Front Row

Graham Norton is one of the most successful entertainment presenters in British broadcasting. He has a popular Radio 2 show, is the face of the BBC's Eurovision song contest coverage and, above all, his Friday night BBC1 chat show draws the biggest names to his sofa. His shows have won him nine BAFTAs and he begins a new series on BBC1 tomorrow. His journey is a fascinating one: raised in county C...

Miss Virginia is a new film based on the story of Virginia Walden Ford’s fight to create positive educational opportunities for African-American students in Washington D.C. and stars Uzo Aduba. Elle Osili-Wood reviews. Australian singer Helen Reddy has died at the age of 77. Her biggest hit, I am Woman, became an anthem for the feminist movement. Writer Lucy O’Brien was an admirer and a fan, and s...

The 17th Century Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi is the subject of a major new exhibition at London's National Gallery. Critic Waldemar Januszczak considers the importance of the artist who struggled against the male Establishment, but who gained fame, patronage and adoration in her lifetime. No Masks is a new co-production between Sky Arts and the Theatre Royal Stratford East; a TV drama bas...

Earlier today the shortlist for the 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction was announced. Two time winner Hilary Mantel has not made the list for the final part of her Cromwell series and four out of six of the books chosen are by debut authors. John speaks to Chair of Judges Margaret Busby and critics Sara Collins and Toby Lichtig give their verdict on the chosen few. Today Arts Council England published...

Michael Kiwanuka said he was seriously surprised when he won the 2020 Mercury Prize last week. Tom Sutcliffe talks to the singer-songwriter about dropping out of his music degree, hanging out in Hawaii with Kanye West and asks why such modesty when his self-titled album had rave reviews on release, and reached number 2 in the charts. Director Joe Mantello on his new film version of The Boys in the...

Dove Cottage Grasmere is the heart of Romantic poetry and is hosting part of this year's Contains Strong Language festival. We'll be asking what the Romantics have to tell us now, with the poet Kate Clanchy who has adapted Samuel Taylor Coleridge's unfinished poem Christabel with a newly commissioned score by composer Katie Chatburn. Novelist, poet and playwright Zosia Wand was born in London but...

David McKee has just been named as the recipient of the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award 2020. Author and illustrator of the Elmer books which with vivid colour and humour make a case for inclusion and acceptance, and the creator of the magical Mr Benn, he also wrote and illustrated Not Now, Bernard, a funny and perceptive plea for children not to be ignored. Now 85, he is still working. Front...

Doctor Foster creator, Mike Bartlett, has come up with a new drama for BBC1. Set in Manchester, Life follows the stories of the residents of a large house divided into four flats, and explores love, loss, birth and death, and features some of the characters from Doctor Foster. Nick Ahad reviews. Channing Godfrey Peoples talks about writing and directing her debut film, Miss Juneteenth, about a bea...

Lead singer of Britpop band Skunk Anansie, Skin has headlined Glastonbury, sold millions of albums, and recently competed in The Masked Singer. As her memoir, Skin - It takes Blood and Guts, is published, we ask her about channelling rage into her performances and if she thinks her achievements as queer black woman have been overlooked. After a six-month Covid delay, Plymouth’s new £40m arts and h...

Announced by Theresa May in 2018 and quickly dubbed the “Festival of Brexit”, submissions are now being made for the UK government funded £120 million festival that will celebrate British creativity in 2022. Creative director Martin Green tells us what kind of projects and ideas he’s looking for. Succession creator Jesse Armstrong on winning the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series at last night's aw...

The Los Angeles-based American artist Mark Bradford, who represented the USA at the Venice Biennale in 2017, discusses his new series of Quarantine Paintings. The three works – only available to view online – explore the nature of art in isolation and how he responded when his city was suddenly shut down unexpectedly. Nick Hornby, the writer who gave us Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy,...

Rocks is the new feature film directed by Sarah Gavron with a screenplay by Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson. Writer Niellah Arboine reviews the film which is set in Hackney with an ensemble cast of largely non-professional actors, and it tells the story of a teenage Londoner nicknamed Rocks who takes responsibility for her little brother Emmanuel in an attempt to stop them both from being taken in...

