Front Row

A history of classical music in 10 minutes. Pianist Jeremy Denk traces seven centuries of Western Classical Music in one recital and album, C.1300 – C.2000, demonstrating at the piano the evolution of harmony from the medieval composer Machaut to Philip Glass. Author Arundhati Roy has agreed to appear at Hay Festival in May following the loss of sponsorship from corporate Tata. Will Gompertz repor...

Politics and Big Band music :British musician Matthew Herbert has created The State Between Us, a new album made in reaction to the progress of Brexit. It's a work which includes original composition, choral elements and recorded sounds which reflect the triggering of Article 50; there's someone walking the Irish border, someone eating fish and chips and even someone flying a WWII bomber. Matthew...

The recent Pinter season at the Pinter Theatre in London, culminating in the current production of Betrayal starring Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox, suggests that Harold Pinter has a durability that other writers of his generation may not be able to claim. What are the qualities that give his work resonance to an audience today? The director Jamie Lloyd, theatre critic and Pinter biog...

Photographer David Bailey has shot some of the most iconic portraits of the last six decades, from the Kray twins to the Queen. He talks about his life and career and how to achieve the perfect portrait shot. Tomorrow the UK’s largest cast bronze sculpture is unveiled in Plymouth. John talks to artist Joseph Hillier, who has been working on the crouching female figure called Messenger for the last...

Ralph Fiennes' third film as director is The White Crow, the story of how Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev came from a peasant upbringing to be one of the greatest dancers, and how whilst on tour in Paris in 1961 he defected to the West from the Soviet Union. Critic Sarah Crompton reviews. Last week dozens of well-heeled American parents, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin,...

Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges discuss their new film Ben is Back, in which a mother faces difficult challenges when her drug-addicted son returns to the family home from rehab unexpectedly for Christmas. We consider the art of internet memes as the World Wide Web turns 30. Elise Bell, co-founder of Tabloid Art History, explains how they make memes that go viral on Twitter and Instagram, and art h...

Jordan Peele talks about Us - his new film about a family terrorised by their doppelgängers. Having upturned the horror genre with his Oscar-winning racial satire Get Out, Jordan takes aim at the American dream in this follow up, starring Lupita Nyong’o. The artist Christian Marclay is best known for The Clock - a 24-hour long film composed of nearly 12 000 clips, taken from films depicting time r...

Briony Hanson reviews the Golden Globe nominated film, Girl, which tells the story of a trans teenage girl who, training to be a ballerina is struggling to adapt to dancing “on pointe” during her transition from male to female. Two long lost episodes of The Likely Lads have recently been discovered and are coming out on DVD and Blu Ray. Dick Clement who, with Ian La Frenais, wrote the television c...

Idris Elba has a new Netflix comedy series: Turn Up Charlie. He plays a struggling DJ and eternal bachelor, who is given a final shot at success when he reluctantly becomes a ‘manny’ to his famous best friend's problem-child daughter, Gabby. Julia Raeside reviews. 25 years ago the Fisherman’s Friends were just a crew of friends in Port Isaac, Cornwall. Some of them were fishermen. They sang sang s...

In 2016 Waitress made history as the first Broadway musical with an all-female creative team. Millie Taylor reviews the new West End production, with music and lyrics by the American singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles. Sadie Jones, author of the Costa-winning The Outcast, discusses her fourth book, The Snakes, which is a tale of power, greed, secrets and shame that ends in tragedy. As the internet t...

Maggie Gyllenhaal discusses her new film The Kindergarten Teacher, in which she plays a teacher who believes one of her students is a child prodigy and begins to pass his poems off as her own. She also talks about having an intimacy director on the set of The Deuce, and her upcoming directorial debut - an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel. This week Akwaeke Emezi became the first non-binary au...

In ITV’s new psychological thriller Cheat, a university lecturer accuses a student of cheating in her essay, sparking a series of retaliations which threaten to spiral out of control. Film and TV lecturer James Walters reviews the show which stars Katherine Kelly and Molly Windsor. Photographer Richard Billingham, dubbed the 'pioneer of squalid realism', won a Turner Prize nomination for his image...

