Front Row

Tom Sutcliffe presents a special edition of Front Row on the art of David Hockney. The artists Maggi Hambling and Tacita Dean and Andrew Marr speak to Tom about Hockney's career and innovations. Tom also speaks to art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston and the art critic and author James Cahill, author of The Beverley Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool, publishe...

Film producer Jason Solomons and Guardian columnist Zoe Williams join Tom Sutcliffe to discuss Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day – a film which looks at whether aliens are really out there. John D. MacDonald’s psychological thriller The Executioners has inspired two Cape Fear films and now there’s a 10-part TV series starring Amy Adams and Javier Bardem. Jason and Zoe give their verdicts. They als...

Scotland's Makar Peter Mackay on his poems honouring Scotland's football team as they head to the FIFA World Cup - one, his own work, the other curated from lines submitted by members of the public. Can they help propel the team to victory in their first tournament in many years? Crime writer Denise Mina tells us about the extraordinary true crime case that inspired her book The Last Drop, now ada...

Barry Manilow on maintaining his musical curiosity as he releases his 33rd studio album, What A Time, and what it's like to have one of his biggest hits, Copacabana, sung by Sabrina Carpenter. With the start of the World Cup this week, sports photographer Tom Jenkins, and Tim Marlow, Director of The Design Museum and one of the judges for this year's Football Art Prize at the Millennium Gallery in...

Samira Ahmed talks to Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter about their new album Mirage Ekow Eshun, writer and broadcaster, and Polly Savage, Lecturer in the Art History of Africa at SOAS, University of London, discuss an exhibition of Pan African art at the Barbican, Project a Black Planet Front Row introduces its AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker for 2026, Genevieve Robyn Arkle, who is a Lecturer in Music...

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by writer Alexander Larman and critic Arifa Akbar to discuss: A new production of High Society, Cole Porter's musical showcase at London's Barbican, starring Call the Midwife's Helen George in the role of the amorously vexed Long Island socialite Tracy Lord who finds her heart pulled in every which direction. Also starring Freddie Fox and Felicity Kendal. The film Savage Ho...

As the Belfast Book Festival opens Kirsty Wark is joined by a range of guests at the Crescent Arts Centre. She'll be discussing reading and freedom of expression with Hilary McCollum, whose new book As A Lover is inspired by the scandal which followed the publication of Radclyffe Hall's story of lesbian love The Well of Loneliness in 1928, and by novelist and short story writer Lucy Caldwell whose...

Award winning jazz saxophonist and broadcaster Soweto Kinch and writer and director of new film Köln 75, Ido Fluk, join Tom to explore the importance of Keith Jarrett’s seminal performance at the Cologne Opera House in 1975, and its subsequent album, which became the bestselling solo album in jazz history. Sex Education and Rivals writer Sophie Goodhart on her award-winning comedy-drama Alice and...

On what would have been her 100th birthday, we look at the enduring popularity of Marilyn Monroe, with film journalist and fan Kim Morgan and reviewer Angie Errigo Sathnam Sanghera talks about the meaning of George Michael. Jazz legend and saxophonist Courtney Pine talks about his career, forty years after his seminal debut album Journey to the Urge Within. And poet Joelle Taylor, author of Maryvi...

Rachel Lloyd, Deputy Culture Editor of The Economist, and writer Lawrence Norfolk join Tom to discuss Channel 4's new queer drama Tip Toe, which is the latest series by Russell T Davies and stars Alan Cumming as a gay bar owner in Manchester and David Morrissey as his long-standing neighbour whose previously friendly relationship takes a dark turn. They also talk about Paul McCartney’s 18th studio...

Nashville-based novelist Ann Patchett tells us about her tenth novel, Whistler, in which a chance encounter between a woman and her stepfather after many years leads to unexpected revelations. As a new publisher - Conduit Books - launches with the intention of promoting work by male authors, we discuss why this might be needed, with its founder, the writer Jude Cook, and with Ellah Wakatama, Edito...

Writer and broadcaster Kevin Le Gendre, and trumpeter and composer Yazz Ahmed on 100 years of Miles Davis - the musician regarded as the Picasso of jazz. Artist Keith Tyson has just donated a quarter of a million pounds for an astronomy post at Oxford University. He's joined by Professor Ken Arnold, director of the Medical Museum at the University of Copenhagen, to discuss the relationship between...

