Front Row

Clint Eastwood is the director and star of The Mule, about a cantankerous 90 year-old horticulturist who decides to become a drug mule. Mark Eccleston reviews. The UK's biggest contemporary art prize, the £40,000 Artes Mundi prize, was won last night in Cardiff by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, known for his dream-like films such as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. He talks to Front Row.In new novel When All is Said, 84 year-old Maurice Hannigan props up the hotel bar in a small town in Ireland and, by toasting the five people important in his life, he tells of his path from poverty to becoming a rich landowner. Debut novelist Anne Griffin explains her real-life inspiration and how she got into her narrator’s head.There have been calls by Leave campaigners for London's Photographers' Gallery to be stripped of its funding in the wake of their exhibition of a fully functioning office tasked with reversing Brexit. In the continued uncertainty surrounding the future of arts funding post-Brexit, cultural historian Robert Hewison discusses what organisations such as Arts Council England may need to consider when funding projects in the future. Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Timothy Prosser

Karen Krizanovich explains the appeal of three of the biggest recent hit TV releases still provoking discussion: Bird Box and Sex Education on Netflix, and Bros: After the Screaming Stops on BBC iPlayer.The contemporary video artist Bill Viola has been paired with the Renaissance master Michelangelo in the Royal Academy’s new exhibition, Bill Viola/Michelangelo: Life, Death, Rebirth. It sets out to show the preoccupation of both artists with the nature of human experience and existence. Critic Waldemar Januszczak gives his response to the exhibition and its thesis.The Art Fund, the charity that raises money to acquire art for the nation, has revealed that it is to disband its volunteer network by the end of the year. Its director Stephen Deuchar explains the decision.The death has been announced of the great literary editor and writer Diana Athill. She worked with many celebrated authors including Jean Rhys, Molly Keane and VS Naipaul. In recent decades she became known as a brilliant and unsentimental writer of memoir. The writer Damian Barr was a close friend, and reflects on Athill's life and work.Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Edwina PitmanMain image: Bros

The nominations for the 91st Academy Awards were announced earlier today with Roma and The Favourite leading the list, with Black Panther the first superhero film to be nominated for best picture. Kirsty Lang is joined by film critics Larushka Ivan-Zadeh and Jason Solomons to consider the winners and losers, and assess whether there is a better representation of BAME talent than in previous years.Presenter Kirsty Lang Producer Dymphna FlynnMain image: Oscars Photo credit: Getty Images

Nicole Kidman discusses her first lead role for some time as she plays a tortured detective in the grimy LA-set thriller, Destroyer.John Cleland’s 18th century novel Fanny Hill has become known as 'the most famous banned book in the country'. Written in 1749, it tells the story of Frances ‘Fanny’ Hill who, after her parents' death, travels from the countryside to London earning money as a sex worker. As one of the oldest-known copies is set to go under the hammer, literary critic Sarah Ditum discusses if it still has the power to excite and shock us.Netflix's Tidying Up with Marie Kondo has caused a stir for suggesting that we should hang on to only 30 books that ‘spark joy’. Stig visits the author Linda Grant in her living room to ask her about famously culling the book collection that she'd built up from childhood.As Sotheby's prepare their auction The Female Triumphant, a selection of works by female Old Masters from the 16th to 19th centuries, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Sotheby's specialist Chloe Stead and critic Charlotte Mullins consider the role of - and the struggles faced by - women artists from that period and today.Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Jerome Weatherald

The Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright MP, who today gave his ‘Value of Culture’ speech, in which he set out the government’s plans for a multi-million-pound investment in the arts and culture in the UK, discusses his plans to ‘unleash creativity across the nation’.This week the BBC radio schedules saw sweeping change with new presenters at the helm of two breakfast shows. Lauren Laverne takes over from Shaun Keaveny at 6 Music, and Zoe Ball fills the shoes of Chris Evans on the UK’s largest breakfast show on Radio 2. Radio critic Susan Jeffreys reviews both shows, as well as BBC Sounds new true crime style drama podcast, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma has followed his Man Booker shortlisted novel, The Fisherman, with an epic story narrated by the central character’s guardian spirit, or Chi. He tells Alex how he wanted An Orchestra of Minorities to explore the Igbo belief system in the way that Milton’s Paradise Lost does for Christianity.Presenter: Alex Clark Producer: Sarah JohnsonMain image: Jeremy Wright MP Photo credit: Getty Images

The impact of Brexit on the creative industries. Today a letter from the Business for People’s Vote Campaign, was published in the Times, signed by names including leaders of the creative industries, like Norman Foster, Terence Conran, and the bosses of Aardman Animation and Endemol Shine. We speak to John Kampfner, formerly of the Creative Industries Federation and who helped coordinate the letter, about the impact of proposals on the sector.Bestselling author of The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield, on her third novel, Once Upon A River – a mystery set in the 19th century around the Thames.The Government has created something called the ‘Building Better, Building Beautiful commission’, led by philosopher Roger Scruton. It will be shortly hosting public debates about the aesthetics of architecture. Architectural designer and presenter of Building the Dream, Charlie Luxton, discusses beauty in architecture. Composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun is one of the featured artists in SoundState, an international festival of new music which in on at the Southbank Centre in London this week. She discusses her love of making music that breaks boundaries.Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Rebecca Armstrong

