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Samira Ahmed

Sarah Johnson

Front Row: Juliet Stevenson, Basquiat, Tony Blackburn, NSSA shortlisted Jenni Fagan

Juliet Stevenson

21/09/2017

Juliet Stevenson, Basquiat, Tony Blackburn, NSSA shortlisted Jenni Fagan

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Juliet Stevenson, Basquiat, Tony Blackburn, NSSA shortlisted Jenni Fagan

Juliet Stevenson on playing a fierce female aviator in the play Wings.

Juliet Stevenson in Arthur Kopit's Wings; Ekow Eshun on Jean-Michel Basquiat; Tony Blackburn looks back as Radio 1 turns 50; and Jenni Fagan on the BBC National Short Story Award.

Last time they worked together director Natalie Abrahami buried Juliet Stevenson up to her neck in Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days. In their new collaboration, Stevenson spends almost the entire evening flying about above the stage, for her role as a stuntwoman who suffers a stroke. Juliet Stevenson and Natalie Abrahami talk to Samira Ahmed about staging Arthur Kopit's Wings.

The New York street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died at the age of 27 in 1988, is the subject of a comprehensive new exhibition at the Barbican in London. The writer and former director of the ICA, Ekow Eshun, considers whether Basquiat was really 'one of the most significant painters of the 20th century', as the show claims.

As Radio 1 prepares to celebrate its 50th birthday later this month, Tony Blackburn - the 24-year-old who launched the station in 1967 - looks back at the landscape of the time and how pop music changed radio for good.

And the final shortlisted author for the BBC National Short Story Award, Jenni Fagan, talks about her story The Waken, an evocative tale of transformation and death set in the Scottish islands.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed
Producer: Sarah Johnson.

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