Simon Armitage, After Life, The Disciple

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage reflects on the experience of the pandemic in new BBC film, A Pandemic Poem: Where Did The World Go? Interspersed with interviews from people across the UK, the poem chronicles the pandemic from the first lockdown to the rollout of the vaccination programme.

What one memory would you choose if you had to live it forever when you die? That’s the question posed in After Life, Jack Thorne and Bunny Christie’s new production at the National Theatre inspired by Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 film. Theatre critic Ava Wong Davies and the British Council’s Director of Film Briony Hanson review the play and consider wider depictions of the afterworld on stage and screen.

Chaitanya Tamhane’s first feature film, Court, was selected to represent India in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars in 2015. His second feature film, The Disciple, which focuses on a musician trying to become an Indian classical music master, won three prizes at last year’s Venice Film Festival. With The Disciple now showing on Netflix, Chaitanya joins Front Row to discuss creating a new cinematic vision of India.

Major publishing organisations and leading authors have joined forces to campaign against potential changes to copyright law, which they say would flood the UK with cheap foreign editions and threaten livelihoods. The Save our Books campaign, organised by the Publishers Association, the Society of Authors, the Association of Authors’ Agents and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, is in response to a new government consultation into the UK’s post-Brexit approach to copyright. Stephen Lotinga, CEO of the Publishers Association, joins us to discuss.

Presenter Tom Sutcliffe Producer Jerome Weatherald