current relationship with China.

Yacht Rock might be a term you’ve never heard of but you’ll definitely know the bands – Toto, Joni Mitchell, The Doobie Brothers and The Pointer Sisters. Katie Puckrik explains what characterises the genre and what it says about America in the 70s and 80s ahead of her two-part documentary broadcast on BBC Four.

Presenter: John Wilson

Gwendoline Christie, famous for playing warrior Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones, discusses her new stage role as the fairy queen Titania in Nicholas Hytner’s immersive new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Works by Steve McQueen, Lubaina Himid and Yinka Shonibare feature in a new exhibition Get Up, Stand Up Now at Somerset House in London, which explores the impact of 50 years of Black creativity in Britain and beyond. Curator and artist Zak Ové and artist Zoe Bedeaux discuss the themes and goals of the exhibition.

The Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, Kara Jackson, and Aisling Fahey, who was London’s Youth Poet Laureate in 2014, discuss what they’ve discovered about each others' cities and the poetry being created there, on an exchange between young Poets Laureate in Chicago and London.

Presenter Kirsty Lang

Oscar winner Julianne Moore talks about her starring role in Gloria Bell, Chilean director Sebastian Lelio's English-language remake of his celebrated 2013 film Gloria, about a divorcee looking for love on the dance floors of Los Angeles.

The much anticipated return of two TV series: Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City and the second season of Big Little Lies, in which Meryl Streep joins Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. Angie Errigo reviews.

Jools Holland pays tribute to Dr John, the New Orleans-born singer and pianist whose Grammy award winning music combined blues, pop, jazz, boogie woogie and rock and roll.

Presenter: Stig Abell

Dulcet-toned comedian Matt Berry joins us to discuss two new projects: a BBC TV spin-off of the 2014 cult mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows in which Berry plays a jaded 700 year-old vampire, and his new role as Detective Inspector Rabbit, a hardened Victorian booze-hound, in Channel 4’s period comedy Year of the Rabbit.

Men make a mess of the world with the First World War. Afterwards a female messiah emerges to lead humanity to salvation, through the work of a community of women in Bedford. That is the milieu of Claire McGlasson’s first book, The Rapture. Her work of fiction, though, is based on fact: the real-life Panacea Society. Claire tells Front Row about her strange love story psychological thriller escape novel.

Yesterday the National Trust announced they had bought Brackenthwaite Hows, the Lake District viewpoint that inspired JMW Turner’s watercolour Crummock Water, Looking Towards Buttermere. The site, which is 77 acres and includes a stone viewing-platform, is the first bought by charity specifically for its panorama. The National Trust’s General Manager for North Lakes Tom Burditt explains the site’s appeal.

As Vasily Grossman’s 1952 Russian novel Stalingrad is published for the first time in English, critic Boyd Hilton argues that it is one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century: an epic comparable to Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Emma Thompson discusses her role as a TV chat show host in her new film Late Night and, as she embarks on her first stand-up show, talks about politics, performing , and how much things have changed for women in comedy.

As the winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019 is announced, we talk to her live from the ceremony. The books are: It’s The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker; My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite; Milkman by Anna Burns; Ordinary People by Diana Evans; An American Marriage by Tayari Jones; Circe by Madeline Miller.

Anthony McCarten's screenplay credits include Bohemian Rhapsody, The Theory of Everything and Darkest Hour. He is also a prolific novelist and playwright. McCarten discusses his new play, The Pope, about Pope Benedict XVI who in 2013 became the first pontiff in seven centuries to resign. The title role of The Pope has tempted Anton Lesser (Thomas More in Wolf Hall) back to the UK stage for the first time in a decade.

This morning in Portsmouth, as part of the D-Day commemoration, David Haig recreated a scene from his 2014 play, Pressure. In this true story, James Stagg, the meteorologist, persuades General Eisenhower to delay the invasion by a day because he forecasts that the storm raging in the Channel will, briefly, abate. We hear from the actor as he prepared to stage his play for the first time.

