Use BBC.com or the new BBC App to listen to BBC podcasts, Radio 4 and the World Service outside the UK.

Find out how to listen to other BBC stations

Episode details

Radio 4,02 Dec 2020,28 mins

Katie Melua, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Crimes Against Christmas

Front Row

Available for over a year

Seventeen years after achieving global success with her debut album, Katie Melua talks about her latest record Album No.8, and how she took a course in short fiction writing before embarking on the lyrics. Plus she performs a special acoustic performance for Front Row. British-Ghanaian artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints 'figments': portraits of fictitious people constructed from memory and fantasy. As Tate Britain re-opens, her Covid-postponed show Fly in League With the Night surveys her body of work from 2003 to the present day with a distinctive sense of mystery. Art critic Asana Greenstreet reviews the exhibition and gives us a sense of Yiadom-Boakye’s importance to British art now. Husband and wife team Feargus Woods Dunlop and Heather Westwell from the New Old Friends Theatre company have come up with a novel way of beating Covid restrictions on live performances by turning their traditional Christmas show into an online advent calendar podcast – Crimes Against Christmas, which is loosely based on Agatha Christie’s Then There Were None. Feargus Woods Dunlop talks to Elle Osili-Wood about how and why they did it. Presenter Elle Osili-Wood Producer Jerome Weatherald Main image: Katie Melua Image credit: Rosie Matheson

Programme Website
More episodes