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Front Row: John Cleese's Fawlty Towers on stage, Beatrice Harrison, Cannes

John Cleese's Fawlty Towers on stage, Beatrice Harrison, Cannes

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, John Cleese's Fawlty Towers on stage, Beatrice Harrison, Cannes

John Cleese talks to Tom Sutcliffe about adapting his classic sitcom for the stage.

John Cleese talks to Tom Sutcliffe about adapting his classic sitcom for the stage and we celebrate the centenary of Beatrice Harrison's live cello/nightingale mashup.

Fawlty Towers arrives on the West End stage nearly 50 years after it first appeared on TV. John Cleese talks about why the sitcom wasn’t initially regarded as a great success, his love and appreciation of comedy as an art form, and how a future project will see Basil running a hotel with his daughter.

100 years ago this month, the musician Beatrice Harrison was responsible for a landmark event in BBC history when she persuaded the corporation to broadcast live from her garden as she played her cello, accompanied by nightingales.  Writer and cellist Kate Kennedy who has recreated this event for a new Radio 3 documentary and Patricia Cleveland-Peck who has edited a book about Beatrice Harrison join Front Row to discuss the significance of this historic event.

Jason Solomons joins us from the Cannes Film Festival to tell us what people there are getting excited about  and what's in store over the next ten days.

Presenter:  Tom Sutcliffe
Producer:  Torquil MacLeod

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John Cleese's Fawlty Towers on stage, Beatrice Harrison, Cannes

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