Presenter: John Wilson

Samira talks to Nigerian American performer, choreographer and writer Okwui Okpokwasili about the UK premiere of Bronx Gothic at London’s Young Vic. How does the piece delve into one woman’s attempt to shake loose memory in a performance at the intersection of dance, theatre and visual installation.

Musical acts always used to be the headliners and sole draw for music festivals. Recently we have seen the rise of alternative stages at these events – often including literary events. But what make them different to what you might find at mainstream literature festivals? We speak to Laura Barton who programmes Green Man’s literary space and Colin Midson, the main programmer for Port Eliot Festival’s literary stage.

Thirty years ago today the name Tiananmen, which means the Gate of Heavenly Peace, assumed a tragic irony when the (also ironically named) People’s Liberation Army, massacred the crowd of young people peacefully calling for democracy in the Square. We'll look at the role of writers and musicians in creating a milieu in which that demonstration became possible. The actor and writer Daniel York Loh considers how cultural life in China has changed in the intervening 3 decades

After 18 years, Apple has announced the end of iTunes. What does the move from downloading to streaming mean to those of us who have been building our iTunes libraries for years and for how people will access music in the future?

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

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

Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat Pray Love has sold fifteen million copies around the world and was made into a film with Julia Roberts. Her new novel is City of Girls, the story of a young woman discovering an exhilarating life in a theatre in New York in the summer of 1940. She talks about why she was unafraid of writing about a young woman’s sexual desire and about the dramatic and difficult events in her personal life that shaped the writing of the book.

“The biggest thing since the Beatles” has become something of a pop cliché, but in the case of the south Korean boy band BTS it might be justified. This year they became the first group since The Beatles to earn three US Billboard number one albums in less than 12 months and this weekend they’re playing in London. Haekyung Um explains the BTS and K pop phenomenon.

Natalia Goncharova was a Russian avant-garde artist known for her large scale abstract canvases, performance art and textile and theatre design. Ahead of a retrospective of her work at Tate Modern, the show’s curator Natalia Sidlina discusses her unique style and significance today.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

At the piano, composer Alan Menken discusses his music which led the rebirth of Disney animation with hits such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, which he’s reworked for the new live-action version currently top of the box office.

Georgia's state governor has signed legislation banning abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected (except in reported cases of rape or incest). In response, several major production companies including Netflix and Disney have said they are considering a boycott of the state. Last year 455 film and television productions were made in Georgia, where film companies enjoy a 30% tax rebate and 92,000 people work in the industry so the impact could be significant. American film writer, Michael Carlson, considers the story.

In Amitav Ghosh’s new novel Gun Island, the protagonist Deen Datta finds himself on a journey from the muddy Sunderbans of Bangladesh – the world’s largest mangrove forest – to Los Angeles and Venice, to solve a linguistic mystery. Ghosh discusses his desire to include in his narrative the powerful issues of today: climate change, migration, and the displacement of people around the world.

Presenter: John Wilson

The long awaited adaptation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s cult fantasy novel Good Omens arrives on Amazon on Friday. Samira talks to Michael Sheen and David Tennant who play a fussy Angel and a loose-living Demon forced into an unlikely alliance to stop Armageddon.

Brìghde Chaimbeul is a young Gaelic speaking piper from the Isle of Skye and one of Scotland’s rising stars. Brìghde won the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award in 2016 and her debut album, The Reeling, has received rave reviews. The pipes she plays, though, aren't the familiar Highland bagpipes but the Scottish Smallpipes. She explains her unusual instrument to Samira Ahmed, and how her style is rooted in her indigenous language and culture, yet draws inspiration from elsewhere - Bulgaria, for instance. And she plays.

The charity Youth Music has undertaken research showing that allowing vulnerable students to choose what music they study and play improves their outcomes in school. This has been reported as 'exchanging Mozart for Stormzy', but Matt Griffiths, Youth Music's Chief Executive, that the reality is far from that and more subtle. Samira finds out what it does mean and what Youth Music is doing.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed