Front Row - 15/07/2009

As the recession sets in, the television industry has begun to feel the pinch. Schedules have started to reflect the economic gloom with shows like Property Ladder becoming Property Snakes and Ladders; even the Apprentice is toning down its messages on money and consumption. Four of the most powerful figures in television - ITV's Peter Fincham, Talkback Thames chief Lorraine Heggessey, the BBC's Director of Vision Jana Bennett and Sky 1 Director of Programmes Stuart Murphy - talk to Mark about how television is responding to harder times. With the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landings being celebrated next Monday, a new feature film Moon is released this week, starring Sam Rockwell as an astronaut coming to the end of a three-year stay in the solitude of his lunar research station. And next week sees the opening of a new exhibition Cosmos & Culture at the Science Museum in London which features Thomas Harriot's 400-hundred-year-old lunar maps. The writer Roger Luckhurst gives his response to these two lunar offerings. Jez Butterworth, who began his career at the Royal Court in 1995 with the Olivier Award-winning Mojo, talks about his new play, Jerusalem. Starring Mackenzie Crook and Mark Rylance, Butterworth describes the play as a 'contemporary vision of life in our green and pleasant land'. TS Eliot's widow is backing a campaign to protect the Margate beach shelter where the poet wrote much of The Waste Land; the Cornish beach that Virginia Woolf pictured for her novel To The Lighthouse is up for auction. Front Row reflects on the seaside views that have inspired great moments in British literature.