Front Row

HG Wells’ classic novel The War of the Worlds has been adapted many times including the infamous occasion on which Orson Welles’ radio version convinced some American citizens that Martians really were invading the Earth . Now a new BBC TV version is coming, with a female narrator and subtexts about empire and climate change. Writer Peter Harness talks to Front Row about the choices he’s made for...

Emilio Estevez discusses his forthcoming film The Public which he has written, directed and stars in, along with Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater, set in Cincinnati Public Library in the middle of winter. 100 Novels That Shaped Our World have just been chosen by a panel including Front Row presenter Stig Abell. The list is part of a BBC Arts season celebrating 300 years since the publication of R...

Emilia Clarke talks about her new film Last Christmas, inspired by the music of George Michael and destined to be one of the major movies of the season. It's written by and also stars Emma Thompson. Emilia plays a young woman who accepts a job as a department store elf during the holidays. She also discusses starring in Game of Thrones and overcoming a stroke whilst filming. Theatre critic and aut...

Alison Balsom, Britain's leading trumpet soloist, talks about her new album Royal Fireworks, a collection of Baroque pieces by Bach, Telemann, Handel and Purcell, played on the "natural" trumpet, a baroque instrument without any valves, which means that each note is made by the shape of the lips. The inaugural Drake YolanDa British Producer and Songwriter Prize has been won by the jazz musician Fe...

With a reported budget of $160m, Martin Scorsese returns to the familiar territory of The Mob and organised crime in America in his new Netflix film The Irishman. The three-and-a-half-hour-long drama spans 50 years and reunites Scorsese with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci for the first time in 24 years, alongside Harvey Keitel and Al Pacino. Briony Hanson has been to see if for Front Row and can tel...

New Amazon Original docudrama The Report sees an idealistic Washington staffer played by Adam Driver tasked by his senator boss to lead an investigation of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, which was created in the aftermath of 9/11. His relentless pursuit of the truth leads to explosive findings that uncover the lengths to which the nation’s top intelligence agency went to destroy ev...

Patti Smith, legendary musician and poet, looks back at a troubled year, 2016, in a new memoir, Year of the Monkey. Director Tom Harper discusses his new film The Aeronauts set in 1862, starring Eddie Redmayne as a pioneering meteorologist and Felicity Jones as a balloon pilot, who attempt to advance knowledge of the weather and fly higher than anyone in history. As a horror film The Shining is a...

Screenwriter Jack Thorne discusses his new HBO/BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, said to be the BBC's most expensive drama yet. Ken Loach’s new film Sorry We Missed You concerns a parcel delivery driver and his carer wife as they try to make ends meet, and the effect of that struggle on their family. Scottee reviews this portrayal of the gig economy on working lives. The 19th...

In their new film, The Good Liar, Ian McKellen plays Roy Courtnay, a con artist who when he meets Betty McLeish, a well-to-widow played by Helen Mirren, can't believe his luck. Sir Ian talks to John Wilson about this role, which involves playing someone who is himself acting. Guilt, a new 4-part BBC Two drama set in Edinburgh, stars Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives as two very different brothers who fi...

Recorded in front of an audience at the Barbican Theatre in Plymouth, Sarah Gosling introduces and showcases the artists and performers making a name for themselves in Devon, in collaboration with BBC Music Introducing. Grace Lightman is an electropop singer whose debut album Silver Eater is about an alien stranded on earth. BBC Music Introducing artist Grace performs her lead track Repair Repair...

David Baddiel has had a varied career. He's been a (Wembley Arena-filling) stand-up comedian, a chart-topping performer (3 times with the same song Three Lions), a TV chat show presenter, a prize-winning children's author, creator of highly-acclaimed shows about his family, prolific twitter presence and now he's a playwright with his first production God's Dice opening at London's Soho Theatre. Ap...

Harry Hill's Clubnite is a new cabaret TV show from the comedian featuring his choice of comic entertainers. Harry talks to Stig about what he looks for in comedians, what makes him laugh and the nature of surrealism. The greatly renowned theatre director Peter Brook is 94 and has just written a book, Playing by Ear, reflecting on sound and music. He talks to Front Row about the flow of a Shakespe...

