Front Row - 02/07/2008

Presented by Mark Lawson. Including: Booker Prize winning author AS Byatt discusses the art and writings of Wyndham Lewis, controversial Modernist and founder of the Vorticist movement in 1912. Portraits of TS Eliot, Ezra Pound and Edith Sitwell feature in a new exhibition of his work which opens this week at the National Portrait Gallery in London. New Tricks follows the antics of three retired cops (Dennis Waterman, Alun Armstrong and James Bolam) recruited by Superintendent Sandra Pullman (Amanda Redman) to reinvestigate unsolved crimes. With a fifth series of this hugely popular drama about to take to our screens, Mark talks to Roy Mitchell, co-creator and co-writer, and Alun Armstrong. The Bayreuth opera festival in Germany have announced plans to sell tickets for their summer performances of Wagner online. With the increasing popularity of live performances relayed from opera houses onto large public screens outdoors, music writer Norman Lebrecht considers the move towards opera on the large and small screen. Every summer the National Theatre's New Connections season premieres new plays, written for and about young people, by the country's top playwrights. Mark joins Moira Buffini and Hertfordshire Country Youth Theatre preparing her new play for its first performance at the Cottesloe.