Front Row

For the poet Ezra Pound it was ‘year zero for Modernism’ but what were people in Britain really reading, watching, listening to and looking at in 1922?To mark the BBC’s centenary, Front Row reviews the popular culture of 1922: from the West End musical comedy The Cabaret Girl by Jerome Kern and PG Wodehouse to May Sinclair’s novel The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, via the silent film epic Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks and a fond farewell to Gainsborough’s portrait of The Blue Boy at The National Gallery, all set to a soundtrack of jazz, music hall and early radio.Tom Sutcliffe is joined by academic Charlotte Jones (Queen Mary, University of London), the writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet and the music critic Kevin Le Gendre.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Kirsty McQuireImage: Enid Bennett, Douglas Fairbanks and Sam De Grasse in Robin Hood, 1922