The career of Hollywood superstar Samuel L Jackson was recently revealed to have made him the highest-grossing actor of all time. He joins Samira to discuss the new Marvel superhero film, Captain Marvel; in which he reprises the role of Nick Fury... This time around he's playing a Nick Fury who is twenty years younger than before, as the film is set in the 90s. He reveals how he de-aged himself fo...

When The Specials released their new album Encore recently, their first new music with Terry Hall since the classic Ghost Town in 1981, it went straight to Number One. Nearly four decades on from their split, the Coventry band’s lead singer Terry Hall discusses the new album and how he found himself back in the recording studio with his long-term collaborators Lynval Golding and Horace Panter afte...

Stephen Merchant has written and directed the feature film Fighting with my Family, which tells the unlikely true story of a young British woman from Norwich who found fame on the women’s wrestling circuit in America. Merchant discusses going in at the deep end and working alongside former champion wrestler and Hollywood star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. Arifa Akbar reviews new books by Leila Aboule...

In his new series After Life, Ricky Gervais plays a local journalist who tries to find humour as he struggles in the wake of his wife’s death, with a dog as his closest companion. Gervais discusses how he copes with people’s reactions and offence at his work and the controversy surrounding historical social media posts and celebrity redemption. Tom Walker, winner of this year’s British Breakthroug...

Charlotte Rampling discusses her new film Hannah, for which she won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival playing a woman shunned by her family and society. She also talks about her five decade career, from Georgy Girl to her recent Oscar-nominated performance in 45 Years. Hector Berlioz died 150 years ago next week. Best-known for his Symphony Fantastique - described by Leonard Bernstein as th...

How much should we separate art from the artist’s behaviour? With new sexual abuse allegations concerning Michael Jackson in the forthcoming documentary Leaving Neverland and R Kelly being charged with 10 counts of sexual abuse – writers Anna Leszkiewicz, Ekow Eshun and Dreda Say Mitchell consider the extent to which we should boycott or continue to appreciate an individual’s work in the light of...

The return of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s black comedy Fleabag: we preview the new series of BBC3's biggest success. The main character continues to battle with her family and her own self-destructive behaviour, but can Fleabag be as fresh and surprising as before? And because it'll be broadcast weekly, one episode at a time (after the news on BBC1) rather than being released as a box set for bingeing)...

Award-winning journalist Jonathan Freedland talks about his alter ego, thriller writer Sam Bourne, and his new book To Kill The Truth. With the strap line “read it before it becomes fiction," this fast paced action thriller sees America taken to the brink of a new Civil War as academic and holocaust survivors are found dead, libraries destroyed and Black Live Matter protestors clash openly with sl...

The Cuban American conductor Odaline de la Martinez talks about this year's London Festival of American Music in which she showcases the music of women and African American composers who are unjustly overlooked. She also tells Samira about the premiere of the third part of her own opera trilogy Imoinda: A story of Love and Hate Anna Paquin stars as a disaster PR tasked with clearing up the scandal...

Felicity Jones discusses her new film On the Basis of Sex, in which she plays Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the American Supreme Court Judge who rose to prominence as a lawyer in landmark cases against gender discrimination. Vue, one of the UK’s biggest cinema chains, has threatened to boycott the Baftas after the film Roma, which they describe as a ‘made for TV’ film, won four awards including Best Film....

The directorial debut of Oscar -winning actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor,is The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Airing on Netflix, adapted from a bestselling novel of the same name Ejiofor also stars as the father. This true story follows the young boy William as he races to save his village from a devastating famine, with a wind turbine he was inspired to build after reading a library book. Come From Away is...

9 to 5 is Dolly Parton’s stage musical based on the 1980 film, in which she starred, about three female office workers getting revenge on their misogynist boss. The songs were written by Dolly Parton and she narrates the story via television screens across the stage. Sarah Crompton reviews. Performance artist, comedian, musician and activist Bryony Kimmings talks about her new autobiographical sho...

Roma, the black and white Mexican film about a young domestic worker in Mexico City in the 1970s, won Best Film at the Baftas on Sunday and is up for the same at the Oscars. The film’s producer, Gabriela Rodriguez, talks about the background to director Alfonso Cuarón’s personal project which draws on his own childhood, and discusses their working relationship. The death has been announced of the...