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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Front Row: Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn in Gangster Squad; author Sally Gardner

Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn in Gangster Squad; author Sally Gardner

07/01/2013

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn in Gangster Squad; author Sally Gardner

Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn in Gangster Squad and children's Costa winner Sally Gardner.

Mark Lawson reviews Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn in the film Gangster Squad, plus Costa Children's Book Award-winner Sally Gardner, and the creators of TV series Great Night Out.

With Mark Lawson, 

Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn star in Gangster Squad, in which the Los Angeles police in the late 1940s battle a mafia boss. Penn plays a ruthless mobster opposite Gosling as an LAPD outsider, who tries to bring order to the streets by breaking the law. Kamila Shamsie reviews. 

Great Night Out is a new ITV comedy drama which focuses on four childhood friends, who are now in their mid-thirties and enjoy a weekly get-together in Stockport. The cast includes Ricky Tomlinson who plays the landlord of the local pub. Creators Mark Bussell and Justin Sbresni (The Worst Week of My Life) discuss finding humour in male relationships.

Today the Royal Opera House is inviting live cameras into the backstage areas never normally visible to audiences. Online viewers can watch multiple rehearsals and interviews, and can even get involved by asking questions and submitting videos of themselves singing Va Pensiero from Nabucco. Opera critic Rupert Christiansen gives his verdict on this experiment in openness. 

Sally Gardner's book Maggot Moon was the winner of the Costa Children's Book Award and is in the running to receive the Book of the Year award, which is announced later this month. She reflects on the inspiration for her novel, which focuses on a 15-year-old dyslexic boy living in a violent, dystopian 1950s England.

Producer Claire Bartleet.

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