Front Row

Award-winning actress Lily Gladstone on working with Martin Scorsese and Native American representation in his new film Killers of the Flower Moon.

Leo Vardiashvili chats about his new book set in his hometown of Tbilisi, Georgia in the post-Soviet era.

Curators William Butler and Roger Kershaw talk about their new exhibition, 'Great Escapes: Remarkable Second World War Captives' at the National Archives at Kew. It explores not just the creativity involved in physically getting away from prison camps, but in making life in confinement more tolerable, and bearing witness. P. G. Wodehouse wrote novels while interned; Peter Butterworth, best-known for his roles in the 'Carry On' films, staged plays in Colditz, the noise of performances masking tunnelling; Ronald Searle found solace in drawing while a prisoner of the Japanese, and his work is an important record of the neglect and ill treatment of fellow prisoners. Importantly, the exhibition includes material about people interned here in the UK.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

The Smile is a trio comprising Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner. That Yorke and Greenwood are members of Radiohead assures keen interest the band. Nick Ahad talks to Jonny Greenwood about Wall of Eyes, The Smile’s second album. After many years Greenwood still enjoys making music with Yorke, and drummer Tom Skinner adds to the excitement.

The winner of this year’s Artes Mundi prize, the UK’s leading international contemporary art prize is Taloi Havinian, an artist from the Autonomous Region of Bougainvillle – an island nation in the South West Pacific. Havinian joins Front Row to discuss her work which has been described as a “visual composition of the experiences of Bougainvilleans with colonialism, mining, resistance, and land and water protection, from the 1960s to the present day.”

Sexism and misogyny are rife in the music industry, a boys club where sexual harassment and abuse are common, according to a Government report. The musician Self Esteem has her say.

A report from the rugged, mythical coast just outside of Newcastle, the location which inspired David Almond’s A Song For Ella Grey, an award-winning novel being adapted for stage by Zoe Cooper and directed by Pilot Theatre’s Esther Richardson.

Presenter: Nick Ahad

Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, who have been married for close to thirty years, talk to Tom Sutcliffe about playing three couples on stage in Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite. They’re joined by director John Benjamin Hickey to explain why they wanted to bring this very New York show to London’s West End.

Having won both awards and praise for his short stories, Colin Barrett discusses his funny and thrilling first novel Wild Houses, set in the margins rural Ireland.

Welsh musician, composer, filmmaker and author Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals fame talks about his 25th album, Sadness Sets Me Free, and performs a track especially for Front Row.

Producer: Olivia Skinner

The Color Purple reviewed, and the pop concert as cinema phenomenon.

Masters of the Air creator John Orloff, Literary spin offs from film and TV with Ronan Bennet and Robert Lautner, and when does a hobby turn into art? with Miriam Elia and Hetain Patel.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Following today’s announcement of the 2024 Oscar nominations, film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh joins Front Row to consider how well this year’s shortlisted categories reflect the year in cinema.

In Howard Jacobson’s new novel, What Will Survive of Us, nothing much happens but everything changes. Lily and Sam, in middle age and longstanding relationships – with other people - fall in love, then stay that way for years and years. The Booker Prize winning author talks to Shahidha Bari about love, sex and literature.

Local Government funding has been rising up the political agenda with one in five council leaders fearing that their local authority is on the verge of municipal bankruptcy. However is cutting council spending on culture a false economy? Stephanie Sirr, Chief Executive of Nottingham Playhouse and joint president of UK Theatre, and Councillor Barry Lewis, Leader of Derbyshire County Council and member of the Local Government Association’s Culture, Tourism and Sport Board, join Front Row to discuss.

Presenter Shahidha Bari

Andrew Haigh’s new film All of Us Strangers, is both a love story and a ghost story. Starring Andrew Scott, it explores the impact of a chance encounter in a deserted tower block, and how nostalgia draws him back to the suburban family home where his parents appear to be living, just as they were on the day they died, 30 years ago.

Tom Hibbert was a popular music journalist who wrote for Smash Hits, Q and many other top magazines in the 1980s and 90s and whose irreverent style of writing would inspire the generation that followed. Miranda Sawyer and Jasper Murison-Bowie join to talk about ‘Phew, Eh Readers’, a new book that compiles some of his best articles.

Lulu Wang’s powerful new series Expats explores the lives of women in Hong Kong who are all outsiders for different reasons. It is an unsurprising theme given such female-led cast (including Nicole Kidman), as well as female-led production remains a rarity for shows of this scale and ambition. Writer and director Wang, who grew up in the US after her parents fled Beijing, joins Samira to discuss her expansive vision for it.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Actor Paul Giamatti and director Alexander Payne on The Holdovers, their award-winning film about the unlikely friendship between a curmudgeonly teacher, a grieving mum and a troubled teen that forms when they’re stuck together over Christmas at a New England prep school.

Critics Stephanie Merritt and Max Liu review a new novel, The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez. Nunez has won many prizes for her fiction and in The Vulnerables turns her attention to the pandemic through a tale that focuses on a woman, a parrot, and a Manhattan penthouse apartment.

Presented by Tom Sutcliffe

Daniel Kaluuya on making his debut as a director and screenwriter with his new film, Kitchen - a dystopian thriller set in London twenty years from now.

Dafydd Rhys, Chief Executive of the Arts Council of Wales, on the surprising and controversial decision to stop funding National Theatre Wales. Plus, as his organisation faces a 10% budget cut, he talks about the impact on the creative sector in Wales.

Late last year, the decision by Warner Bros. to shelve a $70 million film which had been completed and scheduled for release in 2023 sent shockwaves throughout the industry. Film producer Stephen Woolley and Tatiana Siegal, Executive Editor, Film & Media at Variety, discuss what this reveals about the current state of filmmaking in Hollywood.

Korean Danish artist Jane Jin Kaisen describes her work as giving aesthetic shape to histories that in different ways and for different reasons have been silenced or marginalised. As her solo exhibition at esea contemporary in Manchester prepares to open, the director of the gallery, Xiaowen Zhu, reflects on a show which weaves personal and political stories rooted in Jeju Island, South Korea.

Presenter Nick Ahad

Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos talk about their award-winning film Poor Things, based on Alasdair Gray’s novel

Jodie Comer is a new mother struggling to survive after an environmental catastrophe in another new film The End We Start From – Samira Ahmed talks to its director Mahalia Belo.

The new joint artistic directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans have announced their inaugural season of productions – including a stage version of Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia and Northern Ballet's Romeo and Juliet.

And Jason Allen-Paisant who’s won this year's TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, for his work Self Portrait As Othello.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed