Front Row

British jazz pianist and broadcaster Julian Joseph joins us to look at the life and music of his good friend; pianist and composer Chick Corea. Chick began his career in the early 60’s, released his first album in 1968 and over more than 5 decades he played with just about every big name in jazz, winning 23 Grammy awards and was still composing and performing new work just months ago – most recently a concerto inspired by the music of Bela BartokElusive pop sensation Sia makes her film directorial debut with Music, the story of a troubled older sister learning to love and live with her autistic younger sister. It’s released in the UK this week under a barrage of criticism from the autistic community which has seen Sia apologise for depicting a potentially lethal restraint technique, and for casting a neurotypical actress (long-time collaborator Maddie Ziegler) as the autistic eponymous character. TV writer and author of Drama Queen: One Autistic Woman and a Life of Unhelpful Labels Sara Gibbs joins film criti

Screenwriter and novelist Ben Hopkins talks to Tom about his ambitious new novel, Cathedral. It's a portrait of the construction of the medieval period's greatest buildings, featuring a cast of intriguing characters all vying for power - from the bishop to his treasurer to local merchants and lowly stone cutters.Faith, Hope and Glory is a new drama series on Radio 4 which sees British playwrights Roy Williams, Rex Obano, and Winsome Pinnock chart the history of postwar Britain through the intersecting lives of three women. Starting in 1946, a week of 15 minute dramas which set the scene: Hope and Jim’s baby, entrusted to Eunice to take home to Antigua, is lost at Tilbury Docks, and found by Gloria and Clement, a celibate couple, who decide to keep her and call her Joy. The series continues with three 45 minute plays. Winsome Pinnock and Rex Obano join Tom to discuss the series.Luke Jerram is the next artist to feature in #FrontRowGetCreative, where artists encourage you to try your hand at a piece of art. Tod

Documentary-maker Adam Curtis crafts densely-constructed, visually-fragmented work so packed full of ideas and images that you can’t take your eyes off the screen for a moment. He pulls together disparate images and soundtrack to create a mesmerising hypothesis. He discusses his newest work, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, which debuts on BBC iPlayer this Thursday.Welcome to Your Fantasy and The Missing are two new true crime podcasts swelling the ranks in a genre which continues to feature highly in both Spotify and Apple podcast charts. Crime writer and true podcast fan Denise Mina, Natalia Petrzela, presenter and co-producer of Welcome To Your Fantasy, and true crime podcast maker Hannah Maguire, co-host of RedHanded, discuss the continuing appeal of this format.We’ve another in our continuing series, Moments of Joy, showing how art can brighten dark times. Today it’s the turn of writer Max Liu, who celebrates a moment in Annie Baker‘s drama The Flick, which defies theatrical conventions to great effect. It

Tom Hanks stars in Paul Greengrass's new film, News of the World. Hanks plays Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Civil War veteran who crosses paths with Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old taken in by the Kiowa people six years earlier and raised as one of their own. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw gives us her verdict on the western. Songwriter Roger Cook discusses Thursday’s world premiere of Next Year in Jerusalem, the title song of a musical he wrote with Lionel Bart 47 years ago. Roger is now hoping to revive the musical they never managed to stage at the time, and shares an exclusive recording of one of the songs, sung by him and Lionel Bart.Mary Wilson was a founding members of The Supremes, one of the most successful and influential girl groups of all time to spring from the Motown stable. To celebrate her life, Kevin Le Gendre looks at what she achieved and her influence on the British beat group scene at the time.Jean-Claude Carriere, who died yesterday, aged 89, had an extraordinary career. He published his f

Twenty years ago this week, the artist Michael Landy famously destroyed every single one of his 7,227 possessions in an artwork called Break Down. The artist looks back on the 14-day event which took place on an industrial conveyor belt inside a disused department store in Oxford St in London, and considers how the process affected him.Since the now notorious Handforth Parish Council Meeting people have been imagining the film version starring Meryl Streep or Lesley Manville as Jackie Weaver, with cameos from Julie Walters and David Bradley, but films take forever to make. Already, though, people have been busy composing Handforth Parish Council, the musical, the opera, the sea shanty and the drill track, shooting videos and posting them online. Millie Taylor, professor of musical theatre assesses some of these almost instant offerings and talks to Kirsty Lang about what they reveal about creativity in lockdown.Cathy Yan joins us from New York, to discuss how her work as journalist in China informed her film,

In April the artist Luke Jerram spoke on Front Row about his sculpture of the Covid-19 virus. Since then he has been ill with Covid and has created another sculpture - unveiled today - this time of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Jerram discusses his artistic engagement with Covid, including his piece In Memoriam, 120 flags made of NHS bed-sheets, commemorating those who have died. The Oscar-winning actor Christopher Plummer, whose death at the age of 91 was announced today, is remembered by the film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh.For our Friday Review, Larushka is joined by Carl Anka to discuss Malcolm & Marie, the black-and-white, made-in-lockdown relationship movie on Netflix starring Zendaya and John David Washington, written and directed by Sam Levinson. They also watch ZeroZeroZero, a new thriller on Sky unpicking the international cocaine trade based on the book by Roberto Saviano. Arts Foundation Futures Award winner Keisha Thompson discusses her past work as a theatre-maker and poet. She talks about how s

Hollywood star Sam Neill joins us from his home in New Zealand to discuss the perils of acting with sheep in his new film Rams, based on an acclaimed Icelandic drama about two estranged brothers and their flocks of a rare horned breed of sheep.A new colour blue has come onto artists’ palettes. Called YInMn it was discovered in 2009 by accident by scientists working on semiconductors but has only just become commercially available. Art critic Waldemar Januszczak looks at why this is significant and how artists have used the colour blue in painting.The next artist in our series #FrontRowGetCreative is Sarah Maple who will be exploring the art of collage. Using the idea of ‘negative space’, Sarah will be showing us how to create our own collage using text and imagery from magazines, newspapers and junk mail, the result of which will be a modern and striking image and a significant step up from what we were doing at primary school.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Julian May

Film critic Leila Latif joins us to discuss today’s Golden Globe nominations, and gives us an overview of some of the highlights from the first ever online Sundance Festival.The folklore of Taiwan is visited and revisited by subsequent generations of women in Bestiary, the debut novel from K-Ming Chang, as a Daughter falls in love and confronts her family’s secrets in America. Shot through with a litany of mythical beasts, it’s a novel that offers a charged narrative of diaspora and beauty in a hazy magic realist renderings of California, Arkansas & Taiwan. Author and poet K-Ming Chang tells Kirsty Lang how tracing her own heritage led to a story of queer desire, violence, and identity.Writers write while agents tend to their interests and publishers bring their works to the public. There is, though, another lesser known but important worker in the books business - the Literary Scout. Their role is to find the right books, before anyone else, and bring them to publishers, all over the world. Scouts have t

The Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald discusses his follow-up to his YouTube film Life In A Day from 2010, where he invited the public to upload their own footage of their lives taken on one specific day. He then edited those contributions to create a finished film to tell the story of a single day on Earth. For Life In A Day 2020 he received over 320,000 submissions from nearly 200 countries. Jakuta Alikavazovic is a Prix Goncourt winning French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. She talks to John Wilson about her new novel Night As It Falls which explores themes of identity, first love, class and contemporary anxiety against the backdrop of the war in the former Yugoslavia and is out in English this week.As part of our ongoing mission to bring a bit of artistic light to the darkness, we’ve been hearing about some Moments of Joy – those sudden, intense moments watching a play or a film, reading, listening to music or looking at a work of art, when your heart soars. Critic Hanna Flint's choice is

Jill Halfpenny stars in a new tv thriller The Drowning. Nine years ago, Jodie’s little boy disappeared on a picnic by the lake, presumed drowned, and she’s never been able to accept his loss. Now, out of the blue, she catches sight of a teenage boy and she’s sure that it’s her missing son. Jill talks to Samira about why she likes playing morally ambiguous characters, shares her own personal experience of loss and how grief is a monster you just can’t outrun.The British Library has just acquired the archive of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East and Helen Melody, Curator of Contemporary Literature and Creative Archives, tells Samira Ahmed about its treasures: scripts, performance recordings, letters, photographs, rehearsal notes, press cuttings and props. The archive also contains material from the tenures of later artistic directors, such Philip Hedley and Kerry Michael, who notably encouraged diversity and inclusion, Black and Asian theatre, and work made by people with disabilities. We mark the publication

We review The Dig, starring Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes and the Suffolk landscape, a film about the excavation of the Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo. It's also a revealing excavation of class and prejudice in 1930s England. The great ship was discovered, uncovered and conserved by Basil Brown, an autodidact who left school aged 12, He described himself as an excavator and he and his work were brushed aside by incoming university trained archaeologists. The film also tells stories of love and grief in the tense days as war approaches. Our reviewers are Roberta Gilchrist, Professor of Medieval Archaeology and film critic Hannah McGill.Tanoa Sasraku is one of five artists to receive this year’s Arts Foundation Futures Awards worth £10,000, awarded on the basis of past work and to enable future development. She talks about her art practice which uses video performance and flag making to explore her identity as a young, gay woman with British and Ghanaian heritage. And about her plans to use the Fello

The ceramicist, artist and writer Edmund de Waal today launches the #FrontRowGetCreative project, where artists will be encouraging you, our listeners, to try their hand at creating an artwork with easily-available materials. In his studio he talks us through the creation of a palimpsest, where letters and characters overlap in layers of clay – or domestic filler in this case – to memorialise words that are special to him.We'd love to see what you create. Show us what you've made by sharing on social media channels using the hashtag Front Row Get Creative and we'll show those that catch our eye on the BBC Arts and Front Row websites. Check out the BBC's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.Hafsa Zayyan was the winner of the inaugural Merky Books New Writers' Prize - part of Stormzy’s ongoing partnership publishing new books with William Heinemann. We speak to her about her novel We Are All Birds Of Uganda. It’s a fascinating story about intergenerational trauma, racism and displacement set between Uganda in the 19

Celeste talks to Front Row about her career from making tracks on a laptop in her bedroom to successes at the Brit and BBC Music Awards, composing and performing the music for last year's John Lewis advert, A Little Love, and the release of her debut album 'Not Your Muse'.She blew her fusilli, my pretty penne, when she found me watching daytime tagliatelle. The first stanza of 'The Remembrance of Things Pasta' is typical of the poetry of Brian Bilston, who has been called the Banksy of Poetry and Twitter's unofficial poet laureate. He talks and reads witty, wry and wise poetry from his new collection, 'Alexa, what is there to know about love?'And Ryan Gilbey gives his verdict on new film Palmer starring Justin Timberlake. Former high school football star Eddie Palmer went from hometown hero to convicted felon. He returns home to Louisiana and the grandmother who raised him but things become more complicated when Vivian’s hard-living neighbour Shelly (Juno Temple) disappears on a prolonged bender, leaving he

Can you use craft to help make the world a better place, one stitch at a time? In her new BBC Four documentary, Craftivism: Making a Difference, writer, comedian and art lover Jenny Eclair meets people doing extraordinary things with knitting, cross-stitch, banners and felt to change hearts and minds. She tells us all about it.Tom talks to Jon Brown, BAFTA award-winning show-runner and screenwriter about his gaming sitcom Dead Pixels which returns to E4 for a new series.And we've an interview featuring the winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award, which has just been announced.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Julian May

Choreographer Jonzi D has created a new work for Dancing Nation, the all-day digital festival of dance which is streamed on BBC iPlayer this Thursday. Jonzi discusses the state of Black dance with Pawlet Brookes, who runs Serendipity in Leicester and has edited the collection of essays My Voice, My Practice: Black Dance.In the light of the announcement that Kenneth Branagh has been cast to play Boris Johnson in a new TV drama about the Covid-19 crisis, critic, journalist and former political researcher Sam Delaney joins Samira to talk about the impact of dramatisations of contemporary political moments on the public imagination. Last night Bhanu Kapil won the TS Eliot Prize for her collection How to Wash a Heart. She talks to Samira about and reads from her book which, in the voice of an immigrant guest in the house of a citizen host, explores the idea, and limits, of hospitality, and the experiences of diaspora people. For his Moment of Joy, the writer Darran Anderson chooses a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s

The White Tiger is a new Netflix film based on Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel, directed by Ramin Bahrani. It explores Indian society and how hard it can be to climb the social ladder, as Balram, played by Adarsh Gourav, struggles to advance even when he has found rich employers. For our Friday review, writer Abir Mukherjee and film critic and host of the Girls on Film podcast Anna Smith give their verdict, and reflect on the week that saw 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman perform The Hill We Climb at President Biden’s inauguration.Every year one of the first literary events is the T. S. Eliot Prize readings, when each of the 10 shortlisted poets performs to a packed Royal Festival Hall. But this year the The South Bank Centre is streaming the poets' readings instead. The winner will be announced immediately afterwards. Chair of the judges Lavinia Greenlaw discusses this year's shortlist.Denise Dutton discusses her commission to sculpt the statue of Mary Anning, the 19th-century fossil hunter fr

After weeks of speculation, we heard today that the 2021 Glastonbury festival is to be cancelled amidst uncertainly due to Covid. Tom talks to the Chairman of the Department of Culture Media and Sport parliamentary select committee, the Conservative MP Julian Knight, who today issued a strong statement condemning the government for not stepping in to assist the industry.Russell T Davies' hotly anticipated new Channel 4 series It’s A Sin begins tomorrow night. Set in the 1980s, it follows the story of the Aids crisis and charts the joy and heartbreak of a group of friends over 10 years in which everything changed. Critic David Benedict reviews. We’ll also be exploring depictions of the Aids crisis and its impact across the decades on stage, screen and other artforms with David and journalist Juliet Jacques. The London International Mime Festival started this week, online only this year, and as part of that they’ve commissioned five original short films – between three and 10 minutes each – which are availabl

Singers Roderick Williams and David Webb discuss Schubert’s celebrated 1827 song-cycle Winterreise, about a man dealing with rejection and loneliness who journeys through the winter snow. Roderick has recorded a new CD of Winterreise and David is about to perform it at the Wigmore Hall in London, having cycled 500 miles to raise money for mental health charities.More than 100 music stars including Elton John, Sting, Ed Sheeran Brian May, Nicola Benedetti and Roger Daltrey have signed a letter saying performers have been “shamefully failed” by the post-Brexit travel rules and that there is a “gaping hole where the promised free movement for musicians should be”. Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has been meeting today with music industry representatives and we speak to Jamie Njoku Goodwin of UK Music about what he told them. Anya, diligently studying for a doctorate and Luke, a committed environmental scientist, get engaged on holiday in Provence. They begin to plan their wedding in Cornwall. Anya escaped from

John is joined by composer, vocalist, violinist and producer Caroline Shaw – the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, winner of a Grammy in 2018 for her album Orange with Attaca Quartet. Caroline Shaw talks about her new album Narrow Sea featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw, Sō Percussion ensemble and the pianist Gilbert Kalish, as well as writing for unusual instruments, unconventional approaches to composing, and the difference between writing for an orchestra and collaborating with Kanye.Today (19 Jan) is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Patricia Highsmith, author of the classic thrillers The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train and of The Price of Salt, later published as Carol. Several of her books have been made into successful films and continue to be adapted: Deep Water starring Ben Affleck is expected later this year and the making of a new TV series based on Ripley starring Andrew Scott has been announced. To mark the anniversary, a new collection of her short stories has b

English rapper, songwriter and actor Ashley Walters has now turned his hand to directing with a short film called BOYS. Shot in London it follows Noah, who – whilst trying to fulfil a request from his brother who’s in prison – has to decide which way he wants his own life to turn out.To lift our spirits in difficult times Front Row brings you Moments of Joy – a celebration of those intense moments when watching a film or a play, reading a book or poem, listening to music or looking at a picture makes your heart soar. Today, writer and critic Erica Wagner on the opening of Star Wars – a film she saw first in 1977 as a 10-year-old.American writer Torrey Peters joins us to talk about her ground breaking new novel, Detransition Baby. It charts the complex relationship between two trans women, Reese and Amy as the latter detransitions and renames himself Ames, then gets his boss Katrina pregnant. The trio ends up trying to figure out whether it’s possible for them to form a family together.Phil Spector, the pop p