Front Row

Craig and Charlie Reid, better known as The Proclaimers, are live in the Front Row studio playing the title track of their new album Angry Cyclist. They discuss passing the 30 year landmark as professional musicians, seeing their music inspire a theatre production and a film, and why the idea of an angry cyclist seemed for them the perfect way of capturing the current political mood.Two new productions inspired by Gulliver's Travels open this month in Bolton and Edinburgh. Their respective directors - Elizabeth Newman and Dan Coleman - discuss the appeal of Jonathan Swift's classic novel, and how their respective versions celebrate and challenge different aspects of this 18th century story. Continuing Front Row's Inspire season, Drew Hemment, artist and founder of the FutureEverything Festival, and Lesley Taker, Exhibitions Manager at FACT - the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, discuss how the internet has inspired artists. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Ekene Akalawu.

The Artist's Way is a creative self-help book that has sold over 4 million copies and garnered dedicated fans around the world. As part of Front Row's Inspire season we speak to its author Julia Cameron who explains the philosophy behind her 12 week programme and answers listener's questions. Stephen Mangan stars as an online therapist in new Channel 4 comedy Hang Ups, loosely based on US series Web Therapy starring Lisa Kudrow. Mangan, co-wrote and produced the series, which also features Katherine Parkinson, David Tennant, Charles Dance and Celia Imrie. Critic Emma Bullimore reviews. As part of the 2018 BBC Proms, yesterday saw Bach's six Brandenburg Concertos - each with their own different and distinctive orchestration - performed alongside six newly commissioned companion works. Music journalist and critic Alexandra Coghlan has the Front Row verdict. To mark Jamaican Independence Day, award-winning poet Kei Miller chooses his favourite piece by poets from his home country.Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Jack Soper.

Yesterday we launched our new season Inspire. Today we ask the key question: what is inspiration? The poet Kei Miller, the composer Philip Venables, the novelist Stella Duffy, the artist Aowen Jin and the philosopher Julian Baggini join Front Row to share their thoughts on the line between a magical moment and hard graft.On Monday Aurora Orchestra return to the BBC Proms to perform Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony entirely from memory. We're joined in the studio by the orchestra's principle cellist Torun Stavseng and concert pianist and music writer Susan Tomes to explore the opportunities and limitations of performing classical music without a score.Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Hilary Dunn.

We explore the natural landscape as artistic inspiration from three locations around the country. Writer Tracy Chevalier and artist Gayle Chong Kwan join John Wilson in Epping Forest to discuss why forests and trees have sparked ideas for them, composer Brian Irvine and broadcaster Marie-Louise Muir consider the art made about the sea and coastline from Helen's Bay, County Down and poet Kenneth Steven and critic Hannah McGill explore lochs, mountains and islands as a theme from the shore of Loch Lomond.Tonight's programme is the launch of Front Row's Inspire season. We'll be finding out what artistic inspiration is - how do you define that moment when an idea strikes, and where artists find it - the natural world, their dreams, their muse, their Gods. But most importantly, we want to inspire you at home, by speaking to creativity experts and finding out the best tips and tricks to spark your own ideas. The season runs throughout the summer and concludes in September.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Hannah Robins.

Melvin Burgess, who's been dubbed the Godfather of Young Adult fiction, talks about his new book The Lost Witch about a teenage girl who discovers she has magical powers.A record-breaking 3.6 million people watched this year's Love Island final. That's more viewers than were watching BBC One, BBC Two or ITV in the same time slot. Journalist and critic Alix O'Neill discusses the show's cultural impact. In Thursday's Prom concert at the Royal Albert Hall Milŏs Karadaglíc will give the world premiere of Ink Dark Moon, a guitar concerto written for him by Joby Talbot. Milŏs plays live in the Front Row studio, and the pair discuss the relationship between musician and composer. They consider, too, the range of a modern musician's work: Milŏs has recorded classics beyond the classical repertoire - an album of tunes by The Beatles - and Joby writes ballet music, has composed an opera and arranged music for Tom Jones and The Divine Comedy.Brian Friel's Translations is enjoying a sell-out run at the National Theatre; when it comes to an end Aristocrats will open at the Donmar Theatre. Philadelphia Here I Come!, Faith Healer, Dancing at Lughnasa - there is almost always a Friel play on somewhere. All of them are set in Ballybeg (which means 'small town' in Irish) and most are family dramas. Roy Foster, Professor of Irish history and literature, teases out why Friel's domestic dramas of Donegal hold such universal appeal. Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Jack Soper.Main image: Love Island. Credit: ITV

