Front Row - 18/11/2009

Arts news and reviews with Mark Lawson. Comedian Bill Bailey talks about his guide to the Orchestra - very different from Benjamin Brittens', a live touring show in which he lets his eccentric imagination loose on classical music, soon to be released on DVD. Fay Weldon reviews The Original of Laura, the posthumous novel that Nabokov asked his heirs to burn. The book was written, as was all of Nabokov's work, on index cards and Penguin have reproduced the text exactly as written on 138 cards with a transcript of the text on the opposite page. A Serious Man, the latest film from the Coen brothers - whose earlier works include Fargo, The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men - is a black comedy set in the Midwest in 1967 as a college professor tries to establish some clarity in his life when things unravel around him. Critic Diane Roberts reviews. Maverick veteran American film director Joseph Strick caused controversy with his adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses in 1967 and his version of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was banned in the UK. In 1971 he won an Oscar for Best Short Documentary for Interviews with My Lai Veterans. On a rare visit to the UK ahead of a short season of his films at the Barbican Centre in London, the 87-year-old director looks back over his eventful career.