Front Row

It's estimated that almost three million people in the UK now belong to a choir. Kirsty Lang explores why this might be, and looks at the evidence that singing is really good for us.The Sixteen is a professional choir which celebrates its 40th anniversary next year. It's founder, Harry Christophers, and one of the sopranos, Charlotte Mobbs, talk to Kirsty about starting the choir, changing attitudes towards choral singing, their 2019 plans and their outreach programme, working in communities where arts provision is low.Ten years ago, musician Martin Trotman was approached by the Birmingham NHS Trust to set up a community choir for those with mental health issues. One choir has grown into four choirs, which welcome all members of the community with the aim of promoting mental and physical wellbeing through music and song. Martin discusses why choral singing is so beneficial, and two members of the Birmingham Wellbeing Choir talk to Kirsty about how it's helped them.M J Paranzino is a musician and vocal coach with a passion for community singing. She currently runs four choirs, one in Brighton, one in Hastings and two in London. Kirsty joined M J and members of the choirs when they sang at the V&A in London in the run up to Christmas and discovered that all of human life is in a community choir! Dr Jacques Launay is a lecturer at Brunel University and has done, and continues to do, research into music and social bonding. He explains why our bodies and minds respond so well to singing in a choir.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Rebecca Armstrong

Andrew Davies is renowned for turning literary classics into prime-time television drama, from Pride and Prejudice and Bleak House to War and Peace. He talks to Samira about his new BBC One series, a reworking of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, explaining the appeal of the 19th Century epic novel and why the stage musical version of the book didn’t influence his adaption at all. In the Bible, Matthew wrote about the Three Wise Men, Luke about the shepherds and the angels, and ever since, Christmas has provided inspiration for writers. John Milton wrote On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Jane Austen has a Christmas scene in Persuasion, Ernest Hemingway wrote about Paris at Christmas and Helen Fielding, in Bridget Jones’s Diary, has Bridget attending a terrible yuletide family gathering. Writer Matthew Sweet, critic Arifa Akbar and Professor Stephen Regan, who has traced the history of Christmas in English literature, discuss the different ways writers have treated Christmas in their work. Sheffield-based poet Helen Mort talks about the poetry of the festive season and reads her Christmas poem written especially for Front Row.Presenter Samira Ahmed Producer Harry Parker

Ben Elton, creator of the iconic Elizabethan sitcom Blackadder II, talks about his fascination with Shakespeare, as Upstart Crow returns to BBC Two for a Shakespeare/Dickens mashup, A Crow Christmas Carol. He's also written the screenplay for All is True, a Shakespeare biopic starring Kenneth Branagh. Vanessa Kisuule reads her poem Describing Snow in the Aftermath, part of Radio 4's poetry day marking the winter solstice. As artist Olafur Eliasson installs melting ice blocks outside Tate Modern in order to highlight the dangers of climate change, Stig asks whether political art is becoming more of a call to action. With critics Jacky Klein, Jonathan Jones and artist Bob and Roberta Smith. And why has misery won out over cheer on Christmas TV in recent years? David Butcher investigates. Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Timothy Prosser

Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the phenomenally successful stage musical Hamilton, is starring in Mary Poppins Returns, a sequel to Disney’s 1964 classic. He talks to John about following in the cockney footsteps of Dick Van Dyke, and how he referenced the original Mary Poppins in Hamilton. As Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage musical Hamilton marks one year on the London stage this week, we look at whether it has created an increased appetite for hip hop musicals. Taking part are the Musical Director of ZooNation DJ Walde, who co-created the musicals Sylvia, Some Like It Hip Hop, and Into The Hoods; Professor of Musical Theatre, Millie Taylor; and Poppy Burton-Morgan, writer and director of the musical In The Willows.Richard Sherman, now ninety, wrote the music for the original Mary Poppins with his brother Robert. In 2007 he came on Front Row to talk about composing for Walt Disney and performed Walt’s favourite song, Feed the Birds.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Kate Bullivant

Eileen Atkins, grande dame of the stage, looks back over her career. The actress famous for her roles in The Crown and Gosford Park, talks about playing Childie in the original stage production of The Killing of Sister George, and co-creating Upstairs Downstairs, as well as some of the famous acting roles she has turned down.Penny Marshall, the first woman to direct a film that took more than 100m dollars at the box office, has died. She was, too, the second female director to have a film Oscar-nominated for best picture. Marshall starred as Laverne in the long-running hit comedy Laverne and Shirley, directing several episodes before moving on to make commercially and critically successful feature films. Leslie Felperin, who grew up watching Laverne and Shirley, assesses the career of this pioneering director.BBC One’s This Is My Song is a television series which invites members of the public in to a recording studio to work with famous music producers and create a track for a very personal reason. Samira speaks to two people involved in the series - music producer Sister Bliss from Faithless, and Charles, who, following a double lung transplant, sang in the studio for the first time. If you're in need of a break from all the sugar-coated seasonal fare, Front Row is offering some substitute Christmas treats for you to consider. Critic Sarah Ditum unwraps her alternative festive book, Stephen King’s The Shinning, a tale of a family forced to survive a homicidal snowy winter.Presenter Samira Ahmed Producer Hilary Dunn

