Front Row

A special edition exploring the life and legacy of the playwright Joe OrtonLeonie Orton, Joe Orton's youngest sister, has written a memoir of her life, I Had It In Me, in which she describes the childhood in Leicester she shared with Joe Orton and how his death led her to question and change her life. She meets Samira at the Pork Pie Library which she and Joe used to regularly visit. Dr Emma Parker has co-curated two exhibitions inspired by Joe Orton: What the Artist Saw: Art Inspired by the Life and Work of Joe Orton, is on at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester until 22 October and Crimes of Passion: The Story of Joe Orton is on at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham until 1 OctoberSally Norman, co-founder and co-director of Soft Touch Arts in Leicester, and her assistant Jenna Forbes, discuss their new community arts exhibition Breaking Boundaries: Joe Orton and Me which is on at Soft Touch Arts until 8 September.Theatre critic John Lahr, author of the acclaimed Joe Orton biography, Prick Up Your Ears, discusses Orton's skill and significance as a playwright.The actor Sheila Hancock shares her memories of performing in Joe Orton's first stage play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, during its first Broadway run in 1965.The artistic director of Curve theatre, Nikolai Foster, talks about his experience of staging Joe Orton's final play, What The Butler Saw, at Curve earlier this year.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Ekene Akalawu.

Actor Henry Goodman talks about his latest stage role as the celebrated portrait painter Lucian Freud in Looking at Lucian, a new play by Alan Franks.The number of published British black and minority ethnic authors writing for young adults is lamentably low. A new collection of short stories and poetry, A Change is Gonna Come, is setting out to change that - the collection includes work by established YA writers like Tanya Byrne and Patrice Lawrence but also introduces four new unpublished BAME writers. The writer Nikesh Shukla and The Bookseller's Online Editor Sarah Shaffi discuss who are the rising stars in diversity in British YA fiction and look at the publishing industry's attempts to improve their representation.British-born, Bangkok-based best-selling author Lawrence Osborne's novels often focus on travellers coming unstuck in foreign lands, and his new book Beautiful Animals, is no exception. A thriller set amongst the tourists and wealthy expats on a Greek Island, it explores what happens when two young women stumble upon a Syrian immigrant washed up on the shore.For our Queer Icons series, Isaac Julien champions Derek Jarman's film about the Renaissance artist Caravaggio.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Hilary Dunn.

An international figure in architecture Daniel Libeskind is renowned for his ability to evoke cultural memory in buildings.Born in Poland in 1946, Libeskind emigrated to the United States as a teenager and performed as a musical virtuoso, before eventually leaving music to study architecture. He began his career as an architectural theorist and professor, holding positions at various institutions around the world. In 1989, he won the international competition to build the Jewish Museum in Berlin. A series of influential museum commissions followed, including Imperial War Museum North, Manchester; Denver Art Museum; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Royal Ontario Museum; and the Military History Museum, Dresden. In 2003, Studio Libeskind won another historic competition-to create a master plan for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.In this extended interview, Daniel Libeskind gives John Wilson insights into his design process and the sometimes surprising artistic inspirations behind his buildings.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Edwina PItman

Philippa Gregory talks about her new novel The Last Tudor - the 15th book in her Tudor/Plantagenet series in as many years. In the Last Tudor, Gregory tells the stories of the Grey sisters, starting with Lady Jane Grey who was queen of England for just nine days. The classically-trained singer-songwriter Regina Spektor defies categorisation but wins admiration and a loyal following for her distinctive pop drawing on influences from Boris Pasternak to the Beatles. She joins Kirsty in the studio to perform live from her current album, Remember Us To Life.For Front Row's Queer Icons series, the actor Rebecca Root talks about the Mary Oliver poem Wild Geese which helped her through her transition.This week Channel 4 airs the reality TV series Eden: Paradise Lost - the reality show set on a Scottish island which was cancelled after just four episodes last year. Elizabeth Day gives her verdict.Presenter Kirsty Lang Producer Dymphna Flynn.

Highlights from Front Row's Queer Icons project, presented by Alan Carr.With guests including Mary Portas, Olly Alexander, Christine and the Queens, Paris Lees, Maggi Hambling, Rebecca Root, A.Dot, Stella Duffy and the Oscar-winning writer of Moonlight, Tarell Alvin McCraney.Celebrating LGBTQ culture from the poetry of Sappho to the songs of Frank Ocean, we've asked guests to champion a piece of LGBTQ artwork that is special to them - one that has significance in their lives.Will Young picks the Joan Armatrading song that inspired him to come out; Christine and the Queens talks about Jean Genet's Our Lady Of The Flowers; and Sir Antony Sher reveals his regrets about not being out publicly when he starred in Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy.For the full interviews head to Front Row's Queer Icons website, where you can hear Queer Icons from Neil MacGregor, Asifa Lahore, Colm Toibin, Tony Kushner, Emma Donoghue, Nicholas Hytner and many more.Presenter: Alan Carr Readers: Lorelei King and Simon Russell Beale Producer: Timothy Prosser.

When a renowned writer or artist dies, those left behind can find themselves in an ethical quandary - should work that is unfinished or incomplete be kept private or is there a public interest in revealing it to the world? Hunter Davies's wife, the author Margaret Forster, passed away last year, and left behind a substantial amount of unpublished writing. Hunter shares his story with us in the studio, and Virginia Woolf's great-niece and advisor to the Woolf estate, Virginia Nicholson, also joins us to discuss the issue.TV writer and part-time emergency room doctor Dan Sefton talks about his latest TV drama Trust Me, starring the future Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker. A psychological thriller about a nurse who takes drastic measures after losing her job, the four-part BBC series examines the many facets and layers of telling lies.The new Charlize Theron action spy thriller Atomic Blonde is not for the faint-hearted. Set in Berlin in the final days of the Cold War, the film features numerous very physical fight sequences - its director is a former stuntman and it shows. But does this approach offer more style than substance, threatening a good storyline? And with more and more of these movies fronted by women, are female action heroes becoming as bankable as their male counterparts? Film critic Anna Smith joins us to discuss.For Front Row's Queer Icons series, the Irish writer Colm Toibin nominates The Married Man by Edmund White.Presenter John Wilson Producer Rebecca Armstrong.

Irvine Welsh discusses Performers, a new one-act play he has co-written with Dean Cavanagh about the '60s cult film Performance. Directed by Donald Cammell and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, it starred James Fox and Mick Jagger. Welsh's play dramatises the casting process in which East End criminals were sought for the villain roles.When James Daunt became Managing Director of the bookshop chain Waterstones in 2011, the company was receiving £27m per year selling its window space and high-profile in-store locations to publishers who wanted greater visibility for their books. He immediately stopped the practice, but what were the repercussions? James Daunt and Will Atkinson, Managing Director of Atlantic Books, discuss bookshop economics and the role of the 'recommendation'.Morrissey's early years get the rock-star biopic treatment in the film England Is Mine. Anita Sethi reviews.For Front Row's Queer Icons series, singer-songwriter and LGBTI rights activist CN Lester chooses Leslie Feinberg's semi-autobiographical novel Stone Butch Blues, a coming-of-age story about Jess Goldberg, who challenges sexual and gender definitions in a pre-Stonewall America.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Edwina Pitman.

Best known for her performances in the 1978 film Grease and in the 1990s TV series The West Wing, the Emmy and Tony-winning actor Stockard Channing talks about her new role in Alexi Kate Campbell's Apologia at the Trafalgar Studios in London. Channing plays a famous art historian who has written a memoir which does not mention her two sons. The action takes place at a birthday party to which the sons - and their girlfriends - are invited. An installation in an old Roman fort near Hexham recreates the sound of 500 cavalry horses, and the Royal British Legion are commemorating the centenary of the Battle Of Passchendaele with immersive online videos. The poet and historian Katrina Porteous reviews both 360-degree representations of war.Matisse in the Studio is a new exhibition at the Royal Academy which focuses on the artist's personal collection of treasured objects, and how they were both subject matter and inspiration for his paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and cut-outs. Ann Dumas, the exhibition's curator, explains the relevance and importance of the 35 objects that are on display alongside 65 of Matisse's works.For Front Row's Queer Icons series, composer Thomas Adès explores the character of Countess Geschwitz in Alban Berg's opera Lulu, the first explicitly gay character in opera.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Rachel Simpson.

As public services come under increasing pressure from government cuts the demand for documentaries about them is reflected in the number of programmes on TV. Last week, ITV's Inside London Fire Brigade featured previously unheard accounts of fire fighters from inside Grenfell Tower. In the same week, Channel 4's 24 hours in A&E returned for its 13th series, alongside 999 What's Your Emergency which is in its fourth; earlier in July, the second series of Hospital was screened on BBC Two. TV executives Simon Dickson and Ed Coulthard discuss why programmes about public services are so popular and what is involved in turning hours of documentary material into compulsive viewing. Writer Damian Barr champions Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels for Front Row's Queer Icons series.Sally Hawkins stars as Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis, in new biopic Maudie. The actress discusses Maud's remarkable life in a remote part of Nova Scotia living in very basic conditions while suffering from juvenile arthritis, her unlikely romance with local fisherman Everett Lewis played by Ethan Hawke in the film, and Maud's joyful spirit that comes through in her paintings. Josette Bushell-Mingo talks about her one-woman show 'Nina - a Story about Me and Nina Simone' in which she explores Nina Simone's musical and political influence not only on the young Josette but on the American civil rights movement of the 1960s and onwards. Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Jack Soper.

For our Queer Icons series, director Sir Nicholas Hytner chooses the Rodgers and Hart song Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, which he reveals was written by Lorenz Hart with a gay subtext. Northern Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty returns with his first novel in 16 years, Midwinter Break: the small details of a retired couple's trip to Amsterdam build into a portrait of ageing, alcoholism, faith and love.The new Postal Museum in London features the art and artefacts which have shaped the British postal service. Samira and Trainspotting Live presenter Tim Dunn ride the 100-year-old Mail Rail, the small train that runs on miles of subterranean track linking the capital's main railway stations which used to carry millions of letters and parcels across the city.The Californian company SciFuture are commissioning science fiction writers to help corporations cope with change. Scientist Susan Stepney explains the interplay between science fiction and the future.Presenter : Samira Ahmed Producer : Dymphna Flynn.