Front Row

Saxophonist Soweto Kinch has curated this year’s Koestler Arts exhibition, Another Me, featuring 150 artworks by inmates from a number of prisons and secure units across the UK. Kinch discusses the works, and performs a piece from his forthcoming album The Black Peril. As plans are unveiled for Galway’s year as 2020 European Capital of Culture, John talks to film producer Arthur Lappin and creativ...

A solid gold toilet reputedly worth £4.7 million has been stolen from Blenheim Palace. It's part of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's new exhibition Victory is Not an Option which remains open and combines a retrospective of his work along with some new pieces made especially for the Palace. Art critic Jacky Klein reviews and reports on the latest from the theft. Brad Pitt stars in the film A...

Alex Kingston, best known for her TV roles in Dr Who and ER, discusses her new role in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People on stage at the Nottingham Playhouse. Kingston plays Dr Stockman, who is punished by the authorities for saying the unsayable as she attempts to make a stand against corruption. Criminal is Netflix's new crime drama, with each episode focused on one suspect and all filmed in...

Downton Abbey hits the big screen this week as the Crawleys host the none other than King George V himself in a new film edition of the hit television show. Critic Sarah Crompton considers if it’s a success. Comedian Alexei Sayle discusses the return of his Radio 4 comedy series Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar, a mixture of stand-up, memoir and philosophy. The 16th Istanbul Biennial, subtitl...

Lucy Prebble’s play A Very Expensive Poison opened last week at the Old Vic in London. It tells the story of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 with a treatment ranging from the high theatricality of song, dance and puppetry to simple direct address to the audience - and has a love story at its core. Lucy Prebble joins Front Row to talk about putting truth on stage. Mark Strong and Dani...

John Wilson presents Front Row from the BBC Proms, with the American mezzo soprano Jamie Barton, about to perform as the soloist at the Last Night of the Proms, singing Verdi, Bizet, Saint-Saens and paying tribute to Judy Garland with Over the Rainbow. Composer Daniel Kidane talks about his new piece, commissioned to open the Last Night of the Proms this Saturday, which is called Woke. How will Br...

Ten years ago when the first British Ceramics Biennial took place, things didn't look good for pots or Stoke-on-Trent, known as 'the potteries' of the UK. The 240-year-old Spode factory had shut, ceramics had a dusty image and the pot-making artist Grayson Perry said the art world had more of a problem with his being a potter than with him wearing a frock. In Front Row this evening Kirsty will hea...

For Sama is a prize-winning documentary by female Syrian filmmaker Waad al-Kateab, recording life in Aleppo for her young daughter who was born shortly after the conflict began there. Film critic Hannah McGill reviews and reports on the winning films at this year's Venice Film Festival. Lucy Caldwell has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award with The Children. Her story is about...

A celebration of the short story as chair of judges Nikki Bedi joins Front Row to reveal the 2019 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University and we hear from the first shortlisted author. Steve Knightley, half of the popular duo Show of Hands, has teamed up with historian Michael Wood to celebrate one of England’s great musical traditions - songs of social protest. In the year of the...

Margaret Atwood's long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale - The Testaments - is due to be published next Tuesday, but following the release of a number of copies by Amazon, reviewers have managed to obtain early copies. M J Hyland reviews Atwood's sequel which takes place 15 years after the original tale of Gilead. In 1958 Alvin Ailey, aware that there were few opportunities for African-America...

Proceedings in the House of Commons yesterday drew an unusual degree of public attention, with set pieces from Boris Johnson (interrupted by the defection of one of his MPs, crossing the floor to join the Liberal Democrats), the Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg lying supine, humour from Kenneth Clarke and a range of colourful interventions from Mr Speaker, it represents one of the most colourfu...

William Feaver discusses the first part of his comprehensive biography of the great British figurative painter Lucian Freud, who died in 2011. Feaver first got to know the mercurial artist in 1973 and had regular conversations and meetings with him over the decades. The former Observer art critic's two detailed biographies – Youth and Fame - are the result of 20 years’ work. Earlier today the shor...

BBC One’s big autumn thriller serial is The Capture. Telling the story of former soldier Shaun Emery, whose conviction for an unlawful killing during active duty is overturned because of flawed video evidence. The drama delves into the increasing reality of misinformation and fake news. Scriptwriter Ben Chanan talks to Samira about the manipulation of video evidence in our criminal justice system....

