Front Row

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a new film starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield as televangelists Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker charting their controversial rise and fall in the 1970s and 80s. They by Kay Dick is a rediscovered dystopian novel first published in 1977. Critics Suzi Feay and Michael Carlson give their verdicts on both.It's 25 years since the TV news satire Brass Eye first came to our screens with episodes such as one featuring fake drug Cake becoming the stuff of TV legend. Director Michael Cumming joins Samira. And the Bafta film nominations are announced today. Critic Hanna Flint joins us.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Sarah Johnson Studio Manager: Giles Aspen

Erin Doherty shot to fame playing Princess Anne in The Crown and joins Tom to discuss her latest role as social media obsessed stalker Becky in BBC drama Chloe.The writer Andrei Kurkov talks about literature, TV, music and cultural festivals across Ukraine.Documentary and true crime podcasts are more popular than ever, but does audio offer new ways of telling stories? Narrative expert and former head of BBC Drama Commissioning John Yorke, and Alexi Mostrous, host of Tortoise Media’s hit podcast Sweet Bobby, consider the particular craft of longform audio storytelling.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Simon Richardson Photo Credit (Erin Doherty): Joseph Sinclair

Ahead of the release of their fourth studio album, Give Me the Future, Dan Smith and Charlie Barnes of the alt-pop four piece Bastille perform live in the studio and discuss the creation of this sci-fi-influenced concept album, their most collaborative yet.A new initiative sponsored by The Booksellers Association and bookselling website Bookshop.org aims to encourage individuals from under represented backgrounds into the bookselling business, with seed funding available for successful applicants to open their own bricks and mortar bookshop. Historically seen as a more of a labour of love than a viable business or career plan, we explore the current state of the independent bookselling sector in the wake of the pandemic and the ever present pressures of the internet on local high streets.And we have the first interview with the Costa Book Awards Book of the Year winner.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Laura Northedge Photo: Bastille Credit: Sarah Louise Bennett

Van Gogh’s self portraits have defined our sense of his inner life. As a new exhibition gathers many of them together for the first time, The Courtauld’s Curator of Paintings, Karen Serres and the art historian, Martin Bailey join Tom Sutcliffe to consider what they reveal about an artist we feel we know so well.Director Joanna Hogg tells Tom about the making of the sequel to her semi-autobiographical 2019 film The Souvenir, starring real life mother and daughter, Tilda Swinton and Honor Swinton Byrne.Mark Rylance stars in Dr Semmelweis, a new play at the Bristol Old Vic about a pioneering doctor who struggled to make the establishment heed his warnings about hand hygiene. Professor Tim Cook, a consultant intensive care doctor in Bath gives his verdict on the play.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Tim ProsserIMAGE: Self Portrait as a Painter by Vincent Van Gogh (December- February 1888) CREDIT: Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, Vincent Van Gogh Foundation

The actress Romola Garai talks about her directorial debut, the horror film Amulet. Critics Maria Delgado and Louisa Buck review Pedro Almodóvar's film Parallel Mothers starring Penélope Cruz - an account of two new mothers and his most overtly political film yet. And they give their views on a new exhibition at the Royal Academy, Francis Bacon: Man and Beast.And comedian Arthur Smith pays tribute to comedy genius Barry Cryer, so much loved by the Radio 4 audience.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Laura Northedge

Isabel Allende was born in Peru in 1942 and raised in Chile. Most famous for her novel The House of the Spirits, her works have been both bestsellers and critically acclaimed, translated into more than forty-two languages and selling more than seventy-five million copies worldwide. Her latest book, Violeta, is a fictional account of one woman’s life through an extraordinary century of history. Isabel talks about her life, her special relationship with her mother and her pursuit of equality.Freya McClements reports from Derry/Londonderry where The White Handkerchief, a play marking the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, is about to open. Freya speaks to members of the production team and hears about plans for a public memorial to commemorate the dead and injured this coming Sunday.A new recording by Roderick Williams and Tamsin Dalley of Facade, an “entertainment” by Edith Sitwell and William Walton, has been released 100 years after its first performance. Dame Edith’s great nephew William Sitwell and Professor Faye Hammill discuss the story behind the piece, its impact and the part it has played in the movement of Modernism.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Harry ParkerPhoto: Isabel Allende Credit: Lori Barra

The Responder, a five-part BBC drama broadcast on consecutive nights this week, was written by ex-police response officer Tony Schumacher. He joins Samira along with Martin Freeman, who stars as the disillusioned police responder Chris Carson.A cross party group of MPs from the north of England have just made the case for cultural levelling up in a new report, ahead of the Government's much anticipated white paper on its broader levelling up agenda. We hear from the author of the report, Professor Katy Shaw of Northumbria University and arts policy expert Dr. Abigail Gilmore of the University of Manchester and the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre. Screen Yorkshire’s chief executive Caroline Cooper Charles and Jamie Andrews, Head of Culture and Learning at The British Library, tell us about what they're doing to invest in culture in and around Leeds. Samira is also joined in the studio by Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, Minister for the Arts in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Simon RichardsonPhoto: Martin Freeman Credit: BBC

The singer and actor Olly Alexander discusses his new album, Night Call, and playing the central role in the Russell T Davies drama acclaimed television drama, It's A Sin; Theatre director Femi Elufowoju jr on making his opera debut with a new transformed production of Verdi's opera, Rigoletto; and the American poet Honorée Fannone Jeffers on expanding into fiction with her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B DuBois.Presenter: Nick Ahad Production Co-ordinator: Lizzie Harris Studio Engineers: John Cole and Chris Hardman Producer: Ekene Akalawu

Belfast-born actor Ciarán Hinds tells Tom Sutcliffe about playing Kenneth Branagh’s grandfather in the director’s semi-autobiographical film Belfast, set in the early years of The Troubles in Northern Ireland.Historian Hallie Rubenhold and critic Hannah McGill discuss Guillermo Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley and Julian Fellowes’s US answer to Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age.The latest exhibition at Serpentine North in London stretches beyond the gallery’s confines. There are three ways to view it: at the gallery, in augmented reality on the Acute Art app, and on the gaming platform Fortnite, potentially opening it up to hundreds of millions of people. How radical an idea is this, what does it mean for the future of viewing art and how well does it work? Creator and producer of digital exhibitions Marie Foulston takes a look.

Munich: The Edge of War is new film set in 1938 at the time of the Munich Agreement when the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was making a last ditch attempt to avoid war with Hitler’s Germany. Starring Jeremy Irons as Chamberlain it concerns the efforts of a young civil servant, played by George MacKay, who is sent to Munich to secure a document which would change the course of history. The German director Christian Schwochow talks about making a fictional thriller set against a background of historical fact. And as a director of episodes of The Crown he reveals what it’s like to be a German making drama out of the British royal family.A postcard from Australia in its multitudes. In the midst of a two year UK-Australia Cultural Exchange, the ABC’s C Benedict looks at what the UK means to Australia now. First Nations Australian creatives – Yorta Yorta composer Deborah Cheetham and Dharug artist Janelle Evans – talk about cultural custodianship and bringing Indigenous voices to the world, and sound artist Sia Ahmad finds surprising resonances between her experimental punk ethos and the Cornish independent film Bait.Jo Browning Wroe grew up in a crematorium in Birmingham. She talks to Tom about her debut novel, A Terrible Kindness, about a newly qualified embalmer, William, called in to attend to the dead after the Aberfan disaster in 1966 and the impact it has on his life.