Front Row

An entire disused swimming pool has been built on the ground floor of the Whitechapel Gallery in London for the new exhibition from the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset. The artists discuss how they have been inspired by the work of David Hockney and Ed Ruscha. Then film critic Mark Eccleston art critic Jacky Klein and artist and former Canadian national competitive swimmer Leanne Shapton reflect on the swimming pool in the arts. Kwame Kwei-Armah opens his first season as the Artistic Director of London’s Young Vic with a musical adaptation of Twelfth Night. This reworking of Shakespeare’s comedy, which includes soul music and show tunes from songwriter Shaina Taub, has already impressed audiences in New York. Theatre critic Sam Marlowe gives her verdict.Green Noise is the title of poet Jean Sprackland’s new collection which encapsulates her concerns with the natural world on which she focuses minutely, as well as the sounds of the street, the wind, and resonating history. She reads her work and talks about writing poems that listen to the green noise of life.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Edwina Pitman

The actor and entertainer Bernard Cribbins, who will be 90 in December, discusses his new memoir Bernard Who?: 75 Years of Doing Just About Everything, in which he tells his own story, very much in his own way, about a busy career which includes Jackanory , Right Said Fred, Doctor Who, The Wombles, Shakespeare, Hitchcock’s Frenzy, The Railway Children, Crooks in Cloisters, three Carry On films and lots of radio. La La Land duo Ryan Gosling and director Damien Chazelle reunite for First Man, a film about the trials and tribulations of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s bold and costly mission to land on the moon. Ryan plays Neil Armstrong alongside The Crown star Claire Foy as his wife Janet. The actors consider how the astronaut and his wife had to deal with the high-pressured space race whilst processing the death of their young daughter.The new ITV drama series Butterfly focuses on a child who socially transitions from Max to Maxine. Transgender author Juno Dawson gives her verdict on how well the drama tackles the issue on mainstream TV.Montserrat Caballé has died aged 85. Opera critic Rupert Christiansen assesses the career and voice of one of the most exciting and successful sopranos of the 20th century.Presenter John Wilson Producer Jerome Weatherald

“It’s about time” is the tagline for the new Doctor Who series, referencing the programme’s time-travelling exploits, but also the arrival of the first female Doctor in the show's history. Jodie Whittaker will be the 13th Doctor and tells us how she's tackling a role with so much history, attention and anticipation around it.Haruki Murakami's novels are awaited by eager audiences not just in his native Japan but the world over. Killing Commendatore is his latest and it delivers all the things his readers have come to expect: brushes with the supernatural, an almost audible soundtrack and a narrator who’s lost his way. How successful is it? Critic Alex Clark reviews and analyses the Murakami phenomenon.Quentin Blake, one of the world’s best loved illustrators, takes us around the first ever exhibition dedicated to his figurative art. Featuring large-scale oil paintings and drawings it reveals a more experimental side to his practice. Blake explains how this darker, more serious work emerged.Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Hannah Robins

Alice Walker is famous for prose books such as The Color Purple and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. But her first book was a collection of poems and she has published eight more. Alice talks about her latest, Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart, which ranges from poems of rage about injustice, poems of praise to great figures - BB King for instance - and celebration of the ordinary like making frittatas. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is known for her pumpkin installations and her obsession with polka dots. A new documentary charts her career beginning in New York in the 1950s during the Pop Art movement, where she became well known for her provocative immersive exhibitions and performances. It covers her return to Japan in middle-age, checking herself into a psychiatric hospital and fading from public view, to her current status as the world’s bestselling living female artist. The film-maker Heather Lenz tells us about her documentary. Alongside the film, a new show of Yayoi Kusama’s recent work opens this week in London. Jacky Klein reviews.Today is National Poetry Day. Twenty years ago, in its first contribution to National Poetry Day, Radio 4 commissioned Sean Street to write a sequence of poems based on the network's day. So, Thought for the Day was a poem, there was a poem about the pips - the Greenwich Time Signal - and another on the Shipping Forecast. These were dropped between programmes throughout the day. Twenty years later Front Row has commissioned a new poem from Sean Street on this year's theme of change. He reads it publicly for the first time. Presenter: Gaylene Gould Producer: Julian May

In the week Rowan Atkinson returns to the big screen as the hapless spy in Johnny English Strikes Again, which sees him batter innocent bystanders and himself in a series of pratfalls, we look at the art of physical comedy. Jonathan Sayer of Mischief Theatre, classicist and stand-up Natalie Haynes and Dr Oliver Double of the University of Kent attempt to answer an eternal question: why is the unfortunate mishap hilarious - so long as someone else is falling off the ladder?Damien Hirst has just announced that he is scaling back business activities, including laying off 50 staff, to focus on making art. This news coincided with a recent report into the value of Hirst’s work, which found that the artworks he sold at auction in 2008, had plummeted in value when resold. Art market journalist Georgina Adam explains what this all might mean for the artist. Andre Aciman, whose first novel Call Me By Your Name, was turned into an Oscar winning film, discusses his latest novel Enigma Variations, which charts the life and loves of one man from adolescence through adulthood.In the first in an occasional series looking at the way the way in which the arts can positively impact on people’s mental well being, Stig Abell talks to Laura Freeman about her book The Reading Cure in which she describes “the chaos, misery and misrule of an anorexic’s thinking”, and how she overcame it. Aged 24 she read Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol and describes how continuing to read about food in fiction gave her the inspiration to start enjoying food again and became the pathway to a fuller and richer life. Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Edwina Pitman

