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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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Magazines & Reviews

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Live magazine programme on the worlds of arts, literature, film, media and music.

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Samira Ahmed

James Norton

Penny Martin

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff

Norman Lebrecht

Alexandra Coghlan

Joe Stilgoe

Julian May

Front Row: James Norton, Independent Magazines, New Jungle Book Musical

James Norton, Independent Magazines, New Jungle Book Musical

20/12/2017

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, James Norton, Independent Magazines, New Jungle Book Musical

James Norton on McMafia, Independent magazines, Joe Stilgoe on the new Jungle Book musical

James Norton on his role in TV thriller McMafia and two editors discuss the thriving independent magazine scene. Joe Stilgoe, composer of the new Jungle Book musical, performs.

The actor and one-time theology student James Norton discusses his role as Alex Godman in new TV thriller McMafia. His character begins the series as a public advocate of clean capitalism with his own hedge fund investing only in ethical business, but Alex can't escape his Russian family connections and slowly gets drawn into the dangerous world of international organised crime and corruption. 

Penny Martin, editor of The Gentlewoman, and Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, deputy editor of gal-dem magazine, discuss the agendas of their respective publications and the independent magazine landscape, which is vibrant and culturally significant.

You love opera and would love to nurture such love in a loved one: music critics Norman Lebrecht and Alexandra Coghlan are at hand to help, offering their choices of a recording of an opera to entice the reluctant and a cracker available on a DVD. 

The Royal and Derngate Theatre in Northampton is staging The Jungle Book. It's impossible, but try to put 'I'm the King of the Swingers' out of your mind. This is a new musical with songs and a score by Joe Stilgoe (yes, son of...), which looks beyond Walt Disney to Rudyard Kipling and his stories about Mowgli, the boy brought up by wolves, and finds in them themes for our times: the complexities of cultural identity in a diverse world, what the Law of the Jungle means and where the Jungle might be. And Joe performs the song he has written for Baloo the Bear, live in the Front Row studio.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed
Producer: Julian May.

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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