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Front Row: Dev Patel on David Copperfield, Front Row's Risk Season, bestselling author Kimberley Chambers

20/01/2020

Dev Patel on David Copperfield, Front Row's Risk Season, bestselling author Kimberley Chambers

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Dev Patel on David Copperfield, Front Row's Risk Season, bestselling author Kimberley Chambers

Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) on playing David Copperfield in Armando Iannucci's film

Dev Patel on playing David Copperfield and  colour-blind casting in Armando Iannucci's retelling of the story. The launch of Front Row's season investigating risk in the arts.

Dev Patel talks about playing David Copperfield in Armando Iannucci’s retelling of Charles Dickens' classic ode to grit and perseverance, The Personal History of David Copperfield. This is a film for our cosmopolitan age with a diverse ensemble cast of actors from a range of ethnicities. Patel, star of Slumdog Millionaire, describes telling director Iannucci  that the production would have to ‘weather a storm’ because of this colour-blind approach. The film also stars Nikki Amuka-Bird, Peter Capaldi‎, Benedict Wong and ‎Hugh Laurie.
    
Today Front Row launches its Risk Season: we’ll be investigating personal, financial, reputational and physical risk in all the arts. How far is risk inherent to creativity, who takes risks and why? The season will culminate in the unveiling of the top ten riskiest artworks of the last 20 years in the Front Row Risk List.

To launch the season, three of our Risk List judges - author Will Self, critic and columnist Ellen E Jones and performer and writer Scottee – define what they mean by risk in the context of art, discuss if we live in risk taking or safety seeking times, and set out what they’re looking for in contenders for the list.

Stig Abell is joined in the studio by Number One Bestselling author Kimberley Chambers, ‘The Queen of Gangland Crime’, to discuss her new novel, Queenie, the prequel to her successful series of Butlers Family gangster novels. Set in Whitechapel in the 1930s, the book follows Queenie as she watches her family struggle, learning lessons the hard way. When she was a little girl there was one thing Queenie knew, that she was going to get out of this... then a tall, dark and handsome stranger walked into her life, giving her hope for a different future.

Main image: Dev Patel in David Copperfield
Image credit: Lionsgate Films 

Presenter: Stig Abell
Producer: Julian May

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