Front Row - 03/11/2009

The filmmaker Penny Woolcock's new film, 1 Day, has been causing controversy in Birmingham, where the city's cinemas are refusing to screen it. The fictional film follows two groups of drug-dealing, gun-toting gangsters in the suburbs of the city, and features local amateur actors. Penny Woolcock discusses the background to the film and responds to the cinema chains' decision. Seventeen-year-old musical prodigy Alexander Prior talks about his music and life in St Petersburg, where he is studying opera and symphonic conducting, and Velesslavitsa, a concerto he wrote for the four other young prodigies he discovered while making a Channel 4 series. The South African poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile and his compatriot, the poet and playwright Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, are touring the UK in a performance poetry show called Beyond Words. They tell Front Row what they hope to achieve with the tour, both politically and poetically, and discuss whether protest poetry still has a place in the new South Africa. A new comedy series for Radio 4 by Nick Hornby and Giles Smith centres around an old 70s rock star who has ended up fabulously rich from investing in the dreams of a young computer geek called Bill Gates and a starving artist called Damien Hirst. Now living in a mansion the size of a village, the old rocker is isolated and clueless about the post-1970s world. Sarfraz Manzoor reviews the series.