The Documentary Podcast

Baptist minister Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered his "I have a dream" speech on 28 August 1963 to crowds of over 250,000 in Washington DC as part of the Great March, which called for jobs and freedom for African Americans. It helped spur the passage of the US Civil Rights Act of 1964. On the 60th anniversary of this legendary speech, Emmy award-winning journalist Sherri Jackson meets speakers f...

In 2020 Belize was broke. Again. This small, climate-vulnerable, Central American nation is home to the western hemisphere’s longest barrier reef. And it was about to default on a debt of over half a billion dollars. Enter an American NGO... The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is the world’s largest conservation charity. TNC made an offer to the government of Belize: it would help restructure the debt, i...

Neurodivergent students learn, think, and process information differently than their neurotypical peers. Because of this, they often face unique challenges in the school setting. Students may struggle with executive functioning skills, typical social and communication skills and have sensory processing difficulties. As a result, they may be more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and many o...

World famous violinist Nicola Benedetti starts her new job as Director of the Edinburgh International Festival. Anna Bailey follows her as she enters unchartered territory, commissioning new works and running an organisation. Nicola talks through her decisions for her first programme, which features over 2000 artists from 48 countries. And Anna follows the progress of some of those artists as they...

Madagascar is experiencing its worst famine for over 30 years. With successive years of drought, this began in the country’s deep south but as successive cyclones hit Madagascar in 2022 and 2023, people in the south-east are now also suffering from food insecurity. The United Nations has described this as the “world’s first climate-induced famine”. But some climate scientists claim there is little...

It is the deadliest wildfire in the United States in more than a century. On the Hawaiian island of Maui, block after block of the seaside town of Lahaina lies in ruins. Only the twisted wreckage of buildings and charred vegetation remain among the ashes. More than 100 people have been killed. Host James Reynolds speaks to Ella, who lost her family home in the fires and with two volunteers, Uilani...

After the horrific role played by the German military in the Holocaust, arguably the last place you would expect to find a Jew would be in the German Armed Forces. And yet it is estimated that today there are around 300 practising Jewish military personnel, and since 2021 they have had their own chaplain, the first chief rabbi – and the first non-Christian - in nearly 90 years. With the help of se...

Tens of thousands of Zimbabweans are fleeing their country, looking for work in the West, especially in the United Kingdom. Last year Zimbabwe was the third largest source of foreign workers for the UK, behind India and Nigeria, and ahead of the Philippines and Pakistan, which have much larger populations. A popular social media post reads: “the Zimbabwean dream is to leave Zimbabwe.” Many of thos...

In the 15 years that Jordan Hogg has been a TV director, he has never worked with another disabled director. Whilst 18% of the population has a disability, this is not represented in many industries, but Jordan is attempting to change this in TV and Film. Jordan, who has cerebral palsy, speaks to those who are challenging and changing the industry from within. Alongside him is TV Producer (and clo...

Journalist Ellie House is bisexual. But before she had even realised that, it felt like big tech had already worked it out, with sites like Netflix and TikTok regularly recommending her LGBTQ content. Years later, Ellie goes on a quest to understand how the powerful recommendations systems that big tech companies use really work. She reconstructs her digital fingerprint, and hears from LGBTQ peopl...

Fashion designers and brother and sister duo, Christopher and Tammy Kane have been trendsetters in the fashion world since 2006. They’ve dressed celebrities and world leaders, blending a playful, sexy aesthetic with working-class realism. Now they're launching a brand-new club night in London, the More Joy Disco. But how does their upbringing in a small Scottish village inform the glitz and glamou...

Humans are returning to the moon for the first time in over 50 years. The multi-national mission is called Artemis and involves the most powerful rocket and capable spacecraft ever built, a space station in lunar orbit, and a permanent moon-base on the surface. At a special event at the Royal Geographical Society in London, Dr Kevin Fong speaks to three of the world-leading engineers who are makin...

