Front Row

Original version

BBC Radio 4 LW

Magazines & Reviews

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

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

BBC Radio 4 FM

Front Row: Mike Bartlett, Hannah Hodgson, Nick Laird

Mike Bartlett, Hannah Hodgson, Nick Laird

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Mike Bartlett, Hannah Hodgson, Nick Laird

Mike Bartlett, Hannah Hodgson, Nick Laird, Non Fungible Token art gallery.

Mike Bartlett on his play 47th, Hannah Hodgson on poems dealing with her incurable illness, Nick Laird on Louis MacNeice, Non Fungible Token art gallery.

The playwright Mike Bartlett is busy. The 47th, his dark comedy about the next presidential race, with Bertie Carvel giving an uncanny performance as Donald Trump is about to open at the Old Vic in London. So too is Scandaltown, his modern day Restoration comedy about social ambition, featuring characters with names such as Hannah Tweetwell and Freddie Peripheral. And he has another play, a love triangle, Cock, in the West End. Mike talks to Tom Sutcliffe about the appeal of writing gags, blank verse and characters who take control.

Hannah Hodgson's latest volume of poetry is '163 Days' in which she looks back in verse over her six months in hospital as teenager suffering from a severe and undiagnosed disease. Her poems are juxtaposed with her medical notes. The illness, which later proved to be mitochondrial encephalopathy, is incurable and she explores, in her poems, living with a terminal condition.

To mark the BBC's Art That Made Us season, Front Row invites artists from across the nations of the UK to choose the piece of art that made them, by shaping their artistic and cultural identity. Today we hear from the winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, poet Nick Laird who has chosen the 1935 poem Snow, by Louis MacNeice.

Ryan Marsh and James Thomas, two of the people involved in Europe’s first Non Fungible Token gallery, the Quantum Gallery, give us an insight into NFT Art and how it works.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe
Producer: Julian May

BBC Radio 4

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

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Front Row

Mike Bartlett, Hannah Hodgson, Nick Laird

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 4 LW

About BBC Radio 4