Front Row

Bridget Riley is known for her abstract geometric images featuring grids, lines, circles and squares. As the artist prepares to open a new exhibition of her recent work, art critic Charlotte Mullins assesses the importance and impact of the canvases and murals created in the last four years. As the Bayeux Tapestry is set to come to the UK from France we consider the extraordinary qualities of this...

Carleen Anderson, former singer with Young Disciples and the Brand New Heavies, discusses her album and 'tribal opera' Cage Street Memorial, and performs a song from it in the studio. Turkish writer Elif Shafak discusses her bestselling novel The Bastard of Istanbul about a family of women, for which she was accused of 'insulting Turkishness' in 2006 and put on trial. The novel has been made into...

As Will & Grace is revived twenty years after its premiere, TV critic Louis Wise discusses how the ground-breaking sitcom about two gay men and their best girl pal comes across in 2018. Disney and Pixar's new film Coco is about a Mexican boy who travels through the Land of the Dead to unlock a family mystery. We consider the evolution of Disney films, how they depict and reflect international...

Liam Neeson stars in action thriller The Commuter in which an insurance salesman is caught up in danger and conspiracy on his way home from work. He talks about the appeal of the ordinary man as hero. Jamie Hewlett is best known for his artwork for the comic strip Tank Girls, the group Gorillaz, and Damon Albarn's Chinese opera Monkey: Journey to the West. With the publication of a new monograph w...

Tom Hanks discusses his new film The Post, co-starring Meryl Streep and directed by Steven Spielberg, which tells the story of the part The Washington Post played in publishing the top secret Pentagon Papers that changed American public opinion about the Vietnam War. Sir Simon Rattle is conducting the European concert premiere of The Genesis Suite, a work with narration based on stories from the f...

In December the Royal Court withdrew and then reinstated its invitation to stage a new touring production of Andrea Dunbar's semi-autobiographical 1982 play Rita Sue and Bob Too as a result of sexual harassment allegations made against its co-director Max Stafford Clark - himself a former Artistic Director of the Royal Court and one of the most influential theatre directors of his generation. The...

As The Southbank Show marks its 40th anniversary we discuss the legacy of this historic arts programme with host Melvyn Bragg. As ITV makes a return to arts programing with Great Art, and the BBC prepares to revive its landmark series Civilisations, we discuss the state of arts on TV today. With Phil Grabsky, the award-winning executive producer of Great Art and the founder of Seventh Art Producti...

The 1996 radical feminist theatre piece, The Vagina Monologues, made a huge impact in America and around the world as well as inspiring V-Day, an organisation working to stop violence against girls and women. As the writer Eve Ensler updates it with some contemporary voices, we ask about the original production and why now is the right time to revisit it. We also look at feminist theatre in Britai...

A special episode featuring all five winners of the Costa Book Awards 2017. The winner of the novel category Jon McGregor talks about how he wrote his stunning portrait of an English country village, Reservoir 13. Katherine Rundell, winner of the children’s book category, reveals how she ate tinned tarantula for her adventure story The Explorer. The biography winner Rebecca Stott discusses In the...

Kiri, Channel 4's new drama series, is about the disappearance of a young girl, written by Jack Thorne. It stars Sarah Lancashire as the girl's social worker and Lucian Msamati as her grandfather. Dreda Say Mitchell reviews. The winner of the Costa First Novel prize is Gail Honeyman for Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. It tells the story of a 29-year-old woman who lives alone, surviving, but n...

Christopher Plummer discusses replacing Kevin Spacey as John Paul Getty in the Ridley Scott-directed All the Money in the World after Spacey was dropped from the film due to allegations of sexual misconduct. Film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh considers whether this bold move by the director pays off. As Saudi Arabia announces that it will reopen its cinema doors, we look at the arts scene in the coun...

Michelle Terry takes over as Artistic Director at Shakespeare's Globe in London in April, and today she announced details of her first season. She discusses her plans, as well as the drama off-stage that led to her predecessor Emma Rice's controversial early departure. Rebecca Stott, winner of the Biography category in this year's Costa Book Awards announced on Front Row this week, discusses In th...

