Front Row

Arts Council England have announced the most dramatic shift in funding for decades, diverting investment from London towards other parts of the country. The Chair of Arts Council England, Sir Nicholas Serota, Stuart Murphy of English National Opera, which is set to relocate out of London, and arts journalist Sarah Crompton discuss the details. Director Tas Brooker discusses her new film When We Speak, a documentary about female whistleblowers, including Rose McGowan and Katherine Gun, whose evidence lifted the lid on abuse and corruption. To mark the start of the COP 27 climate conference in Egypt, Samira explores the art of the infographic and the appeal of data visualisation with Professor Ed Hawkins, creator of the viral Show Your Stripes temperature change graphic and information designer Stefanie Posavec.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Ellie BuryImage: Show Your Stripes infographic representing the global average temperature for each year since 1850 to 2021 (data source: UK Met Office) Credit: Creator: Professor Ed Hawkins, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading Licensor: University of Reading Licence: Creative Commons

Joan Bakewell and Hanna Flint give their verdicts on Hugo Blick's new TV Western on BBC2 starring Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer, 'The English'. They've also watched new film 'Living' starring Bill Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, based on an Akira Kurosawa film, 'Ikiru', about a man at the end of his life.Royal Opera House Opera Director Oliver Mears discusses his new production of Benjamin Britten’s 'The Rape of Lucretia' and the challenges he’s faced staging a work that deals with sexual violence. Image: 2022 The English (c) Drama Republic/BBC/Amazon Studios Photographer: Diego Lopez CalvinPresenter: Shahidha Bari Producer: Sarah Johnson

Playwright, poet and Children’s Laureate for Wales Connor Allen talks about his grime-theatre mash-up The Making of a Monster, a semi-autobiographical production about a young man struggling to find his place in the world. Harpist Catrin Finch and Irish violinist Aoife Ni Bhriain perform live in the Front Row studio and discuss their appearance at the Other Voices Festival in Cardigan, which will celebrate connections between Ireland and Wales. Poet Zoë Skoulding talks about her latest collection, A Marginal Sea, written in Ynys Mon, Anglesey, on the edge of Wales.Bilingual rapper, Sage Todz, on turning O Hyd - Still Here - a song from the '80s rallying people to the cause of the Welsh language, into one rallying them in support of the Welsh national football team, which is still here, in the World Cup competition. Presenter: Huw Stephens Producer: Julian May

Author Nick Hornby on the similarities of Dickens and Prince, as he publishes his new book on the “genius” of the Victorian novelist and the sex-funk pop musician.On the eve of World Ballet Day, we talk to Pacific Northwest Ballet Principal Dancer, Cecilia Iliesiu, about the new project she has co-founded – Global Ballet Teachers - to make the teaching of ballet more accessible to ballet teachers worldwide. We also hear from Vivian Boateng, a ballet teacher based in Accra, Ghana, who has been taking part in the Global Ballet Teachers project.Derek Owusu has written a book about his mother, who came to Britain from Ghana. But rather than a prose memoir he has imagined the journey of her life as a long poem titled Losing the Plot. Anthony Anaxagorou also writes about his family, life here and in Cyprus, where they came from, in his new collection Heritage Aesthetics. Rather than interviewing the two writers separately Front Row asked each to read the other's. Derek Owusu and Anthony Anaxagorou join Front Row to discuss their work.Photo credit for Nick Hornby: Parisa TaghizadehPresenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Kirsty McQuire

Artist Alison Lapper and co-curator Emma Rutherford discuss a new exhibition Without Hands: The Art of Sarah Biffin, which takes a fresh look at the work of the pioneering Victorian painter. Actor and writer Ric Renton talks about his new play One Off at Theatre Live in Newcastle. Inspired by the time he spent in prison as a young man, it addresses a crisis in the prison system. As a new exhibition about Plastic opens at the V&A Dundee, critic Anna Burnside takes a look at the 20th Century’s most intriguing and controversial materials.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Ellie BuryImage Credit: Sarah Biffin (1784-1850) Self-portrait , 1821 © Philip Mould & Company

Reviewers Karen Krizanovich and David Benedict give their verdicts on Tammy Faye, A New Musical at the Almeida Theatre in London, starring Katie Brayben, and from the combined creative forces of Elton John, Jake Shears, James Graham, and Rupert Goold. Plus they review Paul Newman, The Extraordinary Life Of An Ordinary Man - a memoir of the film star created from recently rediscovered transcripts of conversations Newman had in the 1980s.The Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, reads his poem to mark 100 years of the BBC.And the American artist Daniel Arsham is known for sculptures which look like archaeological remains or as he describes them “future relics.” As an outdoor exhibition of his work opens at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Luke Jones finds out what inspires his work. Photo credit: Marc BrennerPresenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Emma Wallace

Art critic Laura Robertson reviews this year's Turner Prize show at Tate Liverpool. Presenter Nick Ahad pays a visit to the immersive exhibition, Turn It Up: The Power of Music at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester.Laura Robertson brings us up to date on the latest arts news, from the delayed funding announcement by Arts Council England, to Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof gallery's response to rising energy costs.Plus Nick Ahad speaks to the pioneering dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson about his new collection, Selected Poems.Presenter: Nick Ahad Producer: Ekene AkalawuImage: The Musical Playground in Turn It Up The Power of Music exhibition © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum Group

Eliza Carthy is celebrating 30 years as a professional musician with a new album, Queen of the Whirl. She talks about this, the legacy of her musical family – as the daughter of Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy – the way traditional music develops, and her own song-writing, and performs live in the Front Row studio.Double Palme d'Or winning Swedish director Ruben Östlund tells Samira about his first English language film, Triangle of Sadness - a satire on the fashion industry, influencer culture, and the world of the super-rich.Plus the threat to brutalist architecture. Last year the Dorman Long Tower in Redcar was demolished, and now the Kirkgate Shopping centre in Bradford is condemned too. Brutalist architecture provokes both love as well as hate, but around the country its buildings are in peril. Author John Grindrod and Duncan Wilson from Historic England discuss how much is being lost, and if it matters.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian MayPhoto: Eliza Carthy. Credit: Elodie Kowalski

Taylor Swift and the Arctic Monkeys both released their debut albums in 2006. Their latest studio albums, Swift’s tenth, Midnights, and Arctic Monkeys seventh, The Car, have just been released. Laura Barton reviews them and compares their unexpected similarities.As new exhibition The Horror Show! opens at Somerset House, horror in art and film is discussed by the exhibition's co-curator Jane Pollard and BFI film programmer Michael Blyth.May Sumbwanyambe on his new play Enough of Him which explores the 18th century story of Joseph Knight, an African man enslaved by plantation owner Sir John Wedderburn and brought to Scotland to serve in his Perthshire mansion.Presenter: Shahidha Bari Producer: Harry Parker

For the poet Ezra Pound it was ‘year zero for Modernism’ but what were people in Britain really reading, watching, listening to and looking at in 1922?To mark the BBC’s centenary, Front Row reviews the popular culture of 1922: from the West End musical comedy The Cabaret Girl by Jerome Kern and PG Wodehouse to May Sinclair’s novel The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, via the silent film epic Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks and a fond farewell to Gainsborough’s portrait of The Blue Boy at The National Gallery, all set to a soundtrack of jazz, music hall and early radio.Tom Sutcliffe is joined by academic Charlotte Jones (Queen Mary, University of London), the writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet and the music critic Kevin Le Gendre.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Kirsty McQuireImage: Enid Bennett, Douglas Fairbanks and Sam De Grasse in Robin Hood, 1922