Front Row

Keira Knightley discusses her new film about the celebrated French Belle Epoque author Colette, whose bestselling Claudine novels explored teenage sexuality and were inspired by her own life. Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan return with the BAFTA award-winning comedy series Catastrophe on Channel 4. Since becoming pregnant after a fast-moving romance in the show's first episode, the couple's life tog...

Charlie Brooker discusses his ground-breaking interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, where the viewer chooses multiple storylines. As Netflix's first adult live action interactive experience, does this herald the start of a new genre for entertainment? Sophie Raworth (Chair of Judges) announces the category winners of the Costa Book Awards (2018) exclusively on Front Row and John talks live...

Forrest Gump, Back to the Future and Castaway director Robert Zemeckis returns with new film Welcome to Marwen. Based on real-life events and starring Academy Award nominee Steve Carell, the film charts the unconventional way one man copes with losing his memory after a violent attack. As Carol Ann Duffy comes to the end of her ten year stint as the Nation’s Poet Laureate - the first woman in its...

Brexit: The Uncivil War stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Rory Kinnear as the leaders of the Leave and Remain campaigns. Written by James Graham, the one-off Channel 4 drama follows the campaigns as they compete for public attention and votes. TV critic David Butcher reviews. The Catcher in the Rye, narrated by 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, is perhaps the classic coming-of-age text of the 20th Centur...

Olivia Colman is winning major awards for her portrayal of Queen Anne in The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos’ film about a scandalous love triangle between the monarch, the Duchess of Marlborough and her cousin Abigail Masham. Olivia Colman discusses the difference between playing Queen Anne and her other role as our present Queen Elizabeth in the forthcoming series of The Crown. Luther is back. Dreda...

Actress Keeley Hawes has long been a household name and seems to have an uncanny ability to pick parts that place her in the most talked about TV shows of their moment. In this extended interview we look back on her career, considering those key roles including the Home Secretary in the hugely popular Bodyguard, working on cult lesbian drama Tipping the Velvet, MI5 agent Zoe in spy thriller Spooks...

How much were you paying attention to arts and culture in 2018? Critics Boyd Hilton, Katie Puckrik and Sarah Crompton, Raifa Rafiq from the Mostly Lit podcast, and actress Maureen Lipman battle it out to see who'll be crowned champion in our cultural quiz of the year. Plus what is your favourite cultural depiction of New Year's Eve? Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Hannah Robins

Journalist and novelist Jonathan Freedland remembers the Israeli author Amos Oz who died today. Tim Robey, Susannah Clapp and Laura Barton - film, theatre and music critics - look ahead to the notable arts events of the upcoming year. The legendary comic book creator and Marvel figurehead, Stan Lee, died earlier this year. Today, on what would have been his 96th birthday, we pay tribute to his lif...

Front Row marks the deaths of three great choreographers.

Internationally-acclaimed land artist Chris Drury's latest project is a dry stone chamber at the end of a remote peninsular overlooking Morecambe Bay in Lancashire. As the tide recedes, Stig brings us some 'slow radio' as he crosses the causeway and heads for Sunderland Point to meet the artist, as well as Andrew Mason, the Master Craftsman and noted dry stonewaller, as they work on the constructi...

It's estimated that almost three million people in the UK now belong to a choir. Kirsty Lang explores why this might be, and looks at the evidence that singing is really good for us. The Sixteen is a professional choir which celebrates its 40th anniversary next year. It's founder, Harry Christophers, and one of the sopranos, Charlotte Mobbs, talk to Kirsty about starting the choir, changing attitu...

Andrew Davies is renowned for turning literary classics into prime-time television drama, from Pride and Prejudice and Bleak House to War and Peace. He talks to Samira about his new BBC One series, a reworking of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, explaining the appeal of the 19th Century epic novel and why the stage musical version of the book didn’t influence his adaption at all. In the Bible, Matthe...

Ben Elton, creator of the iconic Elizabethan sitcom Blackadder II, talks about his fascination with Shakespeare, as Upstart Crow returns to BBC Two for a Shakespeare/Dickens mashup, A Crow Christmas Carol. He's also written the screenplay for All is True, a Shakespeare biopic starring Kenneth Branagh. Vanessa Kisuule reads her poem Describing Snow in the Aftermath, part of Radio 4's poetry day mar...

Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the phenomenally successful stage musical Hamilton, is starring in Mary Poppins Returns, a sequel to Disney’s 1964 classic. He talks to John about following in the cockney footsteps of Dick Van Dyke, and how he referenced the original Mary Poppins in Hamilton. As Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage musical Hamilton marks one year on the London stage this week, we look at whet...

Eileen Atkins, grande dame of the stage, looks back over her career. The actress famous for her roles in The Crown and Gosford Park, talks about playing Childie in the original stage production of The Killing of Sister George, and co-creating Upstairs Downstairs, as well as some of the famous acting roles she has turned down. Penny Marshall, the first woman to direct a film that took more than 100...

Actor and director John Malkovich discusses foreign accents and facial hair with Kirsty as he explains what drew him to taking on the role of famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in The ABC Murders, the latest BBC One dramatization of Agatha Christie's novels by writer Sarah Phelps. As Christmas approaches with films like It's a Wonderful Life back in cinemas and Love Actually on the TV schedule...

As the Archers prepares for its Canterbury Tales Christmas special, Carole Boyd - who plays the doyenne of Ambridge theatricals Lynda Snell - is joined by Oxford Professor of Medieval Literature Laura Ashe to discuss Chaucer’s tales of courtly love and boisterous sex. The new BBC and Netflix animated version of Watership Down will be broadcast on BBC ONE at 7pm on December 22 and 23. Critic Mark E...

Rita Ora on her six year journey to release her second album Phoenix, following a legal dispute with her record label. The musician, who has also acted in the Fifty Shades film trilogy and been a judge on television talent shows The Voice and The X-Factor, talks to John Wilson about finally being able to release music, song writing and her Albanian heritage. This year’s Bad Sex In Fiction award wa...

Not Going Out is the UK’s longest-running sitcom on TV and will this year bring a live edition to our screens for Christmas. The show’s star and creator Lee Mack talks about its surprising longevity, the changing face of British comedy, and his childhood dream of being a jockey. From real life to the big screen and now the casino stage, Channing Tatum’s outstandingly popular Magic Mike is now in L...

Two new films with comic book superheroes at the centre - Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and Aquaman - have just been released. Aquaman is DC’s follow-up to their hugely successful 2017 film Wonder Woman, while Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an animated superhero film which imagines Spidermen (and women) from alternative universes who team up. Critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw has seen both and...

Mortal Engines is a new sci-fi fantasy film co-written and produced by Peter Jackson, based on the first in a series of young adult steampunk novels by Philip Reeve. In a post-apocalyptic future, mobile cities on huge caterpillar tracks roam the landscape, consuming smaller towns for their resources. Starring Hera Hilmar as Hester Shaw, the film is the directorial debut of long-time Jackson collab...

Tamara Lawrance stars in new BBC One drama The Long Song, an adaption of the Andrea Levy novel set on a sugar plantation during the final days of slavery in 19th century Jamaica. The actress talks about the drama as well as her career so far, which in the three years since leaving drama school has seen her play Viola in Twelfth Night at the National Theatre, Cordelia opposite Ian McKellen's Lear i...

As Bruce Springsteen nears the end of his 236-show run in New York, Kate Mossman reviews Springsteen on Broadway, the new Netflix film of his stage show based on his autobiography Born to Run, in which he looks back on his life and performs songs on acoustic guitar and piano. From James Bond nemesis Blofeld to Scar from the Lion King – facial disfigurements have long been commonplace for cinematic...

Screenwriter Jimmy McGovern talks about his new BBC One drama Care, starring Sheridan Smith, Alison Steadman and Sinead Keenan, which looks at the personal challenges of caring for a parent with dementia and the struggle to find good and affordable care. Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera talks to us from her home in Havana and explains why she is continuing to protest over Decree 349, a new...

Maggi Hambling discusses her new exhibition The Quick and the Dead at Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, which centres on paintings and drawings made over the past decade, in which she has portrayed four fellow artists - Sebastian Horsley, Sarah Lucas, Julian Simmons and Juergen Teller - whose lives have intersected at various points, and who have created their own reciprocal artistic interpretations. N...