We announce the winner of the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award and the Young Writers' Award live from West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge and celebrate the power and possibilities of the short story.Judges Sarah Howe and Stig Abell discuss the merits of the entries from the shortlisted authors. In contention for the £15,000 prize are Kerry Andrew, Sarah Hall, Kiare Ladner, Ingrid Persaud and Nell Stevens.Radio 1 presenter Katie Thistleton will also announce the winner of the BBC Young Writers' Award and consider the strengths and emerging themes of the stories with fellow judge Sarah Crossan, the Irish Children's Laureate / Laureate na nÓg.The Student Critics Award is a new scheme mentoring school students in their critical reading, helping this generation to be literary critics in a digital world where everyone can be a reviewer. Poet Dean Atta has been workshopping in a school and describes his work with the young people he met. The BBC National Short Story Award is presented in conjunction with Cambridge University and First Story. Presenter : John Wilson Producer : Dymphna Flynn.

Sarah Perry discusses Melmoth, her eagerly awaited novel after her award-winning The Essex Serpent. Her new novel is about an English translator who, hiding from her past in Prague, uncovers the legend of Melmoth – a woman in black who wanders the world bearing witness to humanity’s worst crimes.BBC1’s new Sunday night drama is a television adaptation of Helen Fitzgerald’s novel The Cry, in which the abduction of a baby leads to the psychological disintegration of a young woman. Emma Bullimore reviews The Cry and considers why child abduction or disappearance is such a recurring theme in contemporary television drama, with series such as Missing, Kiri and Save Me. What is ‘cultural first aid’? And why is it so important to save heritage in the face of natural disaster, fire, flood and conflict emergencies? Biovanni Boccardi of UNESCO alongside Aparna Tandon and Jose Luiz Pedersoli from ICCROM join Samira to discuss, and also to look at how cultural first aid is being used to help the National Museum of Brazil after the recent devastating fire.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Kate Bullivant

After being appointed director of last year’s opening event for Hull’s year as City of Culture, award-winning and Hull-born filmmaker Sean McAllister decided to make a documentary looking at the impact of the City of Culture on Hullensians by following the work of one man to set up a hip-hop project for disadvantaged kids. He discusses the result, A Northern Soul, and explains his current efforts to challenge the film’s certification.Jamaican-born Poet Tanya Shirley is one of the Hull 18, a selection of poets who have been commissioned to create new work to be premiered in Hull during the Contains Strong Language festival. She joins Jeremy Poynting, founder of Peepal Tree Press, the largest, worldwide publisher of Caribbean and Black British writing to discuss the rise of Caribbean literature.The artist Sean Scully is famous for his distinctively striped oil paintings. As he opens the first exhibition of his sculpture and paintings in the UK, he talks about his love of stripes, his move into sculpture, and why Van Gogh’s painting of his wooden chair had such a profound impact on him. At last year’s Contains Strong Language festival, poet Vicky Foster, joined Front Row to read out some of the poems written by the people of Humberside about places special to them in the region. She returns to Front Row to read a new work that she’s written, Bathwater, about her experiences of living with violence.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Ekene Akalawu

In Theatr Clywd’s new production of William Golding’s classic novel Lord of the Flies, the group of schoolboys stranded on a remote island have all been reimagined as girls. Critic Gary Raymond reviews.Forty playwrights and actors have accused National Theatre Wales of favouring English artists and companies over Welsh ones. In an open letter on the Wales Arts Review website, the Welsh artists also claim that the company is staging too few productions and say that non-Welsh artists and companies should only be engaged to support Welsh or Wales-based artists. Gary Raymond, editor of the Wales Arts Review, and Kully Thiarai, Artistic Director of National Theatre Wales, discuss the issues.From John Cage’s controversial composition 4’33”, a three-act movement where no sound is made, to the Rothko Chapel in Texas, a place for contemplation housing 14 of the artist’s large, dark paintings, silence has had a significant place in culture. Actor and director Simon McBurney, conductor Jeremy Summerly, and art critic Charlotte Mullins consider the use and importance of silence in theatre, music and art.Berta Isla is the latest novel by Javier Marías, Spain's most celebrated contemporary writer. Critic Alex Clark explains its place in the context of the author's body of work.Presenter: Janina Ramirez Producer: Hannah Robins

Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie - The Goodies - join Samira to look back at their 1970s cult comedy series. As a complete box set of every episode is released, they reflect on their comedy writing that tackled police brutality, redefined comedy music and introduced television audiences to the little-known Lancastrian martial-art Ecky Thump. This week marks the centenary of the first performance of Gustav Holst's hugely popular orchestral suite The Planets. Composer and pianist David Owen Norris explains our enduring fascination with this work, and composer Samuel Bordoli talks about about his Planets 2018 project which commissioned eight composers to write new work inspired by current planetary science.Grime artist, poet and playwright Debris Stevenson explains how her coming-of-age theatre piece, Poet in Da Corner, sets the story of her own life growing up in a Mormon family in East London to the tracks of Dizzee Rascal’s seminal album Boy in Da Corner.Presenter Samira Ahmed Producer Edwina Pitman