Front Row

Pa Salieu, the Gambian-British artist from Coventry, has been named as the winner of the BBC Sound of 2021. His single Frontline was the most played track on BBC Radio 1Xtra in 2020. In 2019 he was shot in the head, but recovered to release his debut mixtape Send Them To Coventry at the end of 2020 and now picks up one of the biggest accolades in new music.On the fifth anniversary of Walter Presents, the global streaming service dedicated to showcasing award winning foreign language drama, the platform is launching its first ever dramas from Finland, All The Sins and Bullets. Whilst BBC 4 is launching its first ever Finnish drama, the 6 part drama series Man in Room 301. Walter Iuzzolino, curator of Walter Presents, and best selling Finnish crime writer Antti Tuomainen talk to Kirsty Lang about what makes Finnish drama distinctive and why we should be watching.Natasha Farrant, The Costa Award Children' s category winner, talks about her book Voyage of the Sparrowhawk which, with 12 year old Ben and Lotti becoming friends as they outwit a wicked uncle, a police chase, dogs and a perilous sea crossing in search of people they love, has just about everything a fast-paced adventure story requires.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Timothy Prosser

On 28th September 1985 Lee Lawrence’s mother Cherry Groce was shot by police during an armed raid on her Brixton home. Lee Lawrence talks to Samira Ahmed about his Costa Biography award winning memoir The Louder I will Sing in which he recounts the devastating impact the shooting had on the family’s life and his courageous fight for justice.As British musicians warn that costly post-Brexit bureaucracy could decimate European touring, we discuss the potential impact of the recent Brexit Trade Deal on the music industry. With Deborah Annetts from the Incorporated Society of Musicians, Mark Pemberton from the Association of British Orchestras and conductor Paul McCreesh, founder of the Grammy award-winning baroque ensemble, the Gabrieli Consort. Actor Robert Baddeley, a member of David Garrick’s company at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, created a tradition when he died in 1794. In his will, he left £100 to be invested and each year, the money from that sum be spent on “the purchase of a twelfth Cake or Cakes and Wine and Punch or both of them which it is my request the Ladies and Gentlemen performers of Theatre Royal Drury Lane will do me the favour to accept on twelfth night in every year in the Green Room”. Ever since the company playing has enjoyed Baddeley's largesse on January 6th. Theatre stage manager and author Nicholas Bromley joins us to reveal one of the longest standing British Theatre traditions. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian May

The Great, a new ahistorical comedy from The Favourite writer Tony McNamara arrives on Channel 4 this month. Describing itself as “an occasionally true story”, it is a satirical drama about the rise of Catherine the Great, staring Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult. McNamara talks period dramas, historical inaccuracies and contemporary characters.The great Irish poet Eavan Boland has just posthumously won the Costa Poetry Prize. Boland's collection The Historians continues her reflections on the power of history and memory, of secrets and hidden histories, and of centring women’s stories. Tom is joined by Jody Allen Randolph, a friend and leading scholar of Eavan’s work, and actress Niamh Cusack reads from the collection.The genre that helped define American music and describe the Black American experience is the subject of a new series of album releases which trace the genesis of blues, ragtime, hokum and gospel from the mid-1920s. Matchbox Bluesmaster Series claims to be the most comprehensive survey of the origins of Black American blues music - Kevin Le Gendre assesses the success of its first instalment.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Simon Richardson Studio Manager: John Boland

Suzannah Lipscomb, Chair of Judges for the Costa Book Awards 2020, joins us to reveal exclusively the winners in each of category: Novel, Children’s, Poetry, Biography and Debut Novel. This is followed by an interview with the winner of the Best Novel category.Dante Alighieri wrote The Divine Comedy 7 centuries ago but - like all great literature – it still speaks to us in today’s world. Katya Adler, the BBC's Europe Editor and lover of all things Italian is a fan of the epic poem and has made a 3 part series for Radio 4. She discusses what she's set out ot explore and who she's done that with.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Hilary Dunn SM: Donald MacDonald

Front Row celebrates some of the art that brightened a dark year.British violinist Tasmin Little has hung up her violin and retired from the concert stage in 2020. It’s the last night of the last year of her performing career - she looks back, and says goodbye to the year in style.Satirist Craig Brown won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction this year for his Beatles book, One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time. Rochenda Sandall has been praised for powerful performances in the lockdown Talking Heads which then went briefly on stage at the Bridge in London, and as activist Barbara Beese in Small Axe - Mangrove.And cultural commentator Elle Osili-Wood joins John in the Front Row studio to look back at some of the year's highlights.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Sarah Johnson Studio Manager: Giles Aspen

The family you choose, rather than the family you’re born into, is fertile territory for writers. From Henry V, to The Lord of the Rings, to Josie and the Pussycats, family dynamics between those who start as strangers keep storytelling going. Playwright Temi Wilkey and screenwriter Sarah Dollard join Samira to talk about the enduring and endearing nature of the chosen family story.Inspired by real events, BBC One’s New Years Day drama The Serpent tells the story of how the conman and murderer Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim) was brought to justice. Posing as a gem dealer, Sobhraj and his girlfriend Marie-Andrée Leclerc (Jenna Coleman) travelled across Thailand, Nepal and India in 1975 and 1976, carrying out a spree of crimes on the Asian ‘Hippie Trail’ until Herman Knippenberg (Billy Howle), a junior diplomat at the Dutch Embassy in Bangkok, unwittingly walks into his intricate web of crime. Samira Ahmed talks to the director of The Serpent Tom Shankland.Percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie is the first full time solo percussionist. A career built in part by expanding the percussion repertoire by more than 200 pieces created alongside major composers, orchestras and musicians. In January she’s releasing two new albums. She talks to Samira about working with composers, listening in Lockdown, and demonstrates some of her over 2000 instruments.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Hilary Dunn

The pianist Lang Lang this year released his first recording of Bach's 1741 keyboard masterpiece, Goldberg Variations, feeling he was finally ready to do so 20 years into his own musical career.At the piano from a studio near his home in Beijing, Lang Lang discusses the work originally written for harpsichord, what a challenge it presents for a performer, and why he chose to release two versions of the 31 works, - one recorded in one take in St Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany - Bach’s workplace for almost 30 years and where the composer is buried - and the second a studio version recorded shortly afterwards.Presenter Kirsty Lang Producer Jerome Weatherald

The pandemic is having a profound impact on the arts. But you don't need to go anywhere, involve other people or need many materials, to write or read poetry, and during the lockdown people have turned to verse. In an extended edition of Front Row devoted to poetry Samira Ahmed hears from the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, about his recent writing life - composing lyrics for Huddersfield Choral Society. Vanessa Kisuule, City Poet of Bristol, talks about her collaboration with the Old Vic and local groups, creating modern work inspired by medieval mystery plays. Em Power, three times Foyle Poet of the Year winner, reveals how poetry is a communal art. And they all read their work.Even before the lockdown there was a surge in sales of poetry books, driven by the internet. Anthony Anaxagorou and Vanessa Kisuule chart their journeys as poets via YouTube to the printed page.They discuss poetry addressing politics - Kisuule's poem on the toppling of the Colston statue went viral - and poets' engagement with the environment. Armitage launched the Laurel Prize to encourage this. In March Daphne Astor started the Hazel Press whose books about the natural world are created from it using local recycled paper, printed with vegetable inks. Anna Selby writes poems about the underwater world - while underwater.The prospect of inoculation against Covid gave rise to'vaccination nationalism'. When Edward Jenner pioneered smallpox vaccination in 1796 he was determined his discovery would benefit people around the globe. Several poets, including Robert Southey, wrote poems in his honour. Front Row has commissioned Anthony Anaxagorou to do the same for the developers of the Covid vaccine, and he reads his new poem. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian May

Tim Minchin, the Australian stage performer with unkempt long hair and black mascara eyes, looks back over his career since his early days trying to scrape a living in Perth and Melbourne. As he releases his first ever solo album Apart Together at the age of 45, he reflects on his early struggle to make a living through music, the success of his stage performances with a full orchestra, the RSC's Matilda the Musical for which he composed the score and wrote the lyrics, getting burned in Hollywood, writing, directing and starring in his TV drama series Upright, and his unsettling return to his homeland after four years in Los Angeles.Presenter Tom Sutcliffe Producer Jerome Weatherald

Black Mirror creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones discuss their new Netflix mocumentary Death to 2020, a documentary-style film that tells the story of the year we’ll be glad to put behind us, featuring fictitious figures played by the likes of Hugh Grant, Samuel L Jackson and Tracey Ullman.Opera diva, drag artist and cabaret turn Le Gateau Chocolat concludes our increasingly wistful festive series on the best parties on screen with an ode to the don of the movie party, Baz Luhrmann. John talks to Neil Gaiman about his latest Radio 4 drama adaptation, The Sleeper and the Spindle, a Christmas-time fairy tale brought to life by award-winning dramatist Katie Hims. Starring Penelope Wilton, Gwendoline Christie and Ralph Ineson as well as Neil Gaiman himself, it's a new tale drawing on traditional folk stories, interweaving Snow White and Sleeping Beauty in an enchanting drama that puts the women firmly centre stage.In September Radio 3 challenged listeners to compose a tune for the poem ‘Christmas Carol’ by Paul Laurence Dunbar. More than a thousand people entered. Tthe judges whittled these down to a shortlist of six, listeners voted and the winner is James Walton. We’ll hear his carol, sung by the BBC Singers, and reveal more about Paul Laurence Dunbar, the pioneering black American writer who wrote the lyrics.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Julian MayImage: Tracey Ullman (QUEEN ELIZABETH II) in Death to 2020 Image Credit: Keith Bernstein/Netflix © 2020