Actor and director John Malkovich discusses foreign accents and facial hair with Kirsty as he explains what drew him to taking on the role of famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in The ABC Murders, the latest BBC One dramatization of Agatha Christie's novels by writer Sarah Phelps.As Christmas approaches with films like It's a Wonderful Life back in cinemas and Love Actually on the TV schedules film critic Hannah McGill and Thomas Dixon, author of Weeping Britannia, discuss what makes a good weepie and why do we like to cry at films? Part of Front Row's ongoing series on the relationship between the arts and mental health.True crime podcasts have captivated listeners around the world, with the first series of Serial about the murder of a high school student acting establishing what is now a significant part of the podcast landscape. Crime novelist Mark Billingham discusses the rise and rise of the genre from Atlanta Monster to Death in Ice Valley and most recently the Australian hit The Teacher's Pet.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer : Dymphna Flynn

As the Archers prepares for its Canterbury Tales Christmas special, Carole Boyd - who plays the doyenne of Ambridge theatricals Lynda Snell - is joined by Oxford Professor of Medieval Literature Laura Ashe to discuss Chaucer’s tales of courtly love and boisterous sex.The new BBC and Netflix animated version of Watership Down will be broadcast on BBC ONE at 7pm on December 22 and 23. Critic Mark Ecclestone gives his view on how it compares with the book by Richard Adams, and whether the new version will traumatise children, as the first film version did in the seventies.Recently rappers in Russia have found their concerts cancelled by venues and local authorities and some musicians have been arrested. Over the weekend President Putin admitted he couldn't get rid of rap, but that he wanted to control it, saying, "If it's impossible to stop something, you have to take charge of it." But what is his objection and what does he intend to do? Alexander Kan, the BBC Russian Service's arts and culture correspondent, reads the runes.If you're in need of a break from all the sugar-coated seasonal fare, Front Row is offering some substitute Christmas treats for you to consider. The film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh unwraps her alternative festive film, Gremlins, a tale of Christmas shopping gone wrong.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian May

Rita Ora on her six year journey to release her second album Phoenix, following a legal dispute with her record label. The musician, who has also acted in the Fifty Shades film trilogy and been a judge on television talent shows The Voice and The X-Factor, talks to John Wilson about finally being able to release music, song writing and her Albanian heritage.This year’s Bad Sex In Fiction award was won by James Frey and also had an all-male shortlist. So what defines good and bad writing of sex in literature, and why do men seem to be worse at it than women? Novelist Matt Thorne and Rowan Pelling, founding editor of the Erotic Review now of The Amorist, discuss.Unbelievably, Die Hard is 30 years old this year. Stand-up poet Kate Fox considers why this thriller starring Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman is such a classic.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Sarah Johnson

Not Going Out is the UK’s longest-running sitcom on TV and will this year bring a live edition to our screens for Christmas. The show’s star and creator Lee Mack talks about its surprising longevity, the changing face of British comedy, and his childhood dream of being a jockey.From real life to the big screen and now the casino stage, Channing Tatum’s outstandingly popular Magic Mike is now in London’s West End. Though in the light of the #MeToo movement, the show is compared by female comedian Sophie Linder-Lee, who reveals that there is a message behind the performance, and how demanding a show it is to control.Jeremy Noel-Tod has gathered poems from all over the world and created a new 400-page anthology. But these poems don’t rhyme and they are not metrical. They are not arranged in stanzas, nor even lines. Noel-Tod is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and together with the writer Michèle Roberts who has composed some, explains what a prose poem is, how it came about, and the allure of this particular form.Presenter Stig Abell Producer Jerome Weatherald

Two new films with comic book superheroes at the centre - Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and Aquaman - have just been released. Aquaman is DC’s follow-up to their hugely successful 2017 film Wonder Woman, while Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an animated superhero film which imagines Spidermen (and women) from alternative universes who team up. Critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw has seen both and gives her verdict on which will come out on top in the battle for the box-office.Mike Bartlett, Olivier Award-winning playwright whose work includes Love, Love, Love and King Charles III, and on television, crime drama The Town and Doctor Foster, returns to The Old Fire Station in Oxford where his very first play (co-authored) was produced when he was 18. His latest work, Snowflake, written especially for this theatre at Christmas, is a story of a father and his daughter estranged partly because of their differing views on leaving the EU.Whilst snowflakes might be 'triggered' by the term snowflake - a pejorative term describing the real or imagined sensitivity of the younger generation - how is 'generation snowflake' being represented in the arts? Author and academic Tiffany Jenkins, pop culture journalist Holly Rose Swinyard and writer Ella Whelan discuss the so-called snowflake generation and what the cultural response to it reveals about both the term itself and the current state of the intergenerational relations.Presenter Kirsty Lang Producer Hilary Dunn