StoryCo

Gordon Smart on Murdoch’s private jet, the Bizarre column, and the career he walked away from at the top. Episode Overview Gordon Smart was Scottish Sun editor at 32 and deputy editor of The Sun at 35. The morning after Hibs won the Scottish Cup for the first time in 114 years, Rupert Murdoch called him personally. The picture turned out to be Murdoch kissing Jerry Hall. Smart had to decide on the...

Gordon Smart on Murdoch’s private jet, the Bizarre column, and the career he walked away from at the top. Episode Overview Gordon Smart was Scottish Sun editor at 32 and deputy editor of The Sun at 35. The morning after Hibs won the Scottish Cup for the first time in 114 years, Rupert Murdoch called him personally. The picture turned out to be Murdoch kissing Jerry Hall. Smart had to decide on the...

Kate Cherrell on Victorian séances, TikTok mediums, and why the dead never really go away. Episode Overview In 1871, a woman called Mrs. Guppy was airlifted three miles across London by spirits and deposited, unconscious, onto a séance table. People at both ends confirmed she was there one minute, gone the next. Kate Cherrell tells this story in the first two minutes. It sets the tone exactly righ...

Professor Chris French on ghosts, sleep paralysis, UFOs, and what 35 years of testing the paranormal actually found. Episode Overview Chris French grew up terrified of the dark and believed every second of Uri Geller’s spoon-bending. He is now Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, founder of their Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, and one of Britain’s foremost experts on why people b...

David McKelvey on contract killers, corrupt police, and why he believes two men are in prison for murders they did not commit. Episode Overview In 2008, David McKelvey was interviewing an informant at Ilford Police Station when the man began describing a contract on three people. McKelvey was one of them. A known contract killer was parked outside with a machine gun at that moment. When he reporte...

Mobeen Azhar on the BBC's coverage of Palestine, why identity politics gives him the 'ick', and 20 years of stories nobody else would touch. Episode Overview Mobeen Azhar grew up in Huddersfield, the son of a bus driver whose appointment television was Newsnight and The Cook Report. He has spent 20 years at the BBC making documentaries nobody else would commission: Taliban drug raids in Karachi, B...

Why does "Make America Great Again" beat "Stronger Together"? John Yorke, Mark Borkowski and Misha Glenny on why political slogans work, and why the best ones are really stories. Three StoryCo guests look at political communication through the lens of narrative. They argue that a good slogan tells a complete story in a handful of words, with a clear protagonist, antagonist and...

Why can't Britain investigate its own monarchy? Andrew Lownie has spent a decade trying to find out, and what he has uncovered explains why so much stays hidden. Lownie sets out the position of the royal family as he sees it: exempt from freedom of information laws, beyond parliamentary scrutiny, with opaque finances, sealed wills and no register of their business activities. He argues that a...

Four experts, four different reasons not to panic about AI. Dr Julia Shaw argues that the risks we focus on, like "AI psychosis", are vanishingly rare, and that free access to a listening ear at 3am has probably saved more lives than it's harmed. Psychotherapist Kathleen Saxton agrees AI has a role in mental health, but only as a guide toward proper, qualified human help. Film direct...

Every season of this show begins with a simple request: tell me a story. We have gathered five accounts that have stayed with us long after the cameras stopped rolling. From author Will Storr recounting a haunting ancient Bengali tale about a tiger and a hunter, to John Yorke exploring the weight of words in politics and history, this episode examines why narrative craft is the fundamental buildin...

Ben Lewis and Arthur Brand on the Louvre heist, the art theft epidemic, and why stolen Renoirs end up as drug collateral. Episode Overview In October 2025, thieves arrived at the Louvre on scooters, erected a furniture lift, and were in and out with 88 million euros in Napoleonic crown jewels in four minutes. They dropped the Empress's tiara on the way out. Within 12 hours, another French museum w...

Andrew Lownie on Prince Andrew, royal secrets, and why the establishment is harder to crack than ever. Episode Overview Andrew Lownie came back to StoryCo because listeners asked for him. Since the first episode, the story hasn't stopped moving. Andrew was seen bruised in the back of a car. Harry lost in court. The sovereign grant was tripled with no parliamentary debate. And Lownie is now wri...

Clare Rewcastle Brown on the 1MDB scandal, vexatious lawsuits, and why one blog brought down a government. Episode Overview Some $7 billion was stolen in the 1MDB scandal. It cost $8 billion to cover it up. Clare Rewcastle Brown uncovered it from a spare room, with a blog and a shortwave radio and no newsroom behind her. When the Malaysian government hired a $15 million PR firm to destroy her repu...

Ben Macintyre on Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and the strangest book he has ever written. Episode Overview In 1943, British intelligence floated a dead body off the coast of Spain with letters from an officer who had never existed. The Germans believed it. In 1941, a professional safe-cracker parachuted into Britain by the Nazis immediately switched sides. In 1979, a senior KGB officer in Te...

Misha Glenny on war zones, McMafia, and why this is the time of monsters. Episode Overview In 1994, Misha Glenny drove across Sarajevo Airport under sniper fire. A bullet entered his car, passed through the drive shaft, and exited the other side. He didn't panic. He traced the bullet's path with the detached curiosity of someone who had been doing this for years. Glenny made his name cover...

Thalia Kent Egan on vertical drama, AI theft, and why filmmaking shouldn't be brutal. Episode Overview Thalia Kent Egan was commissioned to write a 90-page vertical drama script. She was told she would direct it, that the company wanted bold storytelling, real actors, heartbeat moments. Then they went quiet. When she followed up, they replied to say they had already released it as an AI-generated...

Dr. Gab Astorga on microbial genomics, hiding the vegetables, and why science is not finished until it's communicated. Episode Overview Dr. Gab Astorga opens with the story of how tuberculosis invented the cowboy hat, which led to American culture, which led to Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter. It is exactly who he is and exactly what this conversation delivers for the next 40 minutes. Gab grew up...

Matthew Manning on poltergeists, laboratory healing, and why he gave up fame at the height of it. Episode Overview When Matthew Manning was 11, objects began moving around his Cambridge home. His father, an architect, ruled out every logical explanation one by one. The police sergeant he reported it to turned out to have a personal passion for ghost hunting and knew exactly who to call: a professo...

Summary Ros Barber on coercive control, the Shakespeare authorship question, and why writing is a survival mechanism. Episode Overview Ros Barber was six months pregnant when she learned the insurance software her husband had been contracted to deliver didn't exist. She stayed up 36 hours, learned C++ from scratch, delivered the system, went into premature labor, and came home from the hospital to...

Summary Joey D'Urso on dirty money, soft power, and why the shirt on your back says more about the world than you think. Episode Overview A Schalke shirt is thirty years of Germany's addiction to Russian gas. A Colombian yellow kit became a factional political weapon in a single election. Joey D'Urso spent years as a political journalist at the BBC before the editor of The Athletic asked if he lik...

Summary Ben Lewis on the art market, the Salvator Mundi, and why the most beautiful objects are used for the ugliest purposes. Episode Overview In 2005, a painting sold at auction for $1,000. In 2017, the same painting sold to the ruler of Saudi Arabia for $450 million. Christie's marketed it as a Leonardo da Vinci. It probably isn't. Nobody can prove it either way because most of the orig...

Summary Jago Cooper on living art, the Easter Island myth, and why things are better storytellers than people. Episode Overview What if artworks aren't objects but living entities? Jago Cooper, Executive Director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, made headlines when he became the first museum director in the world to change his institution's governance structure so that every artwor...

Summary Dr. Jess Venner on Pompeii, the ordinary people history forgot, and why resilience is a better story than disaster. Jess Venner grew up in Hainault on the end of the Central Line, at a school in special measures, having never heard of classics. She is now a research fellow at Oxford, and her book The Lost Voices of Pompeii reconstructs the final day of seven ordinary Pompeiians: a pub land...

Summary Emma Dabiri on hair, history, and why the Black/white binary is a design choice, not a fact of life. Episode Overview Emma Dabiri wrote a book about hair. Except it wasn't about hair.  Don't Touch My Hair  used braiding as a trapdoor into 6,000 years of African philosophy, pre-colonial constructions of time, and the question of who gets to name things, and what happens to the things that g...

Summary Mike Figgis on  Leaving Las Vegas ,  Timecode , and why the best creative work comes from stripping everything back. Episode Overview Mike Figgis shot  Leaving Las Vegas  in three weeks on Super 16 with a skeleton crew and no permits on the Las Vegas Strip. Nicolas Cage won the Oscar. The film cost almost nothing. That was the point. Figgis has been making this argument for 50 years, from...