M. Night Shyamalan discusses his new film, Glass, the third in his comic book trilogy with Unbreakable and Split. It stars Samuel L Jackson, Bruce Willis and James McAvoy. The Sixth Sense director reveals how he storyboards every single shot, how he uses colour to denote character and why it’s so important for him to root his supernatural storylines in the real world.D. H. Lawrence is famous for his novels - The Rainbow, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love and, notoriously, Lady Chatterley's Lover. His poetry is admired and he is even known as a painter. But he also, early in his career, wrote several plays. They didn't enjoy much success in his lifetime - The Daughter-in-Law, which Richard Eyre hails as his masterpiece, wasn't performed until 1967, but there have been a number of productions in recent years. As an acclaimed staging of The Daughter-in-Law returns to the Arcola Theatre, Samira Ahmed discusses the work of D. H. Lawrence, dramatist, with the play's director Jack Gamble and the Lawrence scholar Dr Catherine Brown.The abstract painter Bridget Riley has recently completed Messengers, a huge - 30 by 60 feet - work on the walls of the National Gallery's Annenberg Court. It is inspired by something the young John Constable wrote about clouds, but perhaps also alludes to the numerous angels, themselves harbingers, that appear in the skies of so many of the National Gallery's pictures. Bridget Riley explains how she arrived at the title and the critic Louisa Buck, on the spot, reviews the piece.Presenter: Samira Ahmend Producer: Julian May

Academy Award nominee Steve Carell continues his pursuit of more serious roles with his latest film Beautiful Boy. The true story is based on the parallel books by David and Nic Sheff, played by Steve and Timothée Chalamet, chronicling the years in which David tries to help his son, whose drug addiction is spiralling out of control.This weekend 70,000 people attended the festival marking the start of Waltham Forest's year as the inaugural London Borough of Culture. But after recent knife attacks in the area, questions have been raised about whether London's City Hall should be spending the £1 million award on culture rather than policing. Sam Hunt, Creative Director of the Waltham Forest Borough of Culture, and former Deputy Mayor and Executive Director for Culture at King's College London, Munira Mirza discuss.Composer Brian Tyler is best known for blockbuster film scores including Avengers: Age of Ultron, Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World and The Mummy 3. His most recent hit soundtrack was for Jon M Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians, which incorporates Asian instruments into big band swing. He talks to John about how he creates the theme of a superhero.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Ben Mitchell

Octavian, the winner of BBC Music’s Sound of 2019 announced on Friday, is a true rags-to-riches story. The French-born rapper discusses how, after a turbulent upbringing which saw him homeless for some of his teenage years, he has gone on to make his mark on the scene and how music has always been a driving force for him.Seven years since TV series The Killing's final episode, its creator, Danish writer Søren Sveistrup, is publishing a crime thriller, The Chestnut Man, his first novel. Søren tells Stig how he moved from the cult detective Sarah Lund to create new detectives for the novel.Minutes after the announcement is made, live from the award ceremony Front Row brings you the first interview with the winner of the £25,000 T. S. Eliot Prize for the best collection of poetry published last year. This is the UK’s most prestigious poetry prize, the one poets aspire to win, the one judged only by other poets. Only Fools -The (Cushty) Dining Experience, is the latest comedy theatre tribute version of the BBC’s well-known television sitcom, Only Fools and Horses, to open in the UK. But it’s been reported that the producers behind Only Fools and Horses: The Musical which premieres next month, have complained that such tribute versions may cross moral and legal lines. Theatre critic Paul Vale and Intellectual Property barrister Guy Tritton discuss the issues raised by these tribute productions.Presenter Stig Abell Producer Jerome Weatherald

The immortal comedy duo of Laurel and Hardy have been given a second life on screen by John C. Riley and Steve Coogan in the new film Stan & Ollie. The actors have been nominated for their roles at the Golden Globes and BAFTAs respectively, and they discuss the film that tells the story of Laurel and Hardy’s final UK tour in the twilight of their careers.A man wakes up in a forest with no memory. He is told that today a murder will be committed. He will relive the same day eight times, but each morning he’ll wake up in a different body. This lies at the heart of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle which has just won the Costa First Novel Award. Its author Stuart Turton discusses his time-travelling, body-hopping novel.Tomorrow, the partial shutdown of the US government becomes the longest in the country's history, leaving some 800,000 federal employees unpaid. From New York, David D'Arcy of the Art Newspaper explains how the shutdown is impacting on the US's arts and cultural institutions.Presenter Kirsty Lang Producer Jerome Weatherald