Front Row

Allan Little visits the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, which re-opened last year after a £68 million transformation and is now a finalist for Art Fund Museum of the Year 2023. He talks to Director Duncan Dornan and Caroline Currie, Learning and Access curator. Ahead of their performance at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney which gets underway on Friday we have a live performance from members of the...

Author and former data scientist, Cecilia Rabess joins Samira Ahmed to discuss her debut novel, Everything’s Fine, which explores the unlikely and complicated relationship between a liberal black woman working in the world of investment banking and her conservative white male colleague, during the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Following yesterday’s announcement that the Epstein T...

Surprising musicals: new musicals are packing in audiences - and some with quite unlikely subjects. Whilst the classic Broadway musical, like 42nd Street, Guys and Dolls, and Oklahoma!, remain as popular as ever, there’s now a musical based on Bake Off, and the plot of Operation Mincemeat is itself a plot - to hoodwink the Nazis with a corpse in disguise. Critic David Benedict, Natasha Hodgson, co...

Gaming isn’t just something you play, it is also a spectator sport! Comedian and streamer Ellie Gibson and journalist and gamer Marie Le Conte join us to discuss the cultural phenomenon of game streaming. Linton Stephens, bassoonist and presenter of Radio 3’s Classical Fix, and filmmaker and journalist Catherine Bray join Front Row to review Chevalier, the new film about the life of the French-Car...

The Liverpool Biennial, the UK’s largest contemporary visual arts festival, begins this weekend. Arts journalist Laura Robertson reviews, and the curator of the biennial, Khanyisile Mbongwa, discuss coming up with this year’s theme – uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost things – which reflects on Liverpool’s history as a slave port but also provides a sense of hope and joy. Nobel Prize-winning Italian...

Rufus Wainwright talks to Samira Ahmed about his new album Folkocracy, a collection of reimagined Folk songs. The album includes collaborations with artists including John Legend, Chaka Khan and his sister Martha Wainwright. Thomas Hardiman talks about his new film Medusa Deluxe, a gritty murder mystery set at a hairdressing competition. He explains where his unusual idea came from and why he uses...

Charles Byrne was an 18th-century “Irish giant” whose skeleton was stolen and put on display against his wishes. 240 years after his death, he is being remembered in a new electro acoustic opera rather than as a museum-piece curiosity. Dawn Kemp of the Hunterian Museum discusses removing the famous skeleton from their collection, and composer, musician, and robotic artist Sarah Angliss tells us ab...

Critics Katie Puckrik and Michael Carlson join Front Row to review the exhibition Punk: Rage and Revolution at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery and Soft Touch Arts. The American writer and director Tina Satter talks about her new film Reality, starring Sydney Sweeney. The script is based on the transcript of the FBI interrogation of the whistleblower Reality Winner, who leaked secret documents abo...

Writer/director Shane Meadows and actor Michael Socha on the new BBC TV adaptation of Benjamin Myers' novel, The Gallows Pole. The Mercury Music Prize-nominated minimal jazz trio GoGo Penguin play tracks from their new album, Everything Is Going To Be OK, live in the studio – and discuss how they alter their instruments to extend their range of sound. As the interests and concerns of the First Nat...

Broadway legend Chita Rivera, who made her name playing Anita in the original stage production of West Side Story, talks to Samira Ahmed about the highlights of her seven decade career, ahead of the publication of her memoir. Arts consultant Amanda Parker, formerly editor of Arts Professional magazine and now of the Forward Institute, and theatre director Tom Morris, who until recently ran Bristol...

The Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks on 22 June 1948 from Jamaica. Front Row marks the artistic and cultural contribution of a generation of people from the Caribbean, now characterised as the Windrush Generation, who arrived then, soon before or in the years following. Samira talks to the Jamaican-born actor and director Anton Phillips about his career, including starring in the cult clas...

The Jhalak Prize is an annual literary prize for British or British-Resident writers of colour, established in 2016. Previous winners include Reni Eddo-Lodge and Johny Pitts. Tom speaks to the winners of this year’s Jhalak Prize and Jhalak Children’s and Young Adult Prize, announced at the British Library this evening. This week Tate Britain revealed a complete rehang of its free collection displa...

