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Birmingham Royal Ballet is celebrating the city’s pioneering heavy metal band in a new production, Black Sabbath – the Ballet. Tom Sutcliffe talks to the director of BRB Carlos Acosta about how the marriage of apparently conflicting cultures came about. He also hears from the composer and arranger Christopher Austin on adapting the music for contemporary choreography and the dramaturg Richard Thomas about creating a narrative structure for an abstract dance form.

Today it was announced that Michael Gove has appointed commissioners to take over Birmingham Council. To find out how this might affect arts organisations in the city, Tom speaks to the Birmingham-based journalist and broadcaster Adrien Goldberg.

In our occasional series on cultural bugbears we hear from the author and Guardian journalist Tim Dowling.

As London Fashion Week draws to a close, we put the business of the British fashion industry under the spotlight with the Yorkshire-based designer and Professor of Fashion Matty Bovan, the New York Times fashion journalist Elizabeth Paton and the designer, academic and curator Andrew Ibi, whose exhibition The Missing Thread: Untold Stories of Black British Fashion is about to open at Somerset House.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe
Producer: Emma Wallace

Black Sabbath Ballet 1:18
Birmingham Funding 17:20
Immersive Theatre 22:18
Fashion 28:12