Front Row

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, Dead Pigs. Based on a true story, the film focuses on the lives and connections of a disparate group of characters as thousands of dead pigs mysteriously float down the river towards Shanghai. Cathy will discuss what made her want to adapt the story for screen, as well as her experience shooting in China. How has the current situation affected plans for Coventry city of culture 2021, which is due to kick off on 15 May? Chenine Bhathena, creative director, discusses their plans, and how they've dealt with the challenges of lockdown and Covid.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Simon RichardsonMain image above: Vivian Wu as Candy Wang (Centre) in Dead Pigs. Image credit: MUBI

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 she uses her background in science and maths to inform her theatre practice, and why she is fascinated by taboo subjects in art.And to celebrate Welsh Language Music Day, the 19-year-old Welsh singer, composer and harpist Cerys Hafana joins us to explain how music and the Welsh language go hand-in-hand.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Jerome Weatherald Studio Manager: Giles Aspen

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 to know everyone and everything and, as we all know, knowledge is power. Natasha Farrant, famous as a Costa Award winning children's author, has been a literary scout for 20 years. Antony Harwood has been a prominent literary agent even longer. On Front Row they discuss the role and importance of the literary scout, spilling the beans to Kirsty Lang...but probably not all of them.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Harry Parker Studio manager: Giles AspenMain image: Josh 0'Connor as Prince Charles and Emma Corrin as Lady Diana Spencer in the Netflix TV series The Crown Image credit: Des Willie/Netflix

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 a scene from the film Blinded by the Light – with a soundtrack by the Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen. Continuing the theme, February 2nd is Candlemas, the celebration of the infant Christ's presentation in the Temple, and the coming of light, when all the candles needed for the year were brought into the church, and blessed. Poets have been drawn to the subject - Robert Herrick, T. S. Eliot and Amy Clampitt - all writing Candlemas poems. There are a number of Candlemas customs and sayings - about how the weather at Candlemas predicts the coming season, for instance. The Cornish poet Charles Causley incorporates one of these into his poem, At Candlemas, with which we end Front Row, in a setting by the Dartmoor singer, and relative of the poet, Jim Causley. Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Hilary Dunn

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 of a landmark anthology of queer writing, Queer: A Collection of LGBTQ Writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday, which brings together an unusually broad range of voices from across the ages and the globe to form a survey of queer literature. Editor of the anthology, Frank Wynne, will be joined by writer and artist Morgan M Page, host of trans history podcast One From the Vaults, for a discussion about the cyclical nature of attitudes towards sexuality and gender and to highlight some lesser known voices in the tradition from India, Mexico and Greenland.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Simon RichardsonMain image: Jill Halfpenny in The Drowning Image credit: Unstoppable Film and Television/Bernard Walsh

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 Fellowship to produce the second film in a canon of Black horror fairytales: a queer re-telling of the Selkie legend.Max Porter, best known for his novel Grief is the Thing With Feathers - a meditation on Ted Hughes and loss - discusses his new 75-page book The Death of Francis Bacon, in which he imagines himself into the mind of the artist in his final days in Madrid in 1992 facing approaching death in a convent hospital.As part of our ongoing series of Moments of Joy, poet and winner of the 2018 TS Eliot prize Hannah Sullivan explores a poem– the final section of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself in his collection Leaves of Grass, read for us by Kerry Shale.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Sarah Johnson.

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 1960s and now.Les Enfants Terribles have a reputation for innovating in the world of immersive theatre. Their face-to-face shows included the Olivier-nominated Alice’s Adventures Underground performed literally underground, the prosecution of punk collective in Inside Pussy Riot, and United Queendom, telling the stories of some of Kensington Palace’s lesser known royals in the Palace itself. But can you do immersive theatre online? Oliver Lansley, founder and co-artistic director, discusses Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Hung Parliament described as a combination of theatre, gaming, escape room and board game - .Presenter: Elle Osili-Wood Producer: Simon Richardson

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 her precocious and unique 7-year-old son Sam (Ryder Allen), often the target of bullying for his gender non-conforming behaviour, in Palmer’s reluctant care. Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Oliver Jones Studio Manager: Matilda MacariMain image: Celeste Image credit: Elizaveta Porodina

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