Front Row - 02/03/2009

Presented by Mark Lawson. Emily Blunt, Paul Bettany, Jim Broadbent, Rupert Friend and Miranda Richardson star in the film The Young Victoria, a romantic drama tracing the soon-to-be-Queen's early life. Journalist and Victorian expert Kathryn Hughes gives her verdict. Giles Waterfield discusses a new exhibition of Constable's lesser-known work. John Constable is celebrated as one of England's greatest landscape artists, but for the first time the National Portrait Gallery focuses on his self-portraits and his many paintings and drawings of friends and family. Mark finds out about an unusual tribute to the English writer Samuel Johnson: in the tercentenary year of Dr Johnson's birth, his biographer, Peter Martin, is recreating a hundred-mile walk from Lichfield to London that was undertaken by Johnson and his companion David Garrick. Mark discusses the pros and cons of Live & Sync with music supremo Trevor Dann, Katherine Jenkins (who has frequently sung the Welsh National Anthem at international rugby matches), Lesley Garret (who has sung at FA Cup Finals) and James Taylor (who performed live at one of Barack Obama's inaugural celebrations). Art market watcher Godfrey Barker examines the implications of a tactic used by a Chinese bidder at a recent Christie's auction where the bidder had no intention of paying for the antiquities he bid for, instead claiming his aim was to highlight his campaign for the artefacts' restitution to China. Does this herald a new era in art restitution claims? Godfrey Barker and Mark discuss.