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Episode details

Radio 4,29 Aug 2019,28 mins

Mrs Lowry and Son reviewed, Anna Calvi, Poet Stephen Sexton

Front Row

Available for over a year

Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave star in Mrs Lowry and Son, a new film about the Pendlebury painter LS Lowry and his mother. Critic Sarah Crompton reviews. Singer and electric guitarist Anna Calvi has written the music for the latest series of the gangster TV drama Peaky Blinders. Along with the director Anthony Byrne she talks about how they created the soundtrack. Anna also discusses her latest album Hunter and performs a track from it live in the studio. The poet Stephen Sexton’s first collection takes its title from a pastoral poem by Sir Walter Raleigh, written in 1600. But If All the World and Love Were Young is a very contemporary pastoral as the idyllic landscape it celebrates is that of the Super Mario Nintendo video game. It is, too, a moving elegy to the poet’s mother. Stephen Sexton tells Front Row how the real world of his childhood and that of Mario the Italian plumber, complete with dinosaurs and mushrooms, come together in his poems. Presenter: Tom Shakespeare Producer: Hannah Robins

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