Front Row: Archive 2013

With Mark Lawson.On 3 April 2011, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was arrested at Beijing airport. He disappeared for 81 days and on his release the government claimed his imprisonment related to tax evasion. Howard Brenton's latest play is based on an account of conversations with Ai, in which he told the story of that imprisonment. Howard Brenton discusses the creation of the play, and also the DVD release of his memorable but never repeated 1986 noir BBC series Dead Head.William McIlvanney's Laidlaw trilogy of crime novels created a hard-drinking, Glaswegian, middle-aged cop with marital issues that inspired a generation of fellow Scottish writers including Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre, Val McDermid and Denise Mina. As the Laidlaw series is republished, William McIlvanney talks about Raymond Chandler, poetry and the moment he realized that not everybody's mother read the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.Io e Te (Me and You) is the latest film from Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian director of Last Tango in Paris.