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Audiences are preoccupying Mary Beard this week – do they matter and what’s their role? We’ve spent much of lockdown lamenting the loss of attending live performance - in sport, music, theatre and more, so Mary talks to sports star Ellie Simmonds, and Clare Balding about how the loss of the crowd affects performance. She attends her first Twitter Listening Party - a new way for musicians to reach their audience – and talks to Rev Richard Coles, former 1980s band The Communards, and Tim Burgess of The Charlatans, who came up with the idea. Mary has some fun discussing the changing role of the spectator across history with Kwame Kwei-Armah, Kiri Pritchard-McLean and Dr Kirsty Sedgman, and there’s an exclusive performance from Amy Macdonald at Glasgow’s Barrowlands – famous for its legendary audiences.