Sir Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has twice been named the Best of Booker. Now his new novel Quichotte, a modern take on Cervantes' classic that is both a satire of modern politics and a consideration of familial love, has been Booker longlisted. Rushdie discusses writing about the new politics, family, and keeping up with popular culture. Director Joanna Hogg discusses her new film The Sou...

Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave star in Mrs Lowry and Son, a new film about the Pendlebury painter LS Lowry and his mother. Critic Sarah Crompton reviews. Singer and electric guitarist Anna Calvi has written the music for the latest series of the gangster TV drama Peaky Blinders. Along with the director Anthony Byrne she talks about how they created the soundtrack. Anna also discusses her lates...

Playwright James Graham, author of Brexit: the Uncivil War and The Coalition, talks about making drama out of a constitutional crisis and how soon is too soon to begin fictionalising current political events. Jeff Pope’s writing credits include a number of high-profile factual TV dramas for ITV including Pierrepoint and See No Evil: The Moors Murders, as well as Philomena and Stan & Ollie for...

Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, about slaves escaping from the southern states and seeking sanctuary in the north. The author discusses his new novel The Nickel Boys, which follows the misfortunes of a young black boy, Elwood Curtis, who finds himself being sent to the brutal Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school where the threat of severe...

A Front Row for Bank Holiday Monday: Kirsty Lang interviews the writer Edna O'Brien about her new novel, her first novel and her career in between, spanning almost sixty years, 25 works of fiction, as well as biographies and plays. Radio 4 is now broadcasting an adaptation of The Country Girls trilogy. Edna O'Brien's stories of Kate and Baba as they leave rural Ireland for Dublin then London, find...

Screenwriter Andrew Davies talks to Samira Ahmed about his latest period drama, Sanditon, based on an unfinished novel by Jane Austen. They discuss what attracted him to the seaside tale, how lead character Charlotte Heywood is a very different kind of Austen heroine, and why he felt it was important to raise the issue of racial prejudice in Regency Britain. Writer and reviewer Vic James looks at...

The Bafta winning writer Danny Brocklehurst tells Front Row about the new Sky One comedy drama Brassic. It focuses on Vinnie O’Neill whose incompetent criminal crew is involved in everything from illegal boxing matches to an underground fetish club and stealing a Shetland pony. How did he shape some of lead actor Joe Gilgun’s teenage experiences into a six-part series? Photographer Craig Easton di...

Composer Erich Korngold was best known for his swashbuckling film scores like The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood. A child prodigy, he was already a well-established writer of concert music and operas in his native Austria before he went to Hollywood in the 1930s and continued to compose after he left the movie industry. The conductor John Wilson assembled a special orchestra, the Sinfo...

Antonio Banderas on playing Pedro Almodóvar in Pain and Glory - Almodóvar's film based on his own life. Tom Shakespeare talks to Antonio about how the actor's heart attack affected the performance, the differences between acting in Hollywood and European cinema and how the film is the best depiction of back pain he's seen. Witches have always been a popular subject in fiction but recent months hav...

Louise Doughty, author of Apple Tree Yard, has a new novel: a thriller with a difference. Platform Seven’s narrator is dead – and she haunts the eerie half-light of Peterborough Railway Station weaving her way through the lives of the commuters and staff. The spirit of the late Lisa Evans pieces together a backstory which reveals the reality of an abusive relationship, but also offers an uplifting...

Live from the Edinburgh Festivals : Ian Shaw, son of actor Robert Shaw, discusses his play, The Shark is Broken, based on Jaws. Using his father’s diaries, it’s the story of how Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss are tortuously confined together on the boat Orca while filming - enduring endless delays, studio politics, foul weather and a constantly broken mechanical shark called Bruce. The sh...

Musical impressionist Christina Bianco reveals how she captures the voice and style of so many different musical divas like Shirley Bassey and Celine Dion, with a special performance on the Front Row stage. The surprise hit of this year’s Fringe has been Basil Brush Unleashed. The children’s TV icon is celebrating fifty years in showbusiness with a chat show aimed at adults. Basil talks to Kirsty...