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Front Row: The Salisbury Poisonings, Víkingur Ólafsson, Walter Scott Prize, Pilgrims

12/06/2020

The Salisbury Poisonings, Víkingur Ólafsson, Walter Scott Prize, Pilgrims

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, The Salisbury Poisonings, Víkingur Ólafsson, Walter Scott Prize, Pilgrims

TV drama The Salisbury Poisonings, and Víkingur Ólafsson's final performance for Front Row

Writer Declan Lawn on The Salisbury Poisonings; Víkingur Ólafsson's final performance for Front Row; winner of the Walter Scott Prize; Pilgrims and Banana Split reviewed.

The Salisbury Poisonings, a new BBC One three-part drama, focuses on the 2018 Novichok poisonings, the public health response, and the heroism of the community. Writer Declan Lawn describes how his years as an investigative reporter for Panorama primed him to create this drama based on real events, and the resonance of the story with the government's response to the pandemic.

Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, Front Row’s Lockdown Artist in Residence, has been entertaining us each week with a live performance from the empty Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík. For his eleventh and final performance Víkingur plays Debussy’s The Snow is Dancing from the Children’s Corner. 

The historian Tom Holland and film critic Hanna Flint give their verdicts on Pilgrims, the latest novel by Matthew Kneale, recounting the journey of a disparate bunch who set off for Rome in 1289. His earlier book English Passengers won the Whitbread Book of the Year. They also watch Banana Split, a high school movie with a difference, starring and co-written by Hannah Marks. It foregrounds the friendship of two teenage girls who’ve gone out with the same boy.

We announce the winner of the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Presenter Tom Sutcliffe
Producer Jerome Weatherald
Studio Manager Duncan Hannant

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