 | | | | | | | LATEST PROGRAMME | | | |
|  | |     | |
MONDAY NIGHT
* We start with the release of Attack Of The Clones, the fifth in the Star Wars series. But although it's the fifth film in the series, it's actually Star Wars II. In Attack Of The Clones, we again follow Anakin Skywalker, a Jedi Knight with a big future, this time as he becomes embroiled in politics as the galaxy heads for war.
Star Wars Episode II - Attack Of The Clones, Certificate PG, opens around the country on Thursday 16 May.
Listen to the review
* It was reported this weekend that Australian artist Pro Hart is trying to rewrite our ideas about artistic signatures. Worried by a flood of fake works with fake signatures, Hart now daubs his canvases with a swab from inside his cheek in order to brand the paintings with his DNA. And today in New York Marcel Duchamp's The Fountain, consisting of an enamel urinal signed by him in 1917 with the name R Mutt (in jokey reference to the cartoon characters Mutt and Jeff) goes on sale. Front Row looked at the history of signatures in art - from pseudonymous urinals to saliva-stained canvases.
Listen to the discussion
* A CD recorded during music lessons at a Canadian school is released today. The CD, The Langley Schools Music Project, features amateur cover versions of 60s and early 70s hits, including Space Oddity and Band On The Run, recorded by nine-year-olds in a school gym in 1976 and 1977. It became a such a cult hit in America last year that David Bowie, director of this year's Meltdown music festival in London, has included an English version in his schedules.
The Langley Schools Music Project CD is out in the UK on the Basta label. An English version of the project will take place at the Meltdown festival on London's South Bank from 29 June.
Listen to the feature
* The events of September 11 sparked a flood of hasty re-writes as novels, plays and movies were purged to remove references which now seemed ghoulish, complacent, trivial or anachronistic. The new BBC1 espionage series Spooks was already in production when America was attacked but the producers seem to have been convinced that reality had made the fiction more relevant. As intelligence agencies the world over adjust their priorities, Front Row looks at whether spy fiction can also find a new role in a post-9/11 world.
Spooks begins on 13 May on BBC1 at 9.00pm.
Listen to the discussion
* Sebastian Barry endured one of the stormiest first nights in the history of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, with the opening of his play Hinterland. The political drama, with a former Irish PM being investigated for corruption, was seen getting a bit too close to home, certainly for former Irish PM Charles Haughey's liking. His latest novel Annie Dunne. is the story of a spinster looking after her great-nephew and niece in Wicklow in the 1950s: the time and place where the writer grew up. Front Rowasked Sebastian Barry if his autobiographical stories of the past drew on memory, research or talking to family members.
Annie Dunne is published by Faber. Hinterland continues at the National Theatre in London until 27 May and then goes on tour to Oxford and Liverpool.
Listen to the feature
ON TUESDAY'S PROGRAMME
The Oscar winning film No Man's Land and a discussion about the psychological game-show The Experiment.
GO TO NEXT PROGRAMME
GO TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMME | | |
RELATED LINKS
Star Wars Episode II - Attack Of The Clones - the official website
The Langley Schools Music Project - hear the songs
Spooks - the website of the new BBC Drama Show
| |
| | |
