Front Row

We mark the passing of Dame Vera Lynn, the Forces' Sweetheart, whose songs helped raise morale in World War Two. After Dame Vera's death, aged 103, was announced today, composer and author Neil Brand explores her unique musical gifts. Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe's critically acclaimed work brings a new approach to the classical guitar by experimenting with instruments and repertoire. His new alb...

Judd Apatow - famous for film comedies like Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin, and Trainwreck - on his new film The King Of Staten Island, which he co-wrote with Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson. Pete plays a young man trying to get his life together after the death of his fire-fighter father. Today the damage to UK theatre caused by the Coronavirus has really begun to show: major producer...

In 1923, African American author Jean Toomer published the novel Cane. It wasn’t a best seller at the time but is now held as a modernist classic and a central work of The Harlem Renaissance. A new radio adaptation is to be broadcast on Radio 4. We speak to playwright Janice Okoh and score composer, soul singer Carleen Anderson. Today is Bloomsday, when Dubliners celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses, t...

Tracey Emin discusses the creative burst she has experienced during lockdown, resulting in a series of new paintings created for an online exhibition called I Thrive on Solitude, the first time White Cube gallery has mounted an online exhibition. Alison Brackenbury is Front Row's new Lockdown Poet in Residence. She's written a series of poems inspired by the museums throughout the country which ha...

The Salisbury Poisonings, a new BBC One three-part drama, focuses on the 2018 Novichok poisonings, the public health response, and the heroism of the community. Writer Declan Lawn describes how his years as an investigative reporter for Panorama primed him to create this drama based on real events, and the resonance of the story with the government's response to the pandemic. Icelandic pianist Vík...

It’s as the clever but put-upon Will Mackenzie in The Inbetweeners or the elder son Adam in Friday Night Dinner that Simon Bird has come to public attention but now the star of these successful sitcoms has stepped behind the cameras to direct his first feature film. Simon joins Front Row to discuss Days of the Bagnold Summer. The death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minnesota Police has led t...

Robert Lindsay on his first acting job fifty years ago at the Nortcott Theatre in Devon, in a play which has contemporary resonance: Don Taylor's historical drama The Roses of Eyam, about the village that voluntarily put itself into lockdown during the Great Plague that swept Britain in the mid 17th Century. Director General Tony Hall discusses the BBC’s renewed commitment to the arts with its Cul...

Spike Lee’s new film Da 5 Bloods follows four African-American Vietnam veterans who served together in battle, who return to the country and reunite to locate their fallen squad leader. The writer and director discusses the Netflix film and how resonant many of its issues are particularly now, in the week of its release. Dr Daisy Fancourt is leading the UK’s biggest study looking at the impact the...

Michaela Coel, the double-BAFTA winning actor/writer/director of the TV series Chewing Gum, discusses her new show I May Destroy You, a 12-parter telling a story about one young woman’s date rape and her attempt to piece together what happened to her. Yesterday in Bristol the statue of Edward Colston, who made his fortune from slavery, was noosed, pulled from its plinth, dragged and rolled through...

Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson continues his weekly live performances from the empty Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, as Front Row’s Lockdown Artist in Residence. Tonight Víkingur plays his own transcription of J.S Bach’s cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde, BWV 54. David Greig talks about his new play Adventures With The Painted People - a first century romcom between a Pict and a Roman - whic...

Director Andrew Patterson joins us to talk about new movie The Vast of Night, the story of a small New Mexico town disturbed by lights in the sky and unidentified radio signals which is a loving homage to the sci-fi TV of the 1950s. The low budget, high concept film, which is Patterson’s directorial debut, is available on Amazon Prime. Writers Timberlake Wertenbaker and Winsome Pinnock talk about...

Michael Sheen and David Tennant play themselves in Staged, a new BBC One series of six 15-minute Zoom dramas, in which they play two furloughed actors in lockdown. Comedian and writer Viv Groskop reviews. The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, has released a new online portal to facilitate conversations about race and racism in America. Beverly Morgan-Welch,...

