Front Row

36 years after playing pilot Pete Mitchell in the first Top Gun film, Tom Cruise returns to the role. Now Mitchell is one of the US Navy's top aviators, a courageous test pilot and instructor. He can dodge planes in the air but avoiding the advancement in rank that would ground him proves more difficult for him. Larushka Ivan Zadeh reviews the film.

Joseph Wright of Derby was a fine portrait painter but is best known as the first artist to paint scenes of the Industrial Revolution and its scientific processes, such as in his most famous work, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. Today one of his paintings, in a private collection since 1772, became the centre piece of the Joseph Wright collection at Derby Museums and Art Gallery. On one side there is a self-portrait, on the other a study for An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. Curator Lucy Bamford explains why this is such a significant acquisition.

So that the exhibits are not confined to within the museum building, London Transport Museum is running guided tours of the Kingsway Tram Tunnel in Central London. Opened in 1906 the last tram ran through it in 1952. Since it was abandoned it has been a secret space in the heart of the city. Samira visits the tunnel with transport historian Tim Dunn and Siddy Holloway of the London Transport Museum and discovers part of the capital’s hidden heritage.

Louise Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band and of Chippewa, and is the latest of our authors shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 for The Sentence. The novel is about a bookshop, a haunting, and the events that unfurled in Minneapolis between All Souls’ Day in 2019 and 2020, including of course the death of George Floyd.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

On today's Front Row review, we discuss directors taking a new look at much loved works: Daniel Fish’s Broadway production of Oklahoma!, now at the Young Vic in London, explores the darker aspects of the musical. Conversations with Friends, the debut novel by bestselling author Sally Rooney, has been adapted for television, following the lockdown success of Normal People. Journalist Tara Joshi and Matt Wolf, London theatre critic of the International New York Times, review them both.

The Bob Dylan Centre, home to the singer's immense archive, opened this week. Professor Sean Latham, Director of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa, discusses its cultural significance.

And as the Florence Nightingale Museum reopens after two years, its director David Green joins Samira to consider the legacy of the mother of modern nursing.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Image: Members of the cast of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma at The Young Vic Theatre, London

Film directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, otherwise known as ‘the Daniels’, join us to discuss their much anticipated sci-fi, multiverse film - Everything Everywhere All At Once.

The artist Maurizio Cattelan is being sued over the authorship of some of his most famous works. Art critic Louisa Buck and lawyer Mark Stephens join Front Row to discuss one of the oldest questions in art – how much does the artist need to involved in the making of their artwork to be considered the creator of that work?

Plus, singer, stage performer, and actor, Camille O’Sullivan, performs for us live in the studio, and describes the inspiration behind her acclaimed show, Camille O'Sullivan Sings Cave – singing interpretations of Nick Cave’s work in her own theatrical style – and finally taking it back on tour after lockdown silenced stages.

Presenter: Elle Osili-Wood

Eurovision decided to ban Russian participation this year on the grounds that it might bring the contest into disrepute, following the invasion of Ukraine. Dean Vuletic, author of Postwar Europe and The Eurovision Song Contest, spoke to Tom Sutcliffe, ahead of tonight's first semi-final in Turin.

The hashtag #BookTok has been viewed on TikTok 52.6 billion times and the platform's viral videos made by booklovers have reshaped the young adult bestseller lists. Joining Tom to discuss the social media trends and how they’re influencing the mainstream industry are the co-founder of @CultofBooks Kouthar Hagi AKA Coco and Dan Conway, incoming CEO of the Publishers Association.

Last month the distinguished art critic Waldemar Januszczak visited Ukraine to see what was happening to the country’s art collections, as the war continues. He joins Front Row to discuss his new documentary, My Ukrainian Journey.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Photo: Kalush Orchestra, Ukraine's entrant for the Eurovision Song Contest 2022

Clio Barnard talks to Samira Ahmed about directing the television adaptation of Sarah Perry’s bestselling novel The Essex Serpent. It stars Claire Danes as Cora Seaborne, a naturalist who moves to Essex to investigate reports of a giant serpent living in the marshes. Cora thinks it might be a living fossil. She meets Will Ransome, the local vicar, played by Tom Hiddleston, is surprised by his openness to scientific ideas, and they form a bond. But a young girl dies and the locals believe Cora is drawing the serpent to them.