Patriots, Peter Morgan’s play set in Russia in 1991, traces the rise and fall of Boris Berezovsky, who helped Vladimir Putin take power. As Patriots transfers to the West End, Allan Little – who as the BBC’s Moscow correspondent met Berezovsky – talks to the director Rupert Goold and Will Keen, winner of an Olivier Award for his performance as Vladimir Putin. The V&A Photography Centre opens t...

Sparks, the American pop duo formed in 1960s Los Angeles, are back with their 26th album, The Girl is Crying in her Latte. Samira Ahmed meets brothers Ron and Russell Mael to discuss how Cate Blanchett came to be dancing in the music video for the title track and their extraordinary longevity. E. M. Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View is being dramatised for Radio 4, as is the novel The Ballad...

Singer songwriter Arlo Parks talks about following her highly acclaimed first album with a new release, My Soft Machine, which includes a collaboration with American musician Phoebe Bridgers. Film director James Bluemel discusses his new documentary, Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, which reflects on the troubles using human stories. He’s joined by Craig Murray, curator of the Imperial War Mu...

Caleb Azumah Nelson’s debut novel, Open Water, won the Costa First Novel award and critical acclaim. He joins Front Row to talk about his second, Small Worlds, the story of a young musician looking for his own space in the streets of Peckham, finding his way with love, family and his Ghanaian heritage. The exhibition China’s Hidden Century at the British Museum is billed as a world first, bringing...

Chuck D on his watercolour art. He is regarded as one of hip-hop's greatest MCs with his powerful lyrical dexterity a key component in Public Enemy's international success, but what is less well known is that visual art was his first passion. It's a love that he has returned to in recent years and he joins Front Row to discuss the first collection of his watercolour and pen paintings. Plus author...

Samira Ahmed talks to Priya Khanchandani, the curator of The Offbeat Sari, an exhibition of contemporary saris at the Design Museum in London. The art critic Louisa Buck and the journalist James Marriott consider the vexed politics of museum labels. Mat Osman, bass player with the band Suede, joins Samira to discuss his new novel, The Ghost Theatre, which dramatises the lives of boy actors in 1601...

Brokeback Mountain on stage: musician and librettist Dan Gillespie Sells discusses writing the songs for a new stage production of Brokeback Mountain, adapted from Annie Proulx’s short story about the romance between two men working as sheep herders in 1960s Wyoming. Venice Architecture Biennale: the exhibition at the British Pavilion this year draws on traditions practised by different diaspora c...

In 2021, June Givanni was presented with the British Independent Film Awards Special Jury Prize for what was described as “an extraordinary, selfless and lifelong contribution to documenting a pivotal period of film history” with her extensive archive focussed on African and African diaspora cinema. The archive is now the subject of a new exhibition - PerAnkh: The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Ar...

Louise Kennedy's debut novel Trespasses has been shortlisted for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction. Set in Belfast in 1975 at the height of the Troubles it traces the love affair between a young Catholic schoolteacher and an older man, a married Protestant barrister. Front Row will be talking to the authors on the shortlist in the weeks before the announcement of the prize on June 14th. Musici...

Samira Ahmed speaks to John Cook, Professor of Media at Glasgow Caledonian University about his discovery of a previously unknown early version of the seminal screenplay The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter. Samira is also joined in the studio by Ken Trodd, who co-produced The Singing Detective for television. Music writer Cathi Unsworth discusses her new book, Season of the Witch: The Book of G...

Recorded at the Hornby Library inside Liverpool Central Library, in front of a live audience, as Liverpool gears up to host The Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of Ukraine. Two novelists from The Big Eurovision Read, a list of 12 books from The Reading Agency and BBC Arts talk to Nick Ahad about the unifying power of music: Pete Paphides on his autobiography Broken Greek, A story of chip shops an...

Merseyside-native Jonathan Harvey discusses his new play, A Thong For Europe, which combines his love of Liverpool with his passion for Eurovision to create an exuberant comedy where the Eurovision final really does become a family affair. And this week our panel of cultural critics review two debuts - Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks’s first novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture M...

Jack Thorne talks about his new play, The Motive and the Cue, which is about John Gielgud directing Richard Burton in a 1960s production of Hamlet on Broadway. He discusses the relationship between the two famous figures in the world of stage and screen. Composers Debbie Wiseman and Sarah Glass, who have both been commissioned to write music for the King’s Coronation, discuss composing for a landm...