Front Row Folgen

In front of a live audience in the BBC's Big Blue Tent at the Edinburgh Festival, comedian Lucy Porter and comedy tutor Jojo Sutherland give John Wilson a lesson in stand-up - but can you really teach people to be funny?A one-woman show with 10 characters - Nilija Sun discusses her play Pike St, about the residents in the Lower East Side of Manhattan as they prepare for an imminent hurricane.Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed explains what his show Words and Music is really about - plus a performance from Soweto Gospel Choir from South Africa.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Hannah Robins.

Val McDermid presents a special edition from the Edinburgh International Books Festival.American author Paul Auster talks about his Man Booker longlisted novel 4 3 2 1, which offers four different versions of the central character's life. Denise Mina on her first true crime novel, The Long Drop, about one of Scotland's most notorious criminals, Peter Manuel. Glasgow Student Slam Poetry Champion Catherine Wilson performs a poem written specially for Front Row. Mike Heron from The Incredible String Band discusses the joint memoir he's written with the Scottish novelist Andrew Greig, You Know What You Could Be. Folk singer Sam Lee performs The Incredible String Band song, The Circle is Unbroken. Presenter: Val McDermid Producer: Timothy Prosser.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who has devoted much of his long and distinguished career to the revival of early music, discusses his latest project Monteverdi 450, an international tour of Claudio Monteverdi's three surviving operas in celebration of his 450th anniversary.Apphia Campbell's one-woman show, Woke, interweaves the story of two women, 42 years apart, who become involved in the struggle for civil rights. One, notorious Black Panther Assata Shakur, the other Ambrosia, a present day university student caught up in Black Lives Matter in Ferguson. Two critics - Gayle Anderson, comedy reviewer for the Herald, and Chiara Margiotta, deputy editor of Ed Fest Magazine - discuss their experiences of this year's Edinburgh Festivals.Inspired by recent neurobiological research and interviews with people living with dementia, Theatre Re's The Nature of Forgetting is a part-mime, part-theatre show which focuses on Tom, a 55-year-old man, embroiled in the tangled threads of his disappearing memories. Guillaume Pigé, artistic director of Theatre Re, talks about the music, movement and energy that he uses to tell the story.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Edwina Pitman.