Front Row

Hollywood star Sam Neill joins us from his home in New Zealand to discuss the perils of acting with sheep in his new film Rams, based on an acclaimed Icelandic drama about two estranged brothers and their flocks of a rare horned breed of sheep.A new colour blue has come onto artists’ palettes. Called YInMn it was discovered in 2009 by accident by scientists working on semiconductors but has only just become commercially available. Art critic Waldemar Januszczak looks at why this is significant and how artists have used the colour blue in painting.The next artist in our series #FrontRowGetCreative is Sarah Maple who will be exploring the art of collage. Using the idea of ‘negative space’, Sarah will be showing us how to create our own collage using text and imagery from magazines, newspapers and junk mail, the result of which will be a modern and striking image and a significant step up from what we were doing at primary school.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Julian May

Film critic Leila Latif joins us to discuss today’s Golden Globe nominations, and gives us an overview of some of the highlights from the first ever online Sundance Festival.The folklore of Taiwan is visited and revisited by subsequent generations of women in Bestiary, the debut novel from K-Ming Chang, as a Daughter falls in love and confronts her family’s secrets in America. Shot through with a litany of mythical beasts, it’s a novel that offers a charged narrative of diaspora and beauty in a hazy magic realist renderings of California, Arkansas & Taiwan. Author and poet K-Ming Chang tells Kirsty Lang how tracing her own heritage led to a story of queer desire, violence, and identity.Writers write while agents tend to their interests and publishers bring their works to the public. There is, though, another lesser known but important worker in the books business - the Literary Scout. Their role is to find the right books, before anyone else, and bring them to publishers, all over the world. Scouts have to know everyone and everything and, as we all know, knowledge is power. Natasha Farrant, famous as a Costa Award winning children's author, has been a literary scout for 20 years. Antony Harwood has been a prominent literary agent even longer. On Front Row they discuss the role and importance of the literary scout, spilling the beans to Kirsty Lang...but probably not all of them.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Harry Parker Studio manager: Giles AspenMain image: Josh 0'Connor as Prince Charles and Emma Corrin as Lady Diana Spencer in the Netflix TV series The Crown Image credit: Des Willie/Netflix

The Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald discusses his follow-up to his YouTube film Life In A Day from 2010, where he invited the public to upload their own footage of their lives taken on one specific day. He then edited those contributions to create a finished film to tell the story of a single day on Earth. For Life In A Day 2020 he received over 320,000 submissions from nearly 200 countries. Jakuta Alikavazovic is a Prix Goncourt winning French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. She talks to John Wilson about her new novel Night As It Falls which explores themes of identity, first love, class and contemporary anxiety against the backdrop of the war in the former Yugoslavia and is out in English this week.As part of our ongoing mission to bring a bit of artistic light to the darkness, we’ve been hearing about some Moments of Joy – those sudden, intense moments watching a play or a film, reading, listening to music or looking at a work of art, when your heart soars. Critic Hanna Flint's choice is a scene from the film Blinded by the Light – with a soundtrack by the Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen. Continuing the theme, February 2nd is Candlemas, the celebration of the infant Christ's presentation in the Temple, and the coming of light, when all the candles needed for the year were brought into the church, and blessed. Poets have been drawn to the subject - Robert Herrick, T. S. Eliot and Amy Clampitt - all writing Candlemas poems. There are a number of Candlemas customs and sayings - about how the weather at Candlemas predicts the coming season, for instance. The Cornish poet Charles Causley incorporates one of these into his poem, At Candlemas, with which we end Front Row, in a setting by the Dartmoor singer, and relative of the poet, Jim Causley. Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Hilary Dunn

Jill Halfpenny stars in a new tv thriller The Drowning. Nine years ago, Jodie’s little boy disappeared on a picnic by the lake, presumed drowned, and she’s never been able to accept his loss. Now, out of the blue, she catches sight of a teenage boy and she’s sure that it’s her missing son. Jill talks to Samira about why she likes playing morally ambiguous characters, shares her own personal experience of loss and how grief is a monster you just can’t outrun.The British Library has just acquired the archive of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East and Helen Melody, Curator of Contemporary Literature and Creative Archives, tells Samira Ahmed about its treasures: scripts, performance recordings, letters, photographs, rehearsal notes, press cuttings and props. The archive also contains material from the tenures of later artistic directors, such Philip Hedley and Kerry Michael, who notably encouraged diversity and inclusion, Black and Asian theatre, and work made by people with disabilities. We mark the publication of a landmark anthology of queer writing, Queer: A Collection of LGBTQ Writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday, which brings together an unusually broad range of voices from across the ages and the globe to form a survey of queer literature. Editor of the anthology, Frank Wynne, will be joined by writer and artist Morgan M Page, host of trans history podcast One From the Vaults, for a discussion about the cyclical nature of attitudes towards sexuality and gender and to highlight some lesser known voices in the tradition from India, Mexico and Greenland.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Simon RichardsonMain image: Jill Halfpenny in The Drowning Image credit: Unstoppable Film and Television/Bernard Walsh

We review The Dig, starring Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes and the Suffolk landscape, a film about the excavation of the Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo. It's also a revealing excavation of class and prejudice in 1930s England. The great ship was discovered, uncovered and conserved by Basil Brown, an autodidact who left school aged 12, He described himself as an excavator and he and his work were brushed aside by incoming university trained archaeologists. The film also tells stories of love and grief in the tense days as war approaches. Our reviewers are Roberta Gilchrist, Professor of Medieval Archaeology and film critic Hannah McGill.Tanoa Sasraku is one of five artists to receive this year’s Arts Foundation Futures Awards worth £10,000, awarded on the basis of past work and to enable future development. She talks about her art practice which uses video performance and flag making to explore her identity as a young, gay woman with British and Ghanaian heritage. And about her plans to use the Fellowship to produce the second film in a canon of Black horror fairytales: a queer re-telling of the Selkie legend.Max Porter, best known for his novel Grief is the Thing With Feathers - a meditation on Ted Hughes and loss - discusses his new 75-page book The Death of Francis Bacon, in which he imagines himself into the mind of the artist in his final days in Madrid in 1992 facing approaching death in a convent hospital.As part of our ongoing series of Moments of Joy, poet and winner of the 2018 TS Eliot prize Hannah Sullivan explores a poem– the final section of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself in his collection Leaves of Grass, read for us by Kerry Shale.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Sarah Johnson.

The ceramicist, artist and writer Edmund de Waal today launches the #FrontRowGetCreative project, where artists will be encouraging you, our listeners, to try their hand at creating an artwork with easily-available materials. In his studio he talks us through the creation of a palimpsest, where letters and characters overlap in layers of clay – or domestic filler in this case – to memorialise words that are special to him.We'd love to see what you create. Show us what you've made by sharing on social media channels using the hashtag Front Row Get Creative and we'll show those that catch our eye on the BBC Arts and Front Row websites. Check out the BBC's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.Hafsa Zayyan was the winner of the inaugural Merky Books New Writers' Prize - part of Stormzy’s ongoing partnership publishing new books with William Heinemann. We speak to her about her novel We Are All Birds Of Uganda. It’s a fascinating story about intergenerational trauma, racism and displacement set between Uganda in the 1960s and now.Les Enfants Terribles have a reputation for innovating in the world of immersive theatre. Their face-to-face shows included the Olivier-nominated Alice’s Adventures Underground performed literally underground, the prosecution of punk collective in Inside Pussy Riot, and United Queendom, telling the stories of some of Kensington Palace’s lesser known royals in the Palace itself. But can you do immersive theatre online? Oliver Lansley, founder and co-artistic director, discusses Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Hung Parliament described as a combination of theatre, gaming, escape room and board game - .Presenter: Elle Osili-Wood Producer: Simon Richardson

Celeste talks to Front Row about her career from making tracks on a laptop in her bedroom to successes at the Brit and BBC Music Awards, composing and performing the music for last year's John Lewis advert, A Little Love, and the release of her debut album 'Not Your Muse'.She blew her fusilli, my pretty penne, when she found me watching daytime tagliatelle. The first stanza of 'The Remembrance of Things Pasta' is typical of the poetry of Brian Bilston, who has been called the Banksy of Poetry and Twitter's unofficial poet laureate. He talks and reads witty, wry and wise poetry from his new collection, 'Alexa, what is there to know about love?'And Ryan Gilbey gives his verdict on new film Palmer starring Justin Timberlake. Former high school football star Eddie Palmer went from hometown hero to convicted felon. He returns home to Louisiana and the grandmother who raised him but things become more complicated when Vivian’s hard-living neighbour Shelly (Juno Temple) disappears on a prolonged bender, leaving her precocious and unique 7-year-old son Sam (Ryder Allen), often the target of bullying for his gender non-conforming behaviour, in Palmer’s reluctant care. Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Oliver Jones Studio Manager: Matilda MacariMain image: Celeste Image credit: Elizaveta Porodina

Can you use craft to help make the world a better place, one stitch at a time? In her new BBC Four documentary, Craftivism: Making a Difference, writer, comedian and art lover Jenny Eclair meets people doing extraordinary things with knitting, cross-stitch, banners and felt to change hearts and minds. She tells us all about it.Tom talks to Jon Brown, BAFTA award-winning show-runner and screenwriter about his gaming sitcom Dead Pixels which returns to E4 for a new series.And we've an interview featuring the winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award, which has just been announced.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Julian May

Choreographer Jonzi D has created a new work for Dancing Nation, the all-day digital festival of dance which is streamed on BBC iPlayer this Thursday. Jonzi discusses the state of Black dance with Pawlet Brookes, who runs Serendipity in Leicester and has edited the collection of essays My Voice, My Practice: Black Dance.In the light of the announcement that Kenneth Branagh has been cast to play Boris Johnson in a new TV drama about the Covid-19 crisis, critic, journalist and former political researcher Sam Delaney joins Samira to talk about the impact of dramatisations of contemporary political moments on the public imagination. Last night Bhanu Kapil won the TS Eliot Prize for her collection How to Wash a Heart. She talks to Samira about and reads from her book which, in the voice of an immigrant guest in the house of a citizen host, explores the idea, and limits, of hospitality, and the experiences of diaspora people. For his Moment of Joy, the writer Darran Anderson chooses a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, an exploration of mortality that is nonetheless deeply life-affirming.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Jerome Weatherald Studio Manager: Tim HefferMain image above: Jonzi D Image credit: Dave Barros

The White Tiger is a new Netflix film based on Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel, directed by Ramin Bahrani. It explores Indian society and how hard it can be to climb the social ladder, as Balram, played by Adarsh Gourav, struggles to advance even when he has found rich employers. For our Friday review, writer Abir Mukherjee and film critic and host of the Girls on Film podcast Anna Smith give their verdict, and reflect on the week that saw 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman perform The Hill We Climb at President Biden’s inauguration.Every year one of the first literary events is the T. S. Eliot Prize readings, when each of the 10 shortlisted poets performs to a packed Royal Festival Hall. But this year the The South Bank Centre is streaming the poets' readings instead. The winner will be announced immediately afterwards. Chair of the judges Lavinia Greenlaw discusses this year's shortlist.Denise Dutton discusses her commission to sculpt the statue of Mary Anning, the 19th-century fossil hunter from Lyme Regis. The statue of the pioneer of palaeontology was crowdfunded by a campaign started by 13-year-old Evie Swire. Denise, who has also made statues of suffragettes and the Women's Land Army, considers the role played by statues in bringing overlooked women to public attention.Presenter Kirsty Lang Producer Timothy Prosser