Twenty five years ago Bristol musician Tricky pioneered a new genre of downtempo hip-hop with his album Maxinquaye. As he releases his 14th studio album, Fall to Pieces, Tricky joins us from his Berlin studio. Live theatre returns to Northern Ireland this evening with the play Anything Can Happen: 1972 at The Playhouse in Londonderry, in which people whose lives were affected by the Troubles tell...

Nica Burns, owner of some of the biggest West End theatres, discusses her plan to re-open them in sequence from 22 October, starting with Adam Kay’s one man show This is Going to Hurt and, in November, the hit musical Six. But what about large-scale shows like Harry Potter or Everyone’s Talking About Jamie? Writer Dennis Kelly tells Samira about The Third Day, his new project starring Jude Law and...

David Tennant talks to Front Row about new ITV drama DES, in which he plays one of the most infamous serial killers in UK history, Dennis Nilsen - a civil servant who went undetected as he murdered boys and young men he met on the streets of London from 1978 to 1983. 2020 is the 15th anniversary of the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University. Tonight, with the help of judge Lucy C...

Diana Rigg has died aged 82. Her breakthrough role was as Mrs Emma Peel in The Avengers, going on to have a distinguished career across film, theatre and television with roles including as a Bond Girl in Her Majesty's Secret Service, Lady Macbeth at the National Theatre and Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. Charles Dance remembers the actress alongside Mark Gatiss who wrote an episode of Doctor Wh...

Tonight the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction is announced at a special virtual ceremony – the judgement delayed because of Covid 19. We talk to the winner live on air. How has the pandemic affected what viewers expect from the major arts broadcasters? We ask Director of Sky Arts Philip Edgar-Jones, whose channel becomes free to watch on the 17th of September and to Director of BBC Arts...

Andrew Lloyd Webber told MPs today that the arts are at the "point of no return". Also speaking to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee was Rebecca Kane Burton, chief exec of LW Theatres, who joins us to discuss the crisis, and Lucy Noble, chief exec of the Royal Albert Hall. Will performing venues be saved by the government's recently announced Operation Sleeping Beauty? Andrew O’Hagan...

The Venice Film Festival is currently underway, featuring films we’ll be seeing on our screens over the coming months. Jason Solomons is just back from the city and discusses the films to look out for and which to avoid! In light of some of the critical reaction to Christopher Nolan's new film Tenet, which found the film to be confusing and difficult to follow, we ask how much do you have to under...

The much-loved story of the Chinese warrior Mulan is the latest Disney animation to get a live-action remake. Its less a direct remake of the 1998 original and more a retelling of the Chinese folk legend of Hua Mulan with an all-Asian cast. There have been changes - no cute animated dragon or songs - are we going to love it as much? Find out with critic Gavia Baker Whitelaw. Lorna Sage was a much...

As major City firms and the likes of Facebook and Google allow their employees to work from home for the foreseeable future, does it herald the end of the office as we know it? And what does it mean for culture? From Working Girl to The Office, The Bell Jar to Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came To An End, the office has provided rich inspiration for the arts. We discuss the history of the office in cult...

Bernardine Evaristo on Girl, Woman, Other - shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize For Fiction. As Front Row continues our interviews with writers on the shortlist, the author talks to us about her Booker prize winning novel which follows 12 characters, most of them black British women, on an entwined journey of discovery. Ginette Vincendeau reviews Les Misérables, the French entry for the 2019 Ac...

Gavin & Stacey writer and actor Ruth Jones joins us to discuss her new novel Us Three, which follows the tumultuous friendship of three women over four decades. She shares the inspiration behind the book, how her screenwriting has influenced her novel writing and whether Gavin & Stacey will return to our screens… As many theatres remain shuttered due to Covid-19, those looking to get their...

Robert Macfarlane walks into the mountains, along ancient paths and down into caves and potholes. He has written beautiful and popular books about these - Mountains of the Mind, The Old Ways, Underland. He is concerned about the depletion of the natural world, and the language we use to speak of it. Landmarks is a lexicon of landscape and nature. When a new edition of a famous children's dictionar...

British artist Luke Jerram discusses his new work, In Memoriam, a large-scale outdoor installation designed specifically to be presented in large open and windy spaces, constructed from bed sheets flying from tall flagpoles arranged in a 36-metre wide circular formation. It was created as a temporary memorial to honour those we have lost during the Covid-19 pandemic and also in tribute to NHS staf...