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Samira Ahmed

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Teju Adeleye

Emma-Jean Thackray

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Dymphna Flynn

Front Row: Dad's Army at 50, Jazz on streaming services, Marvellous Mechanical Museum

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30/07/2018

Dad's Army at 50, Jazz on streaming services, Marvellous Mechanical Museum

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Dad's Army at 50, Jazz on streaming services, Marvellous Mechanical Museum

Fifty years of Dad's Army, jazz renaissance on streaming services, and automata on show.

Arts news, interviews and reviews. Fifty years of Dad's Army, the Jazz renaissance on streaming services, and the Marvellous Mechanical Museum.

Chris Dunkley, for many years television critic of the Financial Times, discusses the impact and ongoing popularity of Dad's Army, which was first broadcast fifty years ago this week.

Music streaming platforms have reported a rise people aged under 30 listening to jazz, with the genre's new sound also being produced by musicians in that age group. Music journalist Teju Adeleye and jazz musician Emma-Jean Thackray discuss why young people are responding to jazz now more than ever, if jazz was less accessible in the past and how has the sound evolved. 

The Marvellous Mechanical Museum, a new exhibition at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, looks back to the historical automata (or animated mechanical objects) museums of the 18th centuries and re-imagines them for the modern day. The exhibition includes 57 works, historical pieces dating back to 1625 and new commissions by contemporary artists, all of which explore the themes of life, creation, imitation, and our fraught relationship with technology.

After WOMAD festival organisers complain about foreign artists being deterred by the "humiliating and difficult" process of applying for a British visa, David Jones, director of Serious, a company which produces over 800 events nationwide with over 2,600 artists and a broadcast reach of 44 million, discusses what foreign artists have to do when applying for a British visa, what has changed in the last couple of years and what might be done about it.

Presenter : Samira Ahmed
Producer : Dymphna Flynn

Main image: Dad's Army Christmas Special 1975. Credit: BBC

(Clive Dunn as L-Cpl Jack Jones, Ian Lavender as Pvt. Frank Pike, Arthur Lowe as Captain George Mainwaring, John Le Mesurier as Sgt. Arthur Wilson, John Laurie as Pvt. James Frazer and Arnold Ridley as Pvt. Charles Godfrey.)

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