Front Row

Live magazine programme on the worlds of arts, literature, film, media and music

The Midnight Sky is George Clooney’s post-apocalyptic new film, which he directs and stars in alongside Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo. Is this Clooney’s Magnum Opus? Larushka Ivan-Zadeh reviews Eight years since its announcement and after several delays, futuristic roleplaying game Cyberpunk 2077 is released across consoles and PC this week. Its Warsaw-based studio CD Projekt is famous for The...

Writer and director Julia Hart joins Samira to talk about I'm Your Woman, a gritty crime drama set in the 1970s. Rachel Brosnahan (Marvellous Mrs Maisel) stars as a woman forced to go on the run after her husband betrays his partners, sending her and her baby on a dangerous journey. Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera Owen Wingrave was written for television and first appeared on BBC Two in 1971. Gra...

Ryan Murphy’s new film, The Prom, bursts into song and dance as four down-on-their-luck Broadway stars descend on a small Indiana town in support of a girl who just wants to go to the high school Prom with her girlfriend. The cast includes Meryl Streep, James Corden and Nicole Kidman and the critical reception in the US has been polarised; what does our reviewer Karen Krizanovich make of it? When...

Viggo Mortensen joins us live to talk about his new film, Falling, his debut as a director, which he also wrote. It's the story of a conservative father moving from his rural farm to live with his gay son's family in Los Angeles. We’ve been hearing from figures from the creative industries about their Lockdown Discovery, something that has given them great pleasure or solace during the two lockdow...

The fourth in the Netflix series of The Crown, written by Peter Morgan and starring Olivia Coleman as the Queen, has raised questions about its historical accuracy, including from Britain’s Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden. Award winning novelist Naomi Alderman and journalist Simon Jenkins discuss the controversy in the context of the number of recent dramas set in the very recent past about real p...

Seventeen years after achieving global success with her debut album, Katie Melua talks about her latest record Album No.8, and how she took a course in short fiction writing before embarking on the lyrics. Plus she performs a special acoustic performance for Front Row. British-Ghanaian artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints 'figments': portraits of fictitious people constructed from memory and fantas...

Yazz Ahmed, trumpeter and composer, and winner of the Innovation Award at tonight’s Ivors Awards, joins us in the studio. Yazz’s music blends jazz, arabic scales and rhythms, electronics, and the music of Bahrain, where she spent her childhood. Francis Ford Coppola's first two Godfather films are considered cinematic masterpieces, but The Godfather Part III never received such acclaim. Thirty year...

As museums and galleries in tiers one and two prepare to reopen on Wednesday, we consider what the future might look like for these much loved institutions. Has the pandemic changed their fundamental purpose or merely accelerated shifts that had already begun? What might museums and galleries look like as physical and social entities in ten years’ time? To explore these questions, Kirsty is joined...

Avi Avital., the world's leading mandolin player, on his new album The Art of the Mandolin, in which he performs music specially written for the instrument by Vivaldi, Beethoven and Scarlatti through to contemporary composers David Bruce and Giovanni Sollima. Yesterday the Government announced which areas of England will be in Tiers 1, 2 or 3. For theatres and live performance venues in Tier 3 it'...

The actress Amy Adams is one of Hollywood’s brightest stars with multiple Oscar nominations and a roster of unforgettable roles to her name from the adorable pregnant teenager in Junebug, to the lovable Disney Princess in Enchanted, to full on 1970s disco in American Hustle. Now she’s taken on the distinctly un-glamorous role of a drug addicted mother in the movie version of the best-selling memoi...

Roy Williams joins Samira Ahmed to talk about Death of England: Delroy. Just before Lockdown 2, this play’s opening night became its closing night. The understudy Michael Balogun had just stepped into the role. Luckily the press and audience loved it, and the film of that performance will be available on the National Theatre’s youtube channel this Friday. Directed by Clint Dyer, and written by Roy...

We exclusively reveal and analyse the 2020 Costa Book Prize shortlists. Critics Alex Clark and Jade Cuttle discuss the books chosen in the five categories: Novel, First Novel, Poetry, Biography and Children's fiction. Category winners will appear on the programme in January and Front Row will announce the overall prize-winner on 26 January 2021. Guy Garvey from Elbow reports on what he said to MPs...

On Front Row last week, Douglas Stuart was awarded the 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction for Shuggie Bain, his debut novel about a boy in 1980s Glasgow who supports his mother as she struggles with addiction. Tonight Douglas Stuart talks in-depth with John Wilson about his extraordinary journey from Glasgow to becoming a fashion designer in New York and now a best-selling novelist, after being rejecte...

Tim Minchin - the Australian actor, comedian, performer, musician, and composer and lyricist of the Olivier Award-winning RSC stage show Matilda The Musical – discusses his first solo album Apart Together, the themes he chooses to reflect on, and his approach to composition. Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 are in the shops. The much-anticipated new generation of gaming consoles has arrived seven y...

Live from the Roundhouse, London, Front Row brings you the 2020 Booker Prize ceremony. Who will be the winner of the £50,000 prize for fiction in this extraordinary year? Taking part in the socially distanced proceedings will be Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, last year's winners Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo, chair of judges Margaret Busby, HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, former President of the Unite...

Gillian Anderson on her technique for perfecting Margaret Thatcher’s distinctive voice in the fourth season of The Crown, and the recent debate the TV series has ignited over what is fact and fiction. South Georgia is a remote, windswept and icy Antarctic island, with no permanent population. But much of the industrial whaling industry was based here until the 1960s, when there were scarcely any w...

Patrick is a black comedy from Belgium set in a woodland nudist camp. After his father dies and leaves him to run the campsite, Patrick’s favourite hammer is stolen, and he finds himself on an existential quest as he attempts to recover his beloved tool. The film is by Tim Mielants who directed the third series of Peaky Blinders. Briony Hanson gives us her verdict. The Dublin residence known as Th...

Fela Kuti was the creator of Afrobeat – a blend of traditional Yoruba and Caribbean music with funk and jazz that exhilarated the global music scene in the 1970s and gave rise more recently to the Afrobeats scene from Burna Boy to Tiwa Savage. A new documentary by the Nigerian novelist and playwright Biyi Bandele aims to chart Fela Kuti’s rise to fame and politicisation in 1960s Lagos and the US....

The Simpsons is the longest running scripted primetime TV show ever. As season 31 kicks off in the UK we explore its potent popularity with comedian and fan David Baddiel and writer, producer, and story editor on thes how Tim Long who’s worked on more than 450 episodes Photographer Simon Phipps discusses his book Brutal North, a celebration of modernist and brutalist architecture in the north of E...

We conclude our tour of the novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020 tonight with a final book group where listeners put their questions to Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life. A campus novel and a coming-of-age story, it tells the experiences of a gay, Black doctoral student in a predominantly White, PhD programme at a supposedly enlightened American university. With part of Sir Malcolm Arnol...

Tana French is the creator of the Dublin Murder Squad crime books, that inspired the 2019 BBC TV series. Her gritty urban mysteries have been translated into 37 languages and sold around 7m copies worldwide, gaining praise from the likes of Stephen King and Marian Keyes. Her latest novel, The Searcher, moves the action to rural Ireland for the first time. A retired Chicago police officer reluctant...

The cellist and singer Abel Selaocoe grew up in a township in the south of Johannesburg and creates music that draws on classical, African and contemporary music. He talks to Samira about As You Are, the music he’s composed for Opera North’s sound-walks in Leeds and about the celebration of music from Africa which he’s leading in collaboration with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at this year's London...

Ulysses, Hercules, Jason and Achilles - classical mythology is all about men of action. The women tend to have things - often horrible - happen to them: they get kidnapped, raped, abandoned. The Roman poet Ovid wrote a series of fictional letters, The Heroides, giving voice to these put-upon women. 15 leading British dramatists, all women or non-binary, have drawn on Ovid, recasting their stories...

The death of Geoffrey Palmer was announced today. Two of his leading co-stars, Dame Judi Dench and Wendy Craig, pay tribute. Ruth Wilson plays the sinister and ruthlessly ambitious Mrs Coulter in the BBC’s lavish adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. We catch up with her as series two begins to discuss the relationship with her estranged daughter Lyra, working with a digital monkey, a...