Front Row - 28/08/2009

The former Soft Cell singer Marc Almond discusses Orpheus in Exile, his tribute to Vadim Kozin, the Gypsy folk singer sent to the Gulags after falling out of favour with Stalin for refusing to write a song for him. Kozin died in self-imposed exile in a northern Russian Gulag city in 1994 at the age of 91. Almond discovered Kozin's songs during a visit to Russia in 1992, and recorded and mixed the new CD in Moscow. Natalie Haynes reviews a new rom-com, (500) Days of Summer, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, which offers a new twist on the traditional boy-meets-girl template. Frank Cottrell Boyce talks about the new BBC drama Framed, based on his bestselling children's novel. Starring Trevor Eve and Eve Myles, it is the story of 10 year-old Dylan Hughes and his family's struggle to survive the recession in a small Welsh village and the plan Dylan and his sister conceive when a cosmopolitan art curator called Quentin arrives in the village.