Front Row Hogmanay live from Glasgow

12/31/24 • 42 min

Kirsty Wark hosts a Hogmanay edition live from Glasgow. Featuring performances by The Bluebells and piper Malin Lewis. Plus Alan Cumming; Scotland's new Makar, Peter Mackay; and an exploration of representations of New Year in cinema, literature and poetry.

Previous Episode

Bradford UK City of Culture 2025

As Bradford limbers up for its year as UK City of Culture, in a special edition of Front Row, Nick Ahad meets:

Steven Frayne, the award-winning Bradford-born magician formerly known as Dynamo. Frayne's magic skills have brought him success in arenas and television studios worldwide and his biography Nothing is Impossible: My Story became a bestseller. He returns to Bradford in the ultimate homecoming gig as co-creator of RISE - the opening show for Bradford's year as UK City of Culture.

The 2022 documentary film, A Bunch of Amateurs, charmed critics and audiences alike. This portrait of one of the oldest amateur film societies in the world, Bradford Movie Makers, was the work of filmmaking duo Kim Hopkins and Margareta Szabo. On the set of their latest project, The Local, about another Bradfordian institution, the Jacob's Well pub, one of the oldest Beerhouses in Bradford, they discuss capturing the spirit of the community who walk through the pub doors.

Shanaz Gulzar is the Creative Director of Bradford 2025 and she's also the curator of one of the year's public art events, Wild Uplands. She talks about her vision for celebrating culture in her home city, and the four visual artists that she's selected to create work in the moors landscape she grew up with.

RISE co-creator and theatre director Kirsty Housley is known for the innovation that she brings to the stage in a wide variety of acclaimed productions including for the National Theatre. In poems such as BFD, poet, playwright, and cultural mentor Kirsty Taylor, has turned her home city into alluring verse. Kirsty H and Kirsty T talk about their work on RISE to create an opening show that reflects Bradford to its people and the rest of the world.

Presenter: Nick Ahad Producer: Ekene Akalawu

Next Episode

Front Row on the Shipping Forecast, at the Cutty Sark

Samira Ahmed presents Front Row's contribution to Radio 4's New Year's Day celebration of the Shipping Forecast, marking a century since the BBC began broadcasting it. This edition of the arts programme explores how the Shipping Forecast inspires musicians, writers, artists of all kinds, and how it has become a powerful presence in the psyche of the nation, even among people with no connection to the sea. There is an irony here: the forecast is factual, devoid of metaphor, yet it moves millions emotionally.

Recorded in front of an audience at Britain's most famous ship, the Cutty Sark, Samira's guests are novelist Meg Clothier, author of The Shipping Forecast: Celebrating 100 Years; musicians Lisa Knapp and Gerry Diver; poets Sean Street and Zaffar Kunial; and Paddy Rodgers, Director of Royal Museums, Greenwich. They discuss the inspirational quality of the Shipping Forecast - the litany of names of sea areas, its rhythms, the factual yet evocative vocabulary of atmospheric and sea states, and how this vital information, demanding attention, has become a national lullaby.

Sean Street, Britain's first Professor of Radio and author of several books about sound, considers the Shipping Forecast as a sound work, and reads his poem, Shipping Forecast, Donegal. Lisa Knapp performs, accompanied by Gerry Diver, her song 'Shipping Song' and 'Three Score and Ten', written by William Delf, a Grimsby fisherman, after a disastrous storm in 1889. There are two world premieres, commissioned by Front Row, an audio piece by the sound designer, Ross Burns, and a poem by Zaffar Kunial. And some quirky Shipping Forecast moments such as Alan Bennett reading it and Charlotte Green assaying the Forecast - in Arabic.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian May