Front Row

Lyricist Don Black looks back at his five decade career writing hit songs and musicals. The first British songwriter to win an Oscar, for Born Free in 1967, Don wrote many classic Bond Themes including Diamonds are Forever and Thunderball. As he publishes his autobiography The Sanest Guy in the Room: A Life in Lyrics, Don talks about his close friendship and working partnership with composer John...

Lovecraft Country is a new 10-episode HBO series, based on the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, set in 1950s Jim Crow America. The story is about a young African American man whose search for his missing father begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and also terrifying monsters that could be pulled from the pages of horror fiction writer H.P Lovecraft’s weird ta...

From Wednesday, opera lovers will again be able to watch performances at Glyndebourne Opera in East Sussex, although this year the summer festival will look rather different to comply with Covid restrictions. A much-reduced audience will be able to enjoy opera in the open air setting of its sumptuous gardens starting with Offenbach’s French farce, Mesdames de la Halle, in a new translation entitle...

Xiaolu Guo was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2013. She talks about her latest book A Lover’s Discourse, which is a story of love and language – and the meaning of home set at the time of the European referendum. With a nod to Roland Barthes’ book of the same name, Guo’s novel is told through conversations between a Chinese woman newly arrived in the UK and her Anglo-Germ...

To mark the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki this week, the Imperial War Museum commissioned artist and stage designer Es Devlin and her Japanese collaborator Machiko Weston to make a short film in memory of those who died. They discuss their resulting artwork, I Saw the World End. New Perspectives, the Midlands company that takes theatre to rural area...

Arts organisations in the West Midlands say the region is one of the worst hit by the Coronavirus pandemic. In Birmingham, despite emergency relief funding from the Arts Council, the Town Hall and Symphony Hall face cutting half of their workforce, while both the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the Hippodrome have announced substantial job losses. What impact does it have on a city when its cultu...

Front Row is featuring interviews with all the shortlisted authors for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction. Tonight, Maggie O'Farrell, whose novel Hamnet is about the son of William Shakespeare who died aged 11, an event thought to be the inspiration for Hamlet. In her novel, Maggie O’Farrell imagines the family life and tragedy of one of our greatest playwrights, about whom so little is known....

Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria discusses her screenplay for the latest big release from Sky Atlantic. Inspired by Anaïs Nin’s collection of erotic stories, Little Birds is set in the famous 'international zone' of Tangier. New York heiress Lucy Savage (Juno Temple) is fresh off the transatlantic steamer and ready for love and marriage in exotic climes. But when her h...

Barbara Kingsolver talks about her new book, How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) which is only her second collection of poetry. As well as offering practical advice (on knitting, getting divorced, doing nothing) the poems are about family, and making peace with life and death. Barbara also reflects on the redemptive power of art and poetry itself and celebrates the natural world whilst mourn...

Film director Alan Parker is remembered by Dick Clements and Ian La Frenais, who wrote The Commitments. Disney Producer Don Hahn (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King) joins Samira Ahmed to discuss his new documentary about the legendary lyricist Howard Ashman, who wrote Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid and part of Aladdin, before dying of Aids in 1991 at the age of forty, before Beauty and...

Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee discusses her new TV series - psychological thriller, The Deceived. In the drama, inspired by Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Dial M for Murder and other classic films of that time, a student falls for her married tutor and after a shocking death finds herself doubting her own mind. Sculptor Heather Phillipson on putting whipped cream and a cherry on Trafalagar Square’s Fourth...

In the run-up to the announcement of the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction on the 9th of September, Front Row will be hearing from each of the six novelists on this year’s shortlist. We begin today with Hilary Mantel, whose novel The Mirror and the Light is the conclusion of her wildly acclaimed Thomas Cromwell series, which began with Wolf Hall in 2009. Ai Wei Wei’s latest work has ope...

Shawanda Corbett, a ceramic artist and performer whose performances combine dance with music, prose and poetry, is the latest in our series of interviews with artists awarded a £10,000 Tate bursary in place of this year's Turner Prize. She was born with one arm and without legs and has developed a unique throwing technique in order to make pottery. Shawanda bases her vessels on people, referenced...

