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LATEST PROGRAMME |
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WEDNESDAY NIGHT
* Do you believe a car can fly? You will, say the producers, as a new stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang hits the West End stage. But while the Ian Fleming original is truly saccharine, Adrian Noble has added a bittersweet flavour to an old favourite.
Journalist Jim White went along to the opening night, toute suite.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is currently showing at the Palladium, London.
Listen to the review
* The camera never lies. In an age of CCTV and news on demand this is a truism we live by. But how true is it?
Artist Alison Jackson plays with our growing uncertainty about what we’re being shown. David Beckham wearing his wife’s thong underwear? Tony and Cherie Blair suffering hangovers after a hard night out? The Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker-Bowles choosing a wedding ring? She explained to Front Row how her interest in photographic dead ringers had been prompted by a famous death.
Alison Jackson's pictures can be seen at the Richard Salmon Gallery, Edwardes Square, London W8.
Listen to the interview
* There may be two David Beckhams but there is only one Pierre Lescrue. The founder of intellectual French TV channel Canal Plus was recently sacked by the head of parent company Vivendi, Jean-Marie Messier, in a row over whether TV channels should make art or money.
But this is not the first time Messier has courted controversy. Last year he declared French culture deserved no special protection from American imports. Front Row looked at the background of the row.
Listen to the feature
* "All happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." In Anna Karenina Tolstoy gives us an insight into why novelists tend to concentrate on the Wests not the Waltons. But a new wave of books is trying to put goodness on the page. We examine the challenge of trying to make good literature out of good people.
Nothing To Lose by Tania Kindersley is published by Sceptre. Simon Blackburn’s Being Good is published by OUP.
Listen to the feature
* Have you heard the one about the Santa and the elves? Probably, according to ASDA. That's why they've put out an emergency plea for new jokes for their Christmas crackers. From their collective drunken stupor, the Dead Ringers scriptwriters leapt to their knees to help out.
Listen to the feature
On Thursday's programme
a review of the new play by Jez Butterworth, author of Mojo, which stars Ray Winstone, and improvisation at the piano with Robert Levin.
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