Front Row

The comedian Joe Lycett has long dabbled in art, but it's a serious business now as his first ever solo exhibition ‘Everything Must Go’ has just opened at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. He talks about how this show came together and why its most eye-catching piece is a giant pink and blue woolly mammoth called Martin.

Charlotte Higgins talks to Samira Ahmed about her book Ukrainian Lessons, and the role artist's play in the cultural identity of the country.

With poetry sales at an all time high, we speak to poets Nikita Gill and Lucas Jones, two writers credited as being part of this boom.

Entries for A-level arts subjects continue to fall. However, this year saw a drop of nearly six per cent in entries for A level English Literature. What does this continued decline mean for the health of the arts and humanities? Hetan Shah is Chief Executive of the British Academy and Professor Robert Eaglestone is education policy lead at the English Association.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Academic and critic Maria Delgado and writer and producer Jake Cunningham join Tom Sutcliffe to discuss the film Tony, a film about the early career of food writer Anthony Bourdain, who is played by Dominic Sessa. The film also stars Antonio Banderas, who becomes an unexpected mentor for the young chef.

They also talk about Death Note: The Musical. Based on the best-selling Manga series of the same name, the Barbican show tells the story of a student who discovers a notebook which gives him the power to kill.

The final item for review is Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s final novel, I Give You My Silence, where a music journalist is on a quest to tell the story of an unforgettable musician. The book is also a love letter to Peruvian culture.

Sarah Ditum discusses Jason Arday's memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things.

This programme was broadcast before the announcement of Jason Arday's death.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Australian writer and performer Hannah Reilly talks to us about her much-anticipated one woman show about sex, power and authenticity, Roleplay, which is produced by the team behind Fleabag and Baby Reindeer and which has sold out in Edinburgh but is heading to London for a run in the autumn.

Critic Fergus Morgan talks us through the other shows which are making a splash at this year's Edinburgh Festivals - from a radical sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which stars Golden Globe-winning actor Wagner Moura, and in which 12 members of the audience are brought on stage to deliver a verdict in A Trial, to a reimagining of Virginia Woolf's The Waves - presented to audiences in a sauna.

The first international exhibition from Alabama's Legacy of Slavery Museum has come to Edinburgh this month, and we're joined by its founder, eminent lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson to talk about how it depicts the international slave trade and racial brutality over centuries. We're also joined by writer and director Zora Howard whose powerful production Hang Time sees three performers talk about their lives and loves as they appear to be hanging from a tree, and which is inspired in part by the deaths of two men in Southern California in recent years.

And director Louis Paxton talks to us about debut feature film The Incomer, which opens this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival tomorrow night. It's a darkly comic fable in which an awkward council worker (played by Domnhall Gleeson) is sent to a remote Scottish island to relocate a pair of siblings (Gayle Rankin from GLOW and Grant O’Rourke from Outlander), to the mainland, but let's just say things don't quite go to plan.

Presenter: Kirsty Wark

Steph McGovern, presenter of new BBC show The Big Deal, is joined by Marie Le Conte to discuss how to buy art.

Fleabag actor Sian Clifford on her lead role in "Lady", a new mockumentary film about a fading aristocrat.

Why has a new show at Edinburgh about Amanda Knox been so controversial? Tristram Fane Saunders gives his assessment live from the Fringe Festival.

And Colin Thubron, both a travel writer and novelist, has a new book which journeys into Egypt and the human mind - literally. He talks about how witnessing brain surgery influenced his novella Passage.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

What's the Royal Shakespeare Company's much anticipated stage adaptation of Game of Thrones like? Critics Boyd Hilton and Kate Maltby give their verdict.

Conductor Marin Alsop on what makes American classical music sound American, ahead of her American Classics Prom on 24 August.

TS Eliot Prize-winning poet Anthony Joseph discusses his new collection, Haunting the Black Air, which journeys from the Trinidad of his childhood to the dancefloors of New York.

And following the news of the death of the music producer William Orbit, music jpurnalist Kate Hutchinson discusses his career, including his work on Madonna's Ray of Light album.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Suzi Feay and John-Paul Stonard join Samira to review:

Can Nothing Save Us?, the new novel from Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, a state-of-the-nation thriller set in the US.

The Summer Book, a new film starring Glenn Close and based on the beloved novel by Moomins creator Tove Jansson.

And Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam at the Royal Academy, featuring paintings by the 19th century painter who specialised in pictures of fairies, killed his own father and spent the rest of his life in Bethlem and then Broadmoor psychiatric institutions.

Plus the Guardian's Stephanie Convery discusses the news that AI companies have been buying up rare books and 'destructively scanning' them - removing their spines, scanning, then shredding them - in order to train their large language models.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

In the first of our special programmes from the Edinburgh Festivals, actress Stockard Channing - star of Grease, Six Degrees of Separation and Practical Magic - joins us alongside her friend, actor David Westhead, to discuss their production of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, in which a cynical and disillusioned older man reflects on his early life as an ambitious and idealistic writer.

Jeff Whitty, Tony Award winning creator of the hit musical Avenue Q, which is currently running until 2027 in London's West End, tells us about Midsummer!, his new production inspired by Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's dream, set in the Gilded Age and performed in a contemporary verse translation.

We have a live performance from siblings Maddie and Marcus Rice from their show with songs Goodbye Dandelion, an exploration of an unlikely friendship between an 87 year old and their much younger friend, which is the recipient of the inaugural Underbelly Futures Fund Award.

And we hear how deaf actors and artists are taking centre stage at this year's Festival, with Stijn Van Opstal, the director of the acclaimed production [seagull], performed in Flemish sign language by Belgian company Olympique Dramatique - and with director Cora Bissett and deaf performer Jamie Rea, whose gig theatre production The Singer, centres on Joe, a deaf artist who 'sings' with his hands, and Andy, a washed-up musician seeking a comeback, and features music by KT Tunstall.

Presenter: Kirsty Wark

Samira is joined by two magicians live in the studio, from the stage show "Now You See Me Live". And then she takes part in a trick and is bamboozled!

This programme has been edited since broadcast

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

John Hannah plays a washed-up former detective who has moved to Spain to run a pub in the new Channel 5 comedy drama Benidorm is Murder. He discusses the appeal of television crime series, and why working-class settings are underrepresented on the small screen.

Hull Maritime Museum reopens after a £20 million refurbishment. Director Gillian Osgerby on why this museum is such an important feature of Hull's cultural landscape.

Critic Benji Wilson, author of Rate This Book: How Star Ratings Took Over The World, and journalist, Helen Nugent, editor of online magazine Northern Soul, on the power of star ratings.

Stephen Ellery on his new appointment as chief conductor of the Dnipro Philharmonic in Ukraine.

Presenter: Nick Ahad

Rhianna Dhillon and Sarfraz Manzoor join Tom Sutcliffe to review:

Childhood in War, an exhibition at the Imperial War Musuem exploring how children have experienced conflict from 1914 to the present day.

Ish, the debut feature film from multimedia artist Imran Perretta which follows two boys in Luton as they navigate childhood against a backdrop of political tension and personal loss.

And Children of Wolves, the new novel from Lawrence Osborne (Ballad of a Small Player), about a private investigator sent to Turkey to find a 27-year-old woman who has disappeared.

Plus Laura Barton discusses this year's Mercury Prize shortlist.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe