Front Row

As the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration prepares to open in London, we find out how illustrators are adapting to a changing world. Starting with a rare interview from Quentin Blake, we'll hear how this once undervalued side of the visual arts still creates the defining images of childhoods, whilst also now playing a central role in the visual language of the internet. Featuring voices working...

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by playwright Mark Ravenhill and academic and critic Maria Delgado to review: The first major UK exhibition of Spanish master Francisco de Zurbarán at the National Gallery. A new Spanish language series adaptation of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits on Amazon Prime video. Please Please Me by Tom Wright, a play about manager Brian Epstein and The Beatles at the Kiln...

From the rebellious spirit of The Jam in the 1970s to the soulful sound of The Style Council and mellow ballads as a solo artist, singer-songwriter Paul Weller is about to release Weller At The BBC Volume 2 - a series of session recordings of his classic hits and interpretations of other artists' songs. He .discusses his musical evolution and his influences. She's been rather overshadowed by fello...

Children's Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce launches the Children's Booker Prize and discusses some of the themes of his forthcoming Waterstones Children's Laureate Lecture - The Kids Are Not Alright- which calls for the reading of physical books to made a central part of childhood. Soap writer and aficionado Sharon Marshall on how long-running television dramas are employing bold storytelling techni...

The Devil Wears Prada 2 director David Frankel on why it was time to bring the old gang back together again. David Haig's new play "Magic" imagines the real life friendship between Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A new play "Stage Kiss" looks at what kissing on stage entails. Playwright Sarah Ruhl and actress Emma Fielding discuss how to do it well (and badly). And Luke Roberts, lecturer in Mo...

Critics Larushka Ivan-Zadeh and Ludovic Hunter-Tilney join Tom to review Half Man, Richard Gadd’s follow up to his hit Baby Reindeer. They also discuss Anne Hathaway as a faded pop star looking to make a comeback in supernatural thriller Mother Mary. Plus they assess Deborah Levy’s book My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein: a fiction. To celebrate Shakespeare's birthday, author and translator Dani...

A new biopic chronicles one of the 20th century’s biggest and most controversial music icons, but appears not to paint the whole picture about his life. We discuss Antoine Fuqua's Michael, which stars the pop legend Michael Jackson's nephew Jaafar in the lead role. Stand and Deliver is a National Theatre of Scotland production which tells the story of a legendary industrial dispute. In 1981, worke...

Primavera, a new film about Vivaldi tells the story of his composing for pupils of an institution for abandoned girls. We speak to the film's director Damiano Michieletto, better known as an award-winning opera director, about his film and about Vivaldi himself. The Music is Black is the inaugural exhibition at London’s new V&A East Museum and it celebrates 125 years of Black British music. Le...

Director Charlotte Regan on her new BBC thriller, Mint Have heterosexual male novelists stopped writing sex scenes? We discuss with writer Luke Kennard, author of Black Bag, and editor of the Erotic Review Lucy Roeber. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage plays live in studio with his band L.Y.R. Video game writer and critic Cara Ellison joins us to run through the highlights from the recent BAFTA Games A...

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by reviewers Dreda Say Mitchell and Viv Groskop to consider Lena Dunham's controversial memoir - Famesick. A new adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - directed by Clint Dyer at London's Old Vic Theatre. And Dan "Schitts Creek" Levy has a new dark comedy series on Netflix; "Big Mistakes"

Scottish Ballet's Starstruck honours Gene Kelly's creative legacy and his passion for creating "dance for the common man". His wife Patricia Ward Kelly tells us about this fusion of ballet, jazz, tap and tango danced to the music of Chopin, Ravel and Gerswhin. As the winner of the inaugural Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing is announced as Adam Weymouth for his book Lone Wolf, about a journey fro...

Jack Savoretti sings a song from his latest album We Will Always Be The Way We Were, which is leading the race to top the charts this week. David Szalay's Booker Prize-wnnning novel Flesh is currently at the centre of a debate around inspiration and homage, as critics point to similarities between his novel and Stanley Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon. Literary critics Aled Maclean-Jones and Alex Clark...

Mark Gatiss takes on the role he's always wanted to play, the lead in Brecht's Hitler satire The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. As the Government considers charging tourists to visit England's national museums, we discuss these proposals with TV executive and arts advocate Sir Peter Bazalgette, who’s been an advisor to the DCMS, and Alison Cole - Director, The Cultural Policy Unit think tank. As sh...