Neil Cross, the creator of Luther talks about his new BBC One series Hard Sun. The pre-apocalyptic crime drama follows two detectives who stumble upon proof that the world faces certain destruction, a fact the British Government is trying to suppress Katherine Rundell is the winner of the Costa Children's Book Award 2017 for The Explorer, a classic adventure story of four children whose plane cras...

Novelist Wendy Holden announces the category winners of the Costa Book Awards 2017 exclusively on Front Row and Stig talks to the winner of the Novel Category. Artist Elizabeth Friedlander is the subject of a new exhibition at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft. The work of Friedlander is instantly recognisable as mid-20th century design at its best including her Penguin book covers and Bauer Type Fo...

The opening of V&A Dundee will be one of the big arts stories in 2018 and it's in Dundee that Samira Ahmed begins today's programme which looks at how arts organisations nationwide are seeking to make themselves open and relevant to their local communities. In Dundee, Samira visits the new V&A Dundee community garden in the company of volunteers Denis Harkins and Derek Cassie and Communiti...

Kay Mellor discusses her new ITV drama, Girlfriends, about three women in their late 50s, early 60s, and reveals how closely she's drawn on her own life and friends to write it. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was published on New Year's Day 1818. Christopher Frayling, author of Frankenstein The First Two Hundred Years, joins Janet Todd, the biographer of Mary Shelley's mother Mary Wollstonecraft, to...

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer are back on TV with Vic and Bob's Big Night Out. Three decades after starting out they discuss their surreal and anarchic style of comedy. The legendary Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu returns with a new album Eternamente - her first studio album in six years. She discusses her affinity with the role of Tosca, and why she feels like the "black sheep" of the opera worl...

The surprise success of this year's Wonder Woman film emphasized the current dominance of superhero movies at the box office. Stig Abell investigates the comic book origins of these characters and explores why they have become such a presence in our culture. Dave Gibbons, the comic book writer and artist most famous for his collaboration with Alan Moore on The Watchman, shows Stig around his studi...

Gary Oldman on his 30 year career in film, from playing punk rebel Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy to a barnstorming performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. He tells Kirsty why he was reluctant at first to take on the role. How he transformed himself into Britain's wartime Prime Minister and the challenge of recreating Churchill's distinctive voice. How when he was young his drama teachers...

Join John Wilson for a Christmas party including games and performances from all our guests. Impressionist Jon Culshaw delivers ten Christmas messages, but can you guess all the voices? Poet Patience Agbabi performs her Christmas poem, I Go To the Supervillains Christmas Ball As The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, written especially for Front Row. Cariad Lloyd and Charlotte Gittins from comedy imp...

Emily Watson discusses her role as Marmee March, the mother of four daughters, in the new BBC TV adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women, set in 1860s Massachusetts against the background of the American Civil War. As the landmark film The Graduate turns 50 today, actress Tracy Ann Oberman and film critic MaryAnn Johanson discuss how the character of the seductress Mrs Robinson shaped...

Jodie Foster was a child star who fulfilled that early promise with performances as an adult that won her two Oscars. She went on to direct - four feature films so far. Now she is turning to television, taking charge of an episode of Charlie Brooker's sci-fi series Black Mirror. She talks to John Wilson about this and, after a quarter of a century, the continuing power of The Silence of the Lambs....

The actor and one-time theology student James Norton discusses his role as Alex Godman in new TV thriller McMafia. His character begins the series as a public advocate of clean capitalism with his own hedge fund investing only in ethical business, but Alex can't escape his Russian family connections and slowly gets drawn into the dangerous world of international organised crime and corruption. Pen...

Mavis Staples, formerly of the gospel group The Staple Singers, discusses her new album If All I Was Was Black, ten songs which address the continuing racial issues in America today. The singer, who first performed in 1948, also reflects on her association with Martin Luther King and her close friendship with Prince. Her Body and Other Parties is the acclaimed debut short story collection from Ame...

As The League of Gentlemen returns to BBC Two for three new episodes we speak to Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson about revisiting the bizarre characters of Royston Vasey. Gina Yashere and Jenny Eclair discuss how the climate for comedy has changed and whether comedians still have a duty to shock. How Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World changed television, with producer John Fairley and Professor Roge...