Nigerian British writer Irenosen Okojie has been announced as the winner of this year’s £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing. It was awarded for her story Grace Jones from her recent collection Nudibranch. We speak to her about the story. Kit de Waal discusses Supporting Cast, her new collection of short stories featuring characters from two of her earlier novels - the international bestseller...

Film director Mira Nair on A Suitable Boy - her six part BBC One adaptation of Vikram Seth's huge novel. Set in 1951 in newly independent, post-partition India, its cast of more than a hundred is entirely of Indian origin - the BBC’s first historical drama with no white characters. The book inspired Nair's film Monsoon Wedding, and she has long nursed an ambition to film it. How to Build a Girl is...

In July 2005 Anthony Walker an 18 year old black man was killed in a racist attack in Huyton, Merseyside. Jimmy McGovern’s new BBC drama Anthony - inspired by conversations with Gee Walker, Anthony's mother – is a 90 minute film looking at what his life might have been like had he lived. The story works backwards from him imagined at age 25 – married, a father and on his way to a successful career...

Oliver Stone has written or directed some of cinema's most powerful films - Midnight Express, Platoon, Scarface, Salvador, Natural Born Killers. Now he has written a memoir, Chasing the Light - How I fought my Way into Hollywood From the 1960s to Platoon. Making films, he tells Tom Sutcliffe, is his vocation, but getting them done...that's never come easily. Feeling betrayed by his parents' divorc...

An icon of 1960s feminism and freethinking, Nell Dunn – now in her 80s - author of Up The Junction, Poor Cow and Steaming talks to Tom Sutcliffe about The Muse, A Memoir of Love at First Sight about her friendship with a woman named Josie who inspired much of her work. Kelly O’Sullivan discusses her film Saint Frances which she has written and stars in as Bridget, a 34 year old whose life is trans...

Josephine Mackerras discusses her award winning first feature film, Alice, which she has directed, written and produced. Alice is living an enviable life in Paris with her handsome husband and young son. Then a card payment is refused, their bank account is empty and her husband disappears. He has spent their money using expensive escorts, which gives Alice an idea about how to save her home and h...

American actress Alfre Woodard on her powerful lead performance as a death row prison warden in Clemency, written and directed by Chinoye Chukwu, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The government has announced that live performance will be possible again in indoor venues from August. The London Symphony Orchestra has already experimented with socially distanced live perf...

Film director and writer Mike Hodges, of Get Carter fame, on his 1989 film Black Rainbow, starring Rosanna Arquette. Despite being critically acclaimed, it went straight to video, but has now been restored and re-released on DVD and streaming. Plus, the financial plight of freelance arts workers in the pandemic: the government has agreed a £1.57 billion rescue package for the arts, but how much wi...

How will community theatre companies help restore audience confidence to go back into theatres after the lockdown? And how do we measure how important they are in bringing people to watch live theatre? Alan Lane is director of Slung Low and Holly Lombardo leads the National Rural Touring Simon Stephenson gave up a career as a paediatric doctor to pursue a career in writing. His first novel Set My...

American country group The Chicks (formerly know as The Dixie Chicks), the biggest-selling U.S. female band of all time, talk about Gaslighter, their first album in fourteen years. Natalie Maines, lead vocalist, and Marti Maguire who plays the fiddle, reflect on the band’s outspoken political stances from the War in Iraq to Black Lives Matter and the effect these have had on their work. Actor Hamm...

Winona Ryder, John Turturro and Anthony Boyle star in a new Sky Atlantic drama The Plot Against America adapted by David Simon from Philip Roth’s alternate history which was first published in 2004. Jonathan Freedland reviews. Rachel De-Lahay brings her letter writing project to the Royal Court Theatre for a week-long online festival. My White Best Friend is Rachel's original letter to her white f...

The Kanneh-Masons are an extraordinarily musical family of seven siblings who spent lockdown together at their home in Nottingham and were filmed by BBC1's Imagine. Tonight we're joined by pianist Isata and cellist Sheku, who perform live from their home, and we also talk to their mother Kadie. Open air theatre performances with socially distanced audiences are allowed from tomorrow, and first out...