Trinidadian author Lisa Allen-Agostini’s first novel for adults, The Bread The Devil Knead, has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. A dark story domestic violence but laced with humour Lisa talks about writing it in her native Trinidadian dialect.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Singer songwriter PJ Harvey tells us about Orlam, her narrative poem set in a magic realist version of the West Country - a rural, and at times gothic, coming-of-age story and the first full-length book written in the Dorset dialect for many decades.

Radical Landscapes is the name of a new exhibition exploring human connections with the landscape, at Tate Liverpool. The Terror-Infamy is a drama on BBC2 depicting the internment camps in the US where those of Japanese heritage were kept after Pearl Harbour - and a strange spirit is abroad. Writers and critics Tahmima Anam and Laura Robertson join Front Row to review both.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

PJ Harvey picture credit: Steve Gullick

This year’s Brighton Festival has two guest directors for the first time in its history. One of them, Tristan Sharps, artistic director of Brighton based theatre company dreamthinkspeak, joins Elle to discuss the literary inspiration behind his immersive production, Unchain Me, and his collaboration with fellow guest director, Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni.

Deesha Philyaw’s debut collection of short stories - The Secret Lives of Church Ladies - arrives in the UK garlanded with prizes including the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Deesha joins Front Row to discuss turning the lives of the black women she grew up with into art.

Philippa Goymer explores the various attractions of County Durham that it hopes will earn it the title of City of Culture.

Photo: Deesha Philyaw

Nathaniel Price discusses his drama First Touch, opening at the Nottingham Playhouse, about an aspiring young footballer growing up in Nottingham in the 1970s. Inspired by real life events, it explores the ways predatory abusers exploit positions of power within a community, in this case how the actions of a paedophile football coach almost go undiscovered because of the control he exercises in the football careers of his victims.

In the wake of the campaign, Stop AI stealing the show, launched by Equity in response to the rise of the use of Artificial Intelligence in the entertainment industry, Front Row asked Paul Fleming, General Secretary of Equity, Dr David Leslie, Director of Ethics and Responsible Innovation at the Alan Turing Institute, and Dr Mathilde Pavis, senior law lecturer at Exeter University, to discuss the questions raised by the use of AI to enhance, extend, and replace human actors.

BAFTA nominated film composer Alex Heffes has scored films including The Hope Gap, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and Touching the Void. Now he’s releasing a solo piano recording, Sudden Light, reinterpreting his cinematic orchestral scores after an accident that almost put an end to his piano-playing.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Huw Stephens, familiar to listeners to Radio Cymru and Radio Wales presents a multilingual, multicultural Bank Holiday edition of Front Row from Cardiff.

Caryl Lewis is a mighty presence in Welsh literature, author of more than 25 books. Her novel Martha, Jac a Sianco is a modern classic, taught at A Level. She wrote the screenplay for the film – and won 6 Welsh Baftas. She wrote for the television series Y Gwyll - Hinterland in English - inventing Cymru Noir, so noir it was shown on Danish television. She was also the main writer of Hidden, screened in 60 countries. Until now all her work has been in Welsh but she wrote her new novel, Drift, in English. Nefyn lives on the Welsh coast, near a military base. She gathers what the tide carries in and her world changes when she finds Hamza, a Syrian cartographer, washed up. Caryl tells Huw about her modern and ancient story, and why she chose to write it in English.

In 2009 the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger declared Cornish extinct. But musician Gwenno Saunders was alive then, and she grew up speaking it. Most of the songs on her new album, Tresor, are in Cornish - the others in Welsh. Gwenno explains why, and performs two songs, one in each language.

Choreographers Anthony and Kel Matsena were born in Zimbabwe, in a culture where everyone dances. They moved to Swansea as boys and were nurtured by the people there, and Wales as a whole. They take a break from rehearsing their new work, Shades of Blue, which will premier at Sadler's Wells, to talk about this and Codi, a piece for the National Dance Company Wales that is inspired by Welsh mining communities, and about Brothers in Dance, a BBC documentary film charting their journey.

Presenter: Huw Stephens

Observer theatre critic Susannah Clapp and broadcaster and Editor of the Wales Art Review Gary Raymond review The Corn is Green at the National Theatre and Tate Britain's Walter Sickert exhibition.

And Samira talks to actor actor Cherylee Houston, best known as Coronation Street’s Izzy Armstrong, who is also co-founder of the The TripleC organisation, which has just won BAFTA’s TV Special Craft award, talks about working to improve access and inclusion for disabled artists in the screen industries.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed