Front Row

The comedian Joe Lycett has long dabbled in art, but it's a serious business now as his first ever solo exhibition ‘Everything Must Go’ has just opened at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. He talks about how this show came together and why its most eye-catching piece is a giant pink and blue woolly mammoth called Martin.
Charlotte Higgins talks to Samira Ahmed about her book Ukrainian Lessons, and the role artist's play in the cultural identity of the country.
With poetry sales at an all time high, we speak to poets Nikita Gill and Lucas Jones, two writers credited as being part of this boom.
Entries for A-level arts subjects continue to fall. However, this year saw a drop of nearly six per cent in entries for A level English Literature. What does this continued decline mean for the health of the arts and humanities? Hetan Shah is Chief Executive of the British Academy and Professor Robert Eaglestone is education policy lead at the English Association.
Presenter: Samira Ahmed
Producer: Andrea Kidd

Academic and critic Maria Delgado and writer and producer Jake Cunningham join Tom Sutcliffe to discuss the film Tony, a film about the early career of food writer Anthony Bourdain, who is played by Dominic Sessa. The film also stars Antonio Banderas, who becomes an unexpected mentor for the young chef.
They also talk about Death Note: The Musical. Based on the best-selling Manga series of the same name, the Barbican show tells the story of a student who discovers a notebook which gives him the power to kill.
The final item for review is Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s final novel, I Give You My Silence, where a music journalist is on a quest to tell the story of an unforgettable musician. The book is also a love letter to Peruvian culture.
Sarah Ditum discusses Jason Arday's memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things.
This programme was broadcast before the announcement of Jason Arday's death.
Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe
Producer: Claire Bartleet

Australian writer and performer Hannah Reilly talks to us about her much-anticipated one woman show about sex, power and authenticity, Roleplay, which is produced by the team behind Fleabag and Baby Reindeer and which has sold out in Edinburgh but is heading to London for a run in the autumn.
Critic Fergus Morgan talks us through the other shows which are making a splash at this year's Edinburgh Festivals - from a radical sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which stars Golden Globe-winning actor Wagner Moura, and in which 12 members of the audience are brought on stage to deliver a verdict in A Trial, to a reimagining of Virginia Woolf's The Waves - presented to audiences in a sauna.
The first international exhibition from Alabama's Legacy of Slavery Museum has come to Edinburgh this month, and we're joined by its founder, eminent lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson to talk about how it depicts the international slave trade and racial brutality over centuries. We're also joined by writer and director Zora Howard whose powerful production Hang Time sees three performers talk about their lives and loves as they appear to be hanging from a tree, and which is inspired in part by the deaths of two men in Southern California in recent years.
And director Louis Paxton talks to us about debut feature film The Incomer, which opens this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival tomorrow night. It's a darkly comic fable in which an awkward council worker (played by Domnhall Gleeson) is sent to a remote Scottish island to relocate a pair of siblings (Gayle Rankin from GLOW and Grant O’Rourke from Outlander), to the mainland, but let's just say things don't quite go to plan.
Presenter: Kirsty Wark
Producer: Mark Crossan

Steph McGovern, presenter of new BBC show The Big Deal, is joined by Marie Le Conte to discuss how to buy art.
Fleabag actor Sian Clifford on her lead role in "Lady", a new mockumentary film about a fading aristocrat.
Why has a new show at Edinburgh about Amanda Knox been so controversial? Tristram Fane Saunders gives his assessment live from the Fringe Festival.
And Colin Thubron, both a travel writer and novelist, has a new book which journeys into Egypt and the human mind - literally. He talks about how witnessing brain surgery influenced his novella Passage.
Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe
Producer: Ciaran Bermingham

What's the Royal Shakespeare Company's much anticipated stage adaptation of Game of Thrones like? Critics Boyd Hilton and Kate Maltby give their verdict.
Conductor Marin Alsop on what makes American classical music sound American, ahead of her American Classics Prom on 24 August.
TS Eliot Prize-winning poet Anthony Joseph discusses his new collection, Haunting the Black Air, which journeys from the Trinidad of his childhood to the dancefloors of New York.
And following the news of the death of the music producer William Orbit, music jpurnalist Kate Hutchinson discusses his career, including his work on Madonna's Ray of Light album.
Presenter: Samira Ahmed
Producer: Andrea Kidd