Multi BAFTA-winning writer Jack Thorne returns to our TV screens tonight with the latest in his trilogy exploring life in modern Britain. "The Accident" on Channel 4, starring Sarah Lancashire, is set in a small Welsh town in the aftermath of a industrial disaster. We talk to the writer about anger, blame and justice as the community faces up to some difficult truths. 2020 looks to be a vintage ye...

Bruce Springsteen is about to release a film of his latest album, Western Stars. In the hayloft of his 100-year-old barn in New Jersey, he performs the album alongside a full orchestra, featuring brass, banjo, accordion and steel guitar. Kate Mossman, features editor of The New Statesman, reviews the film which coincides with the singer's 70th birthday. The death was announced last week of the Ame...

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Berlin Film Festival, By the Grace of God is Francois Ozon's new feature film about sexual abuse hidden by the Catholic Church in France. Briony Hanson reviews. The young artist Joy Labinjo discusses her new exhibition Our Histories Cling to Us at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. Her large oil paintings draw on Labinjo's personal experi...

David Attenborough's new documentary series Seven Worlds, One Planet has been four years in the making, we speak to Bertie Gregory, a wildlife cameraman who was at the heart of the show. The new retrospective of the work of the pioneering artist Bridget Riley at the Hayward Gallery in London features over 200 works spanning her 70-year career. Louisa Buck reviews the exhibition that features Riley...

There is much concern about the loss of biodiversity. But what of the linguistic and cultural ecosystem? It is thought that half of the world's 7,000 languages might not survive into the next century. Stig Abell talks to Chris McCabe, editor of Poems from the Edge of Extinction, an anthology of poems from around the world in languages under threat , and to Laura Tohe, poet laureate of the Navajo N...

Gavin Hood, director of Tsotsi and Eye in the Sky, discusses his new film Official Secrets, which stars Keira Knightley as the GCHQ whistleblower who was taken to court by the British government for leaking a top secret email to the press in the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003. Next week The Louvre Museum in Paris opens a major exhibition on Leonardo da Vinci to commemorate the 500th anniversary o...

Having won several album of the year awards for his recording of works by J.S Bach, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson performs and talks about reinventing Bach for a new generation. This year the highest accolade in British architecture, the Stirling Prize, has been awarded for the first time to a social housing development. Social housing as places of crime and deprivation have been commonplace...

Aisling Bea, writer and star of the recent hit Channel 4 comedy This Way Up, on her new Netflix drama Living with Yourself, in which she plays the wife of a man who undergoes a mysterious treatment only to discover that he has been cloned and replaced by a better version of himself. With the surprise announcement last night that the Booker Prize was being awarded to two authors – Margaret Atwood a...

Ahead of the announcement of the 2019 Booker Prize winner tonight, it's the final Front Row Booker Prize Book Group with shortlisted author Margaret Atwood, in which she meets a group of readers to discuss The Testaments, her long awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Last year, Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford sold a single work for $12m, the highest-ever auction price achieved by a living Afric...

Sienna Miller discusses her latest role as a mother whose daughter goes missing, in her new film American Woman, directed by Jake Scott. Our latest Front Row Booker Prize Book Group puts its questions to shortlisted author Elif Shafak about her novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World which tells the story of Leila, a woman whose body has died, but whose mind has a precious ten minutes to...

Mary Beard meets the acclaimed Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood. As her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale – The Testaments – is published, in a wide-ranging encounter Mary talks to her about how Gilead has changed almost 35 years on from the original book; how the cloak which features in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale has become a symbol of protest around the world; about her responses to t...

The Swedish Academy today announced the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Winners, not winner, because, embroiled in a scandal over allegations of sexual assault by the husband of one of its members, the Academy delayed last year’s prize until today. The 2019 winner is Austrian writer Peter Handke, a controversial figure, one of whose early plays was called Offending the Audience, and 2018...

The latest Front Row Booker Prize Book Group features Salman Rushdie answering listeners’ questions about his shortlisted novel Quichotte, a satire on current politics, the opioid crisis and the influence of popular culture that’s also been praised for its touching study of family relationships. Playwright Katori Hall, whose previous plays include Tina: The Tina Turner Musical and The Mountaintop,...