On the review show this week: critics Muriel Zagha and Tahmima Anam review Francois Ozon's film The Stranger., based on the Albert Camus novel which has often been described as unfilmable. Amitav Ghosh's novel Ghost Eye, set in India and dealing with parallel timelines, multiple global locations, environmental catastrophe and a young girl with mysterious powers. Jim Jarmusch's latest film Father M...

Writer and director John Morton, one of the team behind 2012 and W1A, on the new comedy Twenty Twenty Six, set in the run up to this year's football World Cup. Artist Lachlan Goudie's new book The Secrets of Painting explores the creative big bangs in art over the centuries which have given us artistic movements - from Giotto and Rembrandt's use of oil paint to Berthe Morisot's use of an outdoor e...

Writer Daisy Goodwin on Victoria: A Queen Unbound. Was the marriage between Victoria and Albert as idyllic as it has been portrayed? Her new play explores the idea that Prince Albert exerted coercive control over Queen Victoria. Following the launch of the Official UK Christian & Gospel Singles Chart, we speak to the founder of the chart's partner organisation, O'Neil Dennis, and Mobo winning...

100 years ago, inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated his new 'televisor' to the public for the first time. In this special edition of Front Row, Samira Ahmed and guests explore the origins of television in the UK, charting how those early experimental days set a template for this exciting new medium. Guests: TV producer and historian Professor John Wyver, whose new book Magic Rays of Light tells...

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by critics Tim Robey and Nancy Durrant to review: Robert Pattinson and Zendaya's new film The Drama about a young couple in the lead up to their wedding. Life of Pi author Yann Martel's novel Son of Nobody about a newly discovered classic text with the story partly told in footnotes. And from the creator of Mum and Him and Her, Stefan Golaszewski's new BBC drama series Babi...

In venues around the UK and here on BBC Radio 4 and on BBC Sounds, it’s Live Comedy Day today – a celebration of live comedy and grassroots clubs. We’re joined by two of the cast of the new Saturday Night Live UK, Emma Sidi and Hammed Animashaun, and by Amanda Dwyer, who won the Sir Billy Connolly Spirit of Glasgow Award at the Glasgow Comedy Festival this weekend, to discuss the stand-up landscap...

Writer Robert Macfarlane on the world underground as a new documentary, Underland, inspired by his award-winning book of the same name is released in cinemas. The film explores how mankind has often explored some of the spaces miles beneath our feet. Dancer and choreographer Meryl Tankard on creating a new work, Echoes of '78, which pairs the original dancers of a work created by German choreograp...

Lesley Manville, on appearing in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at London's National Theatre Art In Space: As Nasa prepares to send people back to the Moon, former astronauts Helen Sharman and Cady Coleman talk us through the books & music they took with them into space. Do classicists underestimate how difficult it is to read Homer's Odyssey? Ahead of Christopher Nolan's new adaption, we'll discuss...

On this week's review show, critic and broadcaster Rhianna Dhillon and fashion historian and writer Amber Butchart join Tom Sutcliffe to discuss Riz Ahmed's new comedy series Bait, which follows a struggling actor who auditions for the role of James Bond and has to deal with the fallout. They give their verdicts on Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at the V&A in London, featuring the work of d...

Actor Forbes Masson on the National Theatre of Scotland's stage musical revival of cult sitcom The High Life in which he starred alongside Alan Cumming as air stewards working the commuter route between London and Scotland. The writers behind the hotly anticipated whodunnit novel The Ending Writes Itself - billed as being by Evelyn Clarke but in fact written by Cat Clarke and VE Schwab - talk abou...

The much anticipated, Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning medical drama The Pitt finally hits HBO max screens in the UK this week. Samira talks to lead actor Noah Wyle who plays Dr ‘Robby’ Robinavitch, about being back in a high octane emergency department drama decades after making his name as Dr Carter in ER. The Elizabethan composer John Dowland died 400 years ago this month. Next weekend there...

The UK now has its own SNL, 50 years after the US original. But is it funny? Culture journalist Natalie Jamieson gives her verdict. As the BFI begins a season of boxing films, we explore why the sport has inspired so much influential cinema, with BFI curator Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka and boxing broadcaster Steve Bunce. Phil Dunster, best known for his role in Ted Lasso, discusses his new comedy Roo...