Chris Dunkley, for many years television critic of the Financial Times, discusses the impact and ongoing popularity of Dad's Army, which was first broadcast fifty years ago this week.Music streaming platforms have reported a rise people aged under 30 listening to jazz, with the genre's new sound also being produced by musicians in that age group. Music journalist Teju Adeleye and jazz musician Emma-Jean Thackray discuss why young people are responding to jazz now more than ever, if jazz was less accessible in the past and how has the sound evolved. The Marvellous Mechanical Museum, a new exhibition at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, looks back to the historical automata (or animated mechanical objects) museums of the 18th centuries and re-imagines them for the modern day. The exhibition includes 57 works, historical pieces dating back to 1625 and new commissions by contemporary artists, all of which explore the themes of life, creation, imitation, and our fraught relationship with technology.After WOMAD festival organisers complain about foreign artists being deterred by the "humiliating and difficult" process of applying for a British visa, David Jones, director of Serious, a company which produces over 800 events nationwide with over 2,600 artists and a broadcast reach of 44 million, discusses what foreign artists have to do when applying for a British visa, what has changed in the last couple of years and what might be done about it.Presenter : Samira Ahmed Producer : Dymphna FlynnMain image: Dad's Army Christmas Special 1975. Credit: BBC(Clive Dunn as L-Cpl Jack Jones, Ian Lavender as Pvt. Frank Pike, Arthur Lowe as Captain George Mainwaring, John Le Mesurier as Sgt. Arthur Wilson, John Laurie as Pvt. James Frazer and Arnold Ridley as Pvt. Charles Godfrey.)

New film Iceman was inspired by Ötzi, the prehistoric man who was found perfectly preserved in the ice in the Ötztal Alps in 1991. Dubbed "The European Revenant" the characters speak in an extinct language which isn't subtitled. We review with film critic Hannah McGill and survival enthusiast and Costa Children's Book Award winner Katherine Rundell.A recent Parliamentary meeting addressed the issue of mental health and the performing arts as statistics show that there is a higher than average risk of suicide in those professions. How should employers respond? MP Luciana Berger who chaired the meeting and Louise Grainger of Equity talk to Front Row.Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings is one of the world's most loved pieces of classical music, but Barber also wrote many other works, including the opera Vanessa, which is being revived at Glyndebourne sixty years after it was hailed as the first great American opera. Kirsty speaks to director Keith Warner.Main image: Juergen Vogel in Iceman. Copyright: Martin Rattini for Port Au Prince Film Kultur Produktion and Echofilm.

Fran Ross was a gifted African-American author who died in 1985. Her novel Oreo, written at the height of the Black Power movement, tells the rollercoaster story of a black-Jewish girl's quest for her white father using Greek myth, slang, Yiddish, puns, made-up words and Ross' own extraordinary imagination. The novel sank without much trace but Man Booker-Prizewinning author Marlon James, who's written the introduction to a new edition, claims its time is now. As the Mercury Prize shortlist is revealed, music journalist Laura Snapes discusses what surprised and delighted her, and what disappointed.Museums and galleries are under increasing pressure to rethink their displays and collections acquired under colonial rule. What does change look like for these institutions and how will it affect the visitor experience? University College London curator Subhadra Das, anthropologist Dr Charlotte Joy and art historian and independent tour guide Alice Procter discuss what exactly decolonising a museum means and what the process entails.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Rebecca ArmstrongMain image: Marlon James. Credit: Jeffrey Skemp.

Andre Holland is perhaps best known for his role as Kevin, the chef (and love interest) in the Oscar winning film Moonlight. Now he is in Britain playing Othello at Shakespeare's Globe in a production also featuring Mark Rylance as Iago. He tells Kirsty Lang how, unlikely as it might seem, his southern American accent fits the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's lines perfectly. The arrival of artists in rundown areas invariably signals that gentrification is on its way with those very same artists, as well as other locals, eventually getting priced out. London is where this process seems to happen fastest but it's also in London that new housing models for artists are being explored. Hadrian Garrad, director of Create London, and Marcel Baettig, artist, founder and chief executive officer of Bow Arts, discuss the work involved in providing affordable homes for artists.Women Invent the Future is a new anthology of science fiction short stories by and about women. One of the authors, Molly Flatt, discusses re-imagining the future from a feminist perspective with Christina Dalcher, whose new novel Vox is set in a dystopian world where women's voices are strictly limited. And how on this day, 25th July, in 1965 music changed. Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Julian May.

Playwright Patrick Marber and actress Indira Varma on Exit the King, Marber's adaptation for the National Theatre of the Romanian absurdist drama by Eugène Ionesco, in which Varma stars as Queen Marguerite alongside Rhys Ifans' King, about to make his final exit. John talks to Nick Drnaso, the first graphic novelist to be longlisted for the Man Booker prize, and critics Arifa Akbar and Toby Lichtig comment on the longlist as a whole. For the full list see below. Poet Tony Walsh, whose poem This is the Place poignantly captured the feelings of the public following last year's Manchester Arena bomb, has written a new poem for the Imperial War Museum North in Salford, part of a season marking the centenary of the final year of the First World War.The 2018 Man Booker LonglistBelinda Bauer (UK) Snap (Bantam Press) Anna Burns (UK) Milkman (Faber & Faber) Nick Drnaso (USA) Sabrina (Granta Books) Esi Edugyan (Canada) Washington Black (Serpent's Tail) Guy Gunaratne (UK) In Our Mad And Furious City (Tinder Press) Daisy Johnson (UK) Everything Under (Jonathan Cape) Rachel Kushner (USA) The Mars Room (Jonathan Cape) Sophie Mackintosh (UK) The Water Cure (Hamish Hamilton) Michael Ondaatje (Canada) Warlight (Jonathan Cape) Richard Powers (USA) The Overstory (Willian Heinemann) Robin Robertson (UK) The Long Take (Picador) Sally Rooney (Ireland) Normal People (Faber & Faber) Donal Ryan (Ireland) From A Low And Quiet Sea (Doubleday Ireland)Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Timothy Prosser.