Front Row

Actor and director John Malkovich discusses foreign accents and facial hair with Kirsty as he explains what drew him to taking on the role of famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in The ABC Murders, the latest BBC One dramatization of Agatha Christie's novels by writer Sarah Phelps.

As Christmas approaches with films like It's a Wonderful Life back in cinemas and Love Actually on the TV schedules film critic Hannah McGill and Thomas Dixon, author of Weeping Britannia, discuss what makes a good weepie and why do we like to cry at films? Part of Front Row's ongoing series on the relationship between the arts and mental health.

True crime podcasts have captivated listeners around the world, with the first series of Serial about the murder of a high school student acting establishing what is now a significant part of the podcast landscape. Crime novelist Mark Billingham discusses the rise and rise of the genre from Atlanta Monster to Death in Ice Valley and most recently the Australian hit The Teacher's Pet.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

As the Archers prepares for its Canterbury Tales Christmas special, Carole Boyd - who plays the doyenne of Ambridge theatricals Lynda Snell - is joined by Oxford Professor of Medieval Literature Laura Ashe to discuss Chaucer’s tales of courtly love and boisterous sex.

The new BBC and Netflix animated version of Watership Down will be broadcast on BBC ONE at 7pm on December 22 and 23. Critic Mark Ecclestone gives his view on how it compares with the book by Richard Adams, and whether the new version will traumatise children, as the first film version did in the seventies.

Recently rappers in Russia have found their concerts cancelled by venues and local authorities and some musicians have been arrested. Over the weekend President Putin admitted he couldn't get rid of rap, but that he wanted to control it, saying, "If it's impossible to stop something, you have to take charge of it." But what is his objection and what does he intend to do? Alexander Kan, the BBC Russian Service's arts and culture correspondent, reads the runes.

If you're in need of a break from all the sugar-coated seasonal fare, Front Row is offering some substitute Christmas treats for you to consider. The film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh unwraps her alternative festive film, Gremlins, a tale of Christmas shopping gone wrong.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Rita Ora on her six year journey to release her second album Phoenix, following a legal dispute with her record label. The musician, who has also acted in the Fifty Shades film trilogy and been a judge on television talent shows The Voice and The X-Factor, talks to John Wilson about finally being able to release music, song writing and her Albanian heritage.

This year’s Bad Sex In Fiction award was won by James Frey and also had an all-male shortlist. So what defines good and bad writing of sex in literature, and why do men seem to be worse at it than women? Novelist Matt Thorne and Rowan Pelling, founding editor of the Erotic Review now of The Amorist, discuss.

Unbelievably, Die Hard is 30 years old this year. Stand-up poet Kate Fox considers why this thriller starring Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman is such a classic.

Presenter: John Wilson

Not Going Out is the UK’s longest-running sitcom on TV and will this year bring a live edition to our screens for Christmas. The show’s star and creator Lee Mack talks about its surprising longevity, the changing face of British comedy, and his childhood dream of being a jockey.

From real life to the big screen and now the casino stage, Channing Tatum’s outstandingly popular Magic Mike is now in London’s West End. Though in the light of the #MeToo movement, the show is compared by female comedian Sophie Linder-Lee, who reveals that there is a message behind the performance, and how demanding a show it is to control.

Jeremy Noel-Tod has gathered poems from all over the world and created a new 400-page anthology. But these poems don’t rhyme and they are not metrical. They are not arranged in stanzas, nor even lines. Noel-Tod is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and together with the writer Michèle Roberts who has composed some, explains what a prose poem is, how it came about, and the allure of this particular form.

Presenter Stig Abell

Two new films with comic book superheroes at the centre - Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and Aquaman - have just been released. Aquaman is DC’s follow-up to their hugely successful 2017 film Wonder Woman, while Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an animated superhero film which imagines Spidermen (and women) from alternative universes who team up. Critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw has seen both and gives her verdict on which will come out on top in the battle for the box-office.

Mike Bartlett, Olivier Award-winning playwright whose work includes Love, Love, Love and King Charles III, and on television, crime drama The Town and Doctor Foster, returns to The Old Fire Station in Oxford where his very first play (co-authored) was produced when he was 18. His latest work, Snowflake, written especially for this theatre at Christmas, is a story of a father and his daughter estranged partly because of their differing views on leaving the EU.

Whilst snowflakes might be 'triggered' by the term snowflake - a pejorative term describing the real or imagined sensitivity of the younger generation - how is 'generation snowflake' being represented in the arts? Author and academic Tiffany Jenkins, pop culture journalist Holly Rose Swinyard and writer Ella Whelan discuss the so-called snowflake generation and what the cultural response to it reveals about both the term itself and the current state of the intergenerational relations.

Presenter Kirsty Lang

Mortal Engines is a new sci-fi fantasy film co-written and produced by Peter Jackson, based on the first in a series of young adult steampunk novels by Philip Reeve. In a post-apocalyptic future, mobile cities on huge caterpillar tracks roam the landscape, consuming smaller towns for their resources. Starring Hera Hilmar as Hester Shaw, the film is the directorial debut of long-time Jackson collaborator Christian Rivers. Katie Popperwell reviews.

