Matt Berry, Claire McGlasson, National Trust acquires view that inspired Turner, Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad

Dulcet-toned comedian Matt Berry joins us to discuss two new projects: a BBC TV spin-off of the 2014 cult mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows in which Berry plays a jaded 700 year-old vampire, and his new role as Detective Inspector Rabbit, a hardened Victorian booze-hound, in Channel 4’s period comedy Year of the Rabbit.

Men make a mess of the world with the First World War. Afterwards a female messiah emerges to lead humanity to salvation, through the work of a community of women in Bedford. That is the milieu of Claire McGlasson’s first book, The Rapture. Her work of fiction, though, is based on fact: the real-life Panacea Society. Claire tells Front Row about her strange love story psychological thriller escape novel.

Yesterday the National Trust announced they had bought Brackenthwaite Hows, the Lake District viewpoint that inspired JMW Turner’s watercolour Crummock Water, Looking Towards Buttermere. The site, which is 77 acres and includes a stone viewing-platform, is the first bought by charity specifically for its panorama. The National Trust’s General Manager for North Lakes Tom Burditt explains the site’s appeal.

As Vasily Grossman’s 1952 Russian novel Stalingrad is published for the first time in English, critic Boyd Hilton argues that it is one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century: an epic comparable to Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Kate Bullivant