A new season of the Saudi Pro League is underway, now featuring some of the biggest names in football. Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and N'Golo Kante, among many others, have all signed-up to play in the country. It has shaken up the transfer window but it is not without its controversy. Former Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson, who signed for a Saudi club for example, was a vocal advocate of...

The Rev Malcolm Rogers has been in charge of the most extraordinary church.  St Andrews looks like an ordinary British Victorian church, but amazingly it’s just ten minutes from the heart of power in Russia, the Kremlin.   His flock includes local Russian people but also many English speaking ex-pats and members of Moscow's international community. This would have been an unusual posting at any ti...

Tens of thousands of Russian criminals – murders, rapists, robbers – were recruited from prisons by the mercenary group, Wagner, to fight in Ukraine. Now, after six months on the battlefield, the survivors have returned home, with official pardons. Many served only a fraction of their original sentences. And now, they're officially treated as heroes - protected by a new law which criminalises disc...

Subsistence fishing employs hundreds of millions of people around the world. It’s an enormous business worth trillions of dollars. It’s also a dirty business. High-cost diesel motors and expensive, inefficient lights consume huge amounts of fossil fuels, leaving a considerable carbon footprint. But these lights are essential. Venturing out onto the high seas in a small boat is always dangerous, bu...

In March 2022, seven months after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, second level education was banned for girls, leaving around 1.1 million of them without access to formal schooling. Then in December that year, all female students were refused access to universities and colleges. But across the country, Afghan women and girls are fighting back, and defying the Taliban government by co...

The Indian-born crime fiction author, Ajay Chowdhury, is writing the fifth instalment of his Detective Kamil Rahman series, set between India and the UK. But Ajay is also a leading digital tech entrepreneur and this side of his life influences how he writes his fiction. Join fellow author Paul Waters as he watches Ajay completing the first draft of his latest book with the help of artificial intel...

DJ and writer Lynnée Denise marks hip-hop’s 50th year by speaking to leading names about the music, the art and the creativity of this global cultural movement. Legendary hip-hop producer Pete Rock reminisces over the last five decades, celebrating the artform, exploring its social impact and ask what lies ahead in hip-hop’s story. Artist and rapper Chali 2na from Jurassic 5 tells us how the socia...

Niger has been the focus of international and diplomatic attention over the past week after its democratically elected president was removed from power by the military. In recent days, we have seen hundreds of foreign nationals leave the West African country. For most people in Niger though it is about trying to get on with life – amid the uncertainty – in a country that consistently ranks as havi...

A doctor in New York, Anjoli has been longing for a space to practise spirituality within a like-minded community, but she does not want to go to her parents’ Hindu temple. Whilst she likes the rituals and the sense of community, she feels torn over the teachings about race and caste. She's one of a flock of people signing up to an online community called The Nearness - a group brought together by...

Millions of people left Romania after it entered the EU in 2007. They were haemorrhaging doctors at such a rate they had to shut entire hospitals and losing so many builders they had to cancel major infrastructure projects. By 2015, nearly 20% of the population lived abroad. Now their government wants them to come home. They’ve doubled health care salaries, offered tax breaks to builders and dishe...

Fourteen-year-old Sri Nihal Tammana is on a mission to prevent billions of batteries going to landfill. After watching devastating fires cause by discarded lithium-ion batteries, the kind of batteries found in most modern consumer electronics, he decided to set up a not--for-profit organisation called Recycle my Battery. They have set up recycle points in shops and local businesses, evangelised ab...

Science fiction flourished from the earliest days of the Soviet Union. A rare space to explore other realms and utopian dreams of progress. But with the Soviet Union's collapse different narratives bubbled up. Many of them reactionary, imperial, violent with one sub genre flourishing above all - Popadantsy: accidental time travel where protagonists return to World War Two or the Imperial past to s...

The crime writer Agatha Christie remains the best-selling novelist of all time even though her death was almost 50 years ago. Her fictional detective Hercule Poirot has attained legendary status, so for a modern novelist to breathe new life into the character is a considerable challenge. However, the English psychological crime author Sophie Hannah has been doing just that. In 2014 she wrote her f...