In a year when housing has risen up the political agenda, Richard Gregory, artistic director of Quarantine theatre company, and performance artist Grace Surman discuss Tenancy, part of a Manchester-led international project which explores the changing nature of cities by artists taking over a residential home for a year.

The work of the Chinese photographer Ren Hang found admirers worldwide and was championed by Ai Weiwei, though the Chinese authorities were less enamoured. Almost two years after his death at the age of 29 and with the first show of his work in the UK premiering at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, Laura Robertson, critical writer-in-residence at the gallery discusses Ren Hang’s significance.

When Martin Jenkinson was made redundant from the Sheffield steel industry in 1979, it was the start of a four decade-long career as a professional photographer whose first subject was his adopted city. His pictures of the 1984 – 85 miners’ strike were widely published in the national press. Years later they would catch the eye of Turner-prizewinning artist Jeremy Deller who worked with Jenkinson on his recreation of The Battle of Orgreave. Art critic Orla Foster reviews the new retrospective of Jenkinson’s photographs at Weston Park Museum in Sheffield.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Tamara Lawrance stars in new BBC One drama The Long Song, an adaption of the Andrea Levy novel set on a sugar plantation during the final days of slavery in 19th century Jamaica. The actress talks about the drama as well as her career so far, which in the three years since leaving drama school has seen her play Viola in Twelfth Night at the National Theatre, Cordelia opposite Ian McKellen's Lear in Chichester and Prince Harry’s republican girlfriend in BBC One’s Charles III.

Meet Vermeer is a new initiative between The Hague's Mauritshuis gallery and Google Arts and Culture which brings together all 36 authenticated works of 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer in an augmented reality experience viewable via the Google Arts and Culture app on a smartphone. Art critic Estelle Lovatt reviews the virtual museum and chooses some of her favourite art apps.

Matty Healy, frontman for The 1975 discusses the band’s third album A Brief Enquiry into Online Relationships which looks at addiction, depression and social media. Matty, who is almost 30, explains why the band connects so strongly with their huge teenage fan base and why the album represents the millennial generation.

Presenter: John Wilson

As Bruce Springsteen nears the end of his 236-show run in New York, Kate Mossman reviews Springsteen on Broadway, the new Netflix film of his stage show based on his autobiography Born to Run, in which he looks back on his life and performs songs on acoustic guitar and piano.

From James Bond nemesis Blofeld to Scar from the Lion King – facial disfigurements have long been commonplace for cinematic villains. A new campaign by the charity Changing Faces and the BFI, I Am Not Your Villain, wants to end the use of “scars, burns or marks as shorthand for villainy”. Kirsty talks to Changing Faces CEO Becky Hewitt and film podcaster Mike Muncer.

Sarah Shaffi selects the most beautiful books to buy as presents this Christmas. In the age of streaming music and films, do books make better gifts?

And theatre critic Lyn Gardner discusses the difficult financial situation facing the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, which has announced the closure of its repertory theatre company.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

Screenwriter Jimmy McGovern talks about his new BBC One drama Care, starring Sheridan Smith, Alison Steadman and Sinead Keenan, which looks at the personal challenges of caring for a parent with dementia and the struggle to find good and affordable care.

Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera talks to us from her home in Havana and explains why she is continuing to protest over Decree 349, a new law that will require artists to obtain a government licence, despite Bruguera being arrested twice this week by the authorities. BBC Correspondent in Havana, Will Grant, explains the context and implications of the new law.

How can the arts help people with insomnia? We speak to two artists making work to fall asleep to – Richard Talbot of band Marconi Union, who worked with a sound therapist to write the soporific track Weightless, and Phoebe Smith, Sleep Storyteller-in-Residence for the sleep app Calm.

Presenter John Wilson

Maggi Hambling discusses her new exhibition The Quick and the Dead at Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, which centres on paintings and drawings made over the past decade, in which she has portrayed four fellow artists - Sebastian Horsley, Sarah Lucas, Julian Simmons and Juergen Teller - whose lives have intersected at various points, and who have created their own reciprocal artistic interpretations.

Nearly 40 years ago, three white Jewish teenagers called Adam Horovitz, Adam Yauch and Michael Diamond became Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D when they stopped playing hardcore punk and took up rap. The hip hop group Beastie Boys went on to gain 3 Grammy awards and sell 50 million records worldwide. Stig talks to Mike D and Ad Rock about their new book - which is as much dedicated to MCA, who died in 2012, as it is to documenting the band’s history.

With actor Ellie Kendrick making her professional debut as a playwright with Hole at the Royal Court in London this week, she and theatre critic David Benedict consider the long tradition of the actor-turned-playwright, from Shakespeare and Garrick to Pinter and Rory Kinnear.

Presenter Stig Abell