As public protests continue nationally and internationally, award-winning American artist Carrie Mae Weems - whose work explores race, identity, and power - joins Front Row to discuss the role of art in response to tragedies such as the death of George Floyd. Liz Lochhead, the former Makar, or National Poet of Scotland, performs a new poem written during the lockdown, called The Spaces Between. Ho...

Sitting In Limbo is a new BBC drama telling the story of one man’s entanglement with the Windrush scandal where legal migrants, some of whom had lived here for decades, were denied legal rights, threatened with deportation and some were wrongly deported. The drama tells the story of Anthony Bryan who came to the UK from Jamaica with his mother at the age of 8. Gaylene Gould reviews. Joanna Briscoe...

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own. On the eve of Radio 4’s adaptation of Woolf’s totemic study in the treatment of women across the generations we talk to Indira Varma who stars. The DJ Mr Switch, aka Anthony Culverwell, discusses Gabriel Prokofiev’s c...

Social distancing has become one of the key measures for controlling coronavirus, but implementing it is creating an existential threat to arts venues like theatres, museums, galleries, independent music venues and concert halls. With such vastly reduced capacity - as much as 90% - can venues ever make the finances stack up, and what is lost when the audience, and performers, must be so far apart?...

Bestselling author John Grisham on his new novel Camino Winds, a sequel to Camino Island, in which a coterie of crime authors discover one of their colleagues has been murdered during a hurricane. There are currently over 300 million John Grisham books in print worldwide, including A Time To Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief and The Client. With museums and galleries in Europe announcing their pre...

Tracee Ellis Ross is the daughter of Diana Ross and in 2017 became the first African-American woman to win a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV Comedy since 1983, for her sitcom Black-ish. She tells us about her new film The High Note, in which she plays a pop superstar looking to reinvigorate her career. Pushkin Press has partnered with Walter Iuzzolino from Channel 4’s ‘Walter Presents’ on a...

AM Homes won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013 for her novel May We Be Forgiven, beating off stellar competition from Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson, Barbara Kingsolver and Zadie Smith. Kirsty Lang has been finding AM's darkly comic novels and short stories perfect reading for the lockdown. Her writing penetrates contemporary America, with characters who are pulled apart by accidents, trauma, jealo...

For Front Row’s Friday review, the author Patrice Lawrence and film critic Hannah McGill consider two new options to stream. Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng’s bestselling novel set in 1997 suburban America and raising questions around class and race, has been made into a drama on Amazon Prime, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. The Icelandic director Grímur Hákonarson won acclaim...

Percy Bysshe Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. A new series of short plays written as we entered the lockdown aims to make playwrights the unacknowledged reporters of the coronavirus crisis. Playwright April de Angelis and Jeremy Herrin, Artistic Director of the theatre company, Headlong, discuss Unprecedented: Real Time Theatre from a State of Isolation – one of...

How serious is coronavirus for the survival for the performing arts long term? As a government inquiry begins this week, it’s expected that the performing arts that serve an audience in a confined space, such as theatre, music and dance, will take the longest to return to normal, and even then some of the damage may be irreversible. Caroline Norbury, chief executive of the Creative Industries Fede...

Many TV programmes are on hold during lockdown, but one production house is creating a multi-character series set on board a spaceship travelling through the farthest reaches of unchartered space, filmed in Supermarionation and in Super-Isolation. Creator Stephen La Rivière discusses Nebula-75, starring Gerry Anderson-style puppets. The entire enterprise is being made by a team of three friends in...

This evening's Front Row is packed: Tom Sutcliffe talks to a poet, a novelist, a graphic artist, a cultural entrepreneur and a dramatist - but he has only one guest. Inua Ellams is all of these. This week the National Theatre is streaming in its At Home series Ellams' play Barber Shop Chronicles. It sold out at the National twice and toured the UK and internationally to rave reviews. It is set in...

The new Netflix thriller White Lines takes the viewer to the sunshine and drug-fuelled world of 90s raves in Ibiza. A Spanish-British production, it stars Laura Haddock, Daniel Mays and Angela Griffin. For our Friday Review, Rowan Pelling and Gaylene Gould give their verdicts on that and Rainbow Milk, the debut novel by Paul Mendez, which depicts a childhood in the West Midlands where religion and...