Live from Hay, celebrating reading and writing in many different forms, Samira is joined on stage by Jack Thorne - multi-award-winning screenwriter of the TV sensation Adolescence and his newest drama Falling, about a nun and a priest who fall in love. Also, Tartan Noir titan Val McDermid speaks about crime fiction and her 40 years of writing. The Ian Fleming estate has granted novelist Vaseem Kha...

Samira Ahmed is joined by writer Matt Cain and critic Suzi Feay to review: Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart's new novel John of John, set on the Isle of Harris. New series The Boroughs, which stars Alfred Molina and Geena Davis in a retirement community, executive produced by Stranger Things' Duffer Brothers. And Holy Pop!, a new exhibition at Somerset House in London th...

Canadian author Rachel Reid talks to us about the the phenomenon which has followed the publication of her books about the romantic relationship between rival ice hockey players. We speak to author Yang Shuang-zi and translator Lin King, the author and translator of this year's International Booker Prize winning book, Taiwan Travelogue. And Mull Historical Society's latest album In My Mind There’s...

The paintings of Winston Churchill are being exhibited at the Wallace Collection in London. Xavier Bray, Director of the Wallace Collection, and Katharine Carter, curator at Chartwell, Churchill’s country house in Kent, discuss what we learn about Churchill from his art. Creator and star Phil Dunning talks about series two of Smoggie Queens, which follows a close-knit group of friends; it’s a cele...

Leo Woodall stars in the film Tuner, about a young piano prodigy who turns to crime, in cinemas on the 29th May. The classical music world has been paying tribute to the soprano Dame Felicity Lott, who died on Friday at the age of 79. Critic David Benedict joins us to discuss her life in music. Ronald Firbank is considered a pioneering queer voice of modernist fiction, but he's often overlooked. S...

Leo Woodall stars in the film Tuner, about a young piano prodigy who turns to crime, in cinemas on the 29th May. The classical music world has been paying tribute to the soprano Dame Felicity Lott, who died on Friday at the age of 79. Critic David Benedict joins us to discuss her life in music. Ronald Firbank is considered a pioneering queer voice of modernist fiction, but he's often overlooked. S...

Observer Theatre critic Susannah Clapp and Heat's Entertainment Director Boyd Hilton join Samira to discuss The Christophers - Steven Soderbergh’s film about an ageing artist and a young forger hired to copy his work, starring Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel. They also discuss the second series of Rivals, based on Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster novel which was set in the affluent 80s world of commercial...

From landmark releases to hidden treasures, director Mark Cousins on his 16-hour epic The Story of Documentary Film, which is screening at the Cannes Film Festival this week. A hundred years since Virginia Woolf published her essay On Being Ill, writer Darcey Steinke is presenting a newly commissioned work in response at the Charleston Festival this week. She joins us alongside poet Jade Cuttle to...

This year marks the tercentenary of polymath Sir John Vanbrugh, regarded as the rockstar architect of the Baroque era. Art historian Sir Charles Saumerez Smith, co-curator of the Vanbrugh exhibition at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, and Rory Fraser who is writing a biography on Vanbrugh, discuss the man happy creating dramas for the British stage and dramatic buildings on the British landscape. Turn...

Critics Ben Luke and Aviva Dautch bring us all the news from The Venice Biennale. Following the death of the great Shakespearean actor Michael Pennington, we speak to former RSC Director Gregory Doran about his impact on the stage. A new small exhibition Elizabeth I: Queen and Court Is running in London. It includes rarely seen portraits of The Virgin Queen that are normally held in private collec...

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by journalist and podcaster Nick Hilton and writer and historian Catherine McCormack to review a selection of cultural items from this week: They'll look at The Sheep Detectives, starring Hugh Jackman, a live-action film in which a group of ovine sleuths attempt to solve the murder of their shepherd. Elizabeth Strout's latest novel, The Things We Never Say, about a Massachu...

Acclaimed author Siri Hustvedt on Ghost Stories, her memoir of her marriage to novelist, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster and her grief following his death in 2024. Following last night's live report on the controversies surrounding this year's Venice Biennale, we are joined by one of the curators of the Ukrainian Pavillion, to hear how a concrete sculpture of a deer rescued from the frontline of th...

Antony Gormley joins Samira Ahmed. The sculptor and artist is best known for landmarks such as Angel of the North or the beach figures of Another Place, in Liverpool. But Antony has also been exhibiting drawings since the 80s and with the publication of the book Drawing he tells Samira what this art means to him. After the Devil Wears Prada 2 topped the box office this week, BBC New Generation Thi...