Magic live in the studio

In the first of our special programmes from the Edinburgh Festivals, actress Stockard Channing - star of Grease, Six Degrees of Separation and Practical Magic - joins us alongside her friend, actor David Westhead, to discuss their production of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, ...  Show more

Writer and director John Morton, one of the team behind 2012 and W1A, on the new comedy Twenty Twenty Six, set in the run up to this year's football World Cup.Artist Lachlan Goudie's new book The Secrets of Painting explores the creative big bangs in art over the centuries which ...  Show more

Poet Fiona Sampson, conductor Alice Farnham, and broadcaster Tom Service join Ian McMillan to explore the maths, metaphors and musical terms that make up the language of conducting. Plus comedy writer Jack Bernhardt takes a sideways look at Hollywood's take on the tortured genius ...  Show more

With Antonia Quirke.Director Brian Welsh discusses Beats, his acclaimed drama set in the 90s rave scene in Glasgow. He explains how to film a rave. You just hold a party and invite one thousand extras.Novelist Jonathan Coe enters the fray of Pitch Battle as he pitches an adaptati ...  Show more

This week, a special interview with the sociologist Richard Sennett takes us from Roland Barthes to Leonard Bernstein; and Hettie Judah on two memoirs inspired by a love of 17th-century art.'The Performer: Art, Life, Politics', by Richard Sennett'Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and ...  Show more

Ben Elton has a new sitcom on BBC2; Upstart Crow starring David Mitchell as The Bard of Avon. Could it be a return to his golden form of Blackadder? A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first production by Emma Rice, the new Artistic Director at London's Globe Theatre. Does it auger ...  Show more