Front Row - 10/12/2009

Kirsty Lang talks to Heidi Thomas about writing the BBC period drama Cranford and having to make up storylines and characters that weren't in Gaskell's original. How will Judi Dench and her formidable group of women cope with the prospect of a new railway in the village? Patrick Wright discusses an exhibition of three painters - John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert and Stanley Spencer - at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Film director Sally Potter, the subject of a major retrospective at the BFI Southbank, talks about guerrilla film-making and the why a film can be improved by mistakes. And critic Damian Kelleher chooses the best of this year's books for children over the age of nine.