Playwright Jonathan Harvey on A Thong for Europe, Tom Hanks’s new novel reviewed

Merseyside-native Jonathan Harvey discusses his new play, A Thong For Europe, which combines his love of Liverpool with his passion for Eurovision to create an exuberant comedy where the Eurovision final really does become a family affair.

And this week our panel of cultural critics review two debuts - Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks’s first novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, and Harka, the debut feature from the Egyptian-American filmmaker Lotfy Nathan. The literary critic Max Liu and the film critic Leila Latif join Samira Ahmed to give their assessment of Hanks’s time travelling tour of the film industry on the page and Nathan’s portrait of Tunisia on screen, set some ten years after the Arab Spring.