Front Row

Lead singer of Britpop band Skunk Anansie, Skin has headlined Glastonbury, sold millions of albums, and recently competed in The Masked Singer. As her memoir, Skin - It takes Blood and Guts, is published, we ask her about channelling rage into her performances and if she thinks her achievements as queer black woman have been overlooked.After a six-month Covid delay, Plymouth’s new £40m arts and heritage museum space The Box is due to open next week. This weekend also sees the Plymouth Art Weekender, a city-wide festival of art and events. Sarah Gosling, BBC’s arts and culture presenter in Plymouth, considers the role of art and culture in helping to transform the city. It is the season of moths and spiders. Many people strive to keep these out of their houses. Not so the poet Sean Borodale whose new collection, Inmates, records close encounters with all manner of insects, in all stages of their existence – egg, maggot, flight, in death and decay. He talks about co-existing with the natural world and writing the process in poetry.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Julian May

Announced by Theresa May in 2018 and quickly dubbed the “Festival of Brexit”, submissions are now being made for the UK government funded £120 million festival that will celebrate British creativity in 2022. Creative director Martin Green tells us what kind of projects and ideas he’s looking for.Succession creator Jesse Armstrong on winning the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series at last night's awards.English National Opera are staging Europe’s first drive-in opera, Puccini’s La Bohème, at London’s Alexandra Palace, where the audience watch the singers from their cars. Will this be an exciting new way to experience opera? Alexandra Coghlan reviews. Writer Gwyneth Hughes discusses her new ITV drama, Honour, starring Keeley Hawes. It’s the story of the real-life detective who brought five killers to justice after the so-called honour killing of Banaz Mahmod, a 20 year old Iraqi Kurdish woman from Mitcham, south London, who was murdered for falling in love with the wrong man.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Hannah Robins Studio Manager: Donald McDonald Main image: Soraya Mafi in ENO La bohème (c) Lloyd Winters, Courtesy ENO

The Los Angeles-based American artist Mark Bradford, who represented the USA at the Venice Biennale in 2017, discusses his new series of Quarantine Paintings. The three works – only available to view online – explore the nature of art in isolation and how he responded when his city was suddenly shut down unexpectedly.Nick Hornby, the writer who gave us Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy, discusses his new novel Just Like You, which features a relationship between a black man in his early 20s and a white 42-year-old English teacher and mother. The novel is set in 2016 and it’s not long before the social and political divisions brought about by the looming Brexit vote are becoming unavoidable.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Julian May

Rocks is the new feature film directed by Sarah Gavron with a screenplay by Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson. Writer Niellah Arboine reviews the film which is set in Hackney with an ensemble cast of largely non-professional actors, and it tells the story of a teenage Londoner nicknamed Rocks who takes responsibility for her little brother Emmanuel in an attempt to stop them both from being taken into care, supported by a chaotic but loving group of friends.Poet Phoebe Stuckes discusses her first collection, Platinum Blonde, which gives us a glimpse of the life of a lively young woman today. She is only 24, but Phoebe Stuckes is a seasoned poet and performer, winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award - four times - she has also been Barbican Young Poet and the Ledbury Poetry Festival’s young poet-in-residence.Troubled Blood is the title of JK Rowling’s latest novel, written under her crime writing pseudonym Robert Galbraith. And it’s generated something of a troubled reaction so far as reviewers and then social media reacted to the inclusion of a character who cross dresses. Alex Clark joins Front Row to explain.BBC National Short Story Award shortlisted author Eley Williams on her story Scrimshaw, about a women texting late at night, and how Eley was influenced by the nonsense literature of Edward Lear. Presenter Kirsty Lang Producer Simon Richardson

Twenty five years ago Bristol musician Tricky pioneered a new genre of downtempo hip-hop with his album Maxinquaye. As he releases his 14th studio album, Fall to Pieces, Tricky joins us from his Berlin studio. Live theatre returns to Northern Ireland this evening with the play Anything Can Happen: 1972 at The Playhouse in Londonderry, in which people whose lives were affected by the Troubles tell their stories. We hear from playwright Damian Gorman, cast member Susan Stanley, whose brother was killed in a bombing, and Sarah Feeney-Morrison, who has contributed a photo of her aunt, shot by an IRA sniper.Netflix's new drama this week is Ratched, the origin story of Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It stars Sarah Paulson, Cynthia Nixon, Judy Davis and Sharon Stone. Karen Krisanovich reviews.Our latest interview with an author shortlisted for the 2020 BBC National Short Story Award is Jack Houston, whose powerful story Come Down Heavy is about two people struggling on the edges of society, in a world of homelessness and drugs.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Timothy Prosser Studio Manager: Giles AspenMain image: Tricky Image credit: Erik Weiss

Nica Burns, owner of some of the biggest West End theatres, discusses her plan to re-open them in sequence from 22 October, starting with Adam Kay’s one man show This is Going to Hurt and, in November, the hit musical Six. But what about large-scale shows like Harry Potter or Everyone’s Talking About Jamie? Writer Dennis Kelly tells Samira about The Third Day, his new project starring Jude Law and Naomie Harris. It's a psychological thriller, set on an alluring and mysterious island, that's been brought to life through a collaboration between Sky Atlantic and the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk. The drama consists of six one-hour episodes for TV plus a live-streamed twelve-hour event. The Northern Irish writer Jan Carson is best known for her award-winning magic realist novels. But her new work - shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award – is an authentic slice of rural protestant life. She discusses why this community is not often written about and explains why it’s important that their voices are heard now.And in an interview with John Wilson from 2013, the designer Sir Terence Conran - who died this weekend at the age of 88 - remembers how his collaboration with the Italian/Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi changed the direction of his approach when he was a young student of textile design in the 1940s.Presenter Samira Ahmed Producer Jerome WeatheraldMain image above: Jude Law in The Third Day Image credit: (c) 2020 Sky UK Ltd & Home Box Office , Inc

David Tennant talks to Front Row about new ITV drama DES, in which he plays one of the most infamous serial killers in UK history, Dennis Nilsen - a civil servant who went undetected as he murdered boys and young men he met on the streets of London from 1978 to 1983.2020 is the 15th anniversary of the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University. Tonight, with the help of judge Lucy Caldwell – who has herself been twice shortlisted for the award – Front Row announces this year’s shortlist.Critics Arifa Akbar and Leslie Felperin join Front Row to look back at the week in culture and to review The Painted Bird, a new film by Czech director/producer Václav Marhoul - an adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński's classic novel. 3 hours long, in black and white, it is the first film to feature the Interslavic language and tells the tale of a young Jewish boy who undergoes a series of harrowing, life-changing episodes in rural Eastern Europe during the Second World War. It was the Czech entry for the Best International Feature Film at the Oscars but its brutal depictions of violence have led to walkouts at festivals. Presenter: John Wilson Studio Manager: Emma Harth

Diana Rigg has died aged 82. Her breakthrough role was as Mrs Emma Peel in The Avengers, going on to have a distinguished career across film, theatre and television with roles including as a Bond Girl in Her Majesty's Secret Service, Lady Macbeth at the National Theatre and Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. Charles Dance remembers the actress alongside Mark Gatiss who wrote an episode of Doctor Who for Diana especially. On the line from Beijing, Chinese pianist Lang Lang discusses his new recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the culmination of a 20-year musical journey for the musician. One version was recorded in the studio, the other in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, where Bach worked and is buried. Cinemas have faced huge disruption through this pandemic - closing and now re-opening, so how have film distributors managed to get their movies seen? Kirsty asks film producer Julie Baines and Hamish Moseley of the independent distributor Altitude whether the altered landscape of the cinema industry is here for good.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Hannah Robins Studio Manager: Emma Harth

Tonight the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction is announced at a special virtual ceremony – the judgement delayed because of Covid 19. We talk to the winner live on air. How has the pandemic affected what viewers expect from the major arts broadcasters? We ask Director of Sky Arts Philip Edgar-Jones, whose channel becomes free to watch on the 17th of September and to Director of BBC Arts Jonty Claypole, who has just announced an extension to the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine season bringing the best of the UK arts world to people in their homes under lockdown. Film Director Antonio Campos tells us about his Southern Gothic thriller: The Devil All The Time, which stars Robert "Batman" Pattinson and Tom "Spider-man" Holland in a bloody revenge drama adapted from the award-winning novel by Donald Ray Pollock. It's a story which follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Julian May

Andrew Lloyd Webber told MPs today that the arts are at the "point of no return". Also speaking to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee was Rebecca Kane Burton, chief exec of LW Theatres, who joins us to discuss the crisis, and Lucy Noble, chief exec of the Royal Albert Hall. Will performing venues be saved by the government's recently announced Operation Sleeping Beauty? Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel, Mayflies, is the story of two young friends in a small Scottish town who spend the summer of 1986 escaping from the world of their fathers and into the freedom of a magical weekend in Manchester. Thirty years after that, one calls the other with devastating news. O’Hagan talks about how the novel was inspired by the joy and sadness of a real-life friendship.A Christopher Hampton adaptation of J G Farrell’s 1978 novel The Singapore Grip starts on Sunday on ITV, starring David Morrissey, Jane Horrocks, Charles Dance and Luke Treadaway. Set in the Second World War it tells of the fortunes of a family of rich rubber planters in the months before and during the Japanese invasion of Singapore. Actor and writer Daniel York Loh reviews.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Timothy Prosser Production Co-ordinator: Lizzie Harris