Lives Less Ordinary

On the night of December 15th, 1997, a fire broke out in the home of Luz Cuevas and Pedro Vera, a couple living in Philadelphia with their two young sons and their ten-day-old daughter, Delimar. She was asleep upstairs. In the aftermath, the fire was declared the result of faulty wiring. No trace of baby Delimar was ever found — she was presumed dead; “completely consumed by the fire”, according t...

Ryan Calais Cameron dreamed of being an actor, but after a careers advisor told him this was unrealistic he took a different path as a tradesman. Unhappy, Ryan took a risk with acting and eventually landed himself a lead role on one of London’s biggest stages; this opened the door to a career in theatre and on TV. But as his acting progressed, Ryan often found himself playing clichéd and typecast...

In 2017 Australian Gus Taylor lost his lower leg in a terrible climbing accident. The climbing community rallied, hauled him out of depression and got him back on the mountains again. But then in 2022 another serious accident had tragic consequences. Gus was out in the Blue Mountains with his friend Richard Mills when he dislodged a rock that struck Richard, standing below. Despite his injuries Ri...

Dan McCrum investigated a story at Wirecard that had him fearing for his safety. British journalist Dan McCrum usually writes about businesses for the London-based newspaper, the Financial Times. In 2014 he got a tip off alleging there were so-called gangsters behind a much-feted German company called Wirecard. The company had started small, taking care of the technical part of processing online p...

Ricky Ellcock’s rollercoaster life as a fast bowler and airline pilot Barbados-born Ricky Ellcock had twin ambitions as a boy – to become a cricketer and fly airplanes. His father was, like Ricky, cricket-mad – but on the question of him becoming a pilot his answer was emphatic: black people don’t fly planes. Ricky’s talents as a fast bowler won him many plaudits and a scholarship to come to Engla...

Paul Rousseau was accidentally shot in the head by his best friend and flatmate. When Paul met Mark in the first year of university in the US, they quickly became close. They moved in together, and spent most of the next four years in each other's company. But Paul did not know that Mark had been keeping a collection of guns in his bedroom. In April 2017 one of Mark's guns accidentally went off, t...

Jerald Walker grew up in the predominantly white, Worldwide Church of God – a doomsday cult that convinced its followers the world would end in 1972. Raised by blind, African American parents and under the cult's strict teachings, which preached racial segregation and an imminent apocalypse, Jerald’s life was dominated by fear, isolation, and the belief that his future didn’t exist. When the promi...

Nasubi had no idea his 15-month fight to survive was being broadcast on Japanese TV. In the late 1990s aspiring comedian Tomoaki Hamatsu, nicknamed Nasubi, lived inside a small room for 15 months surviving off sweepstake competition winnings. He was naked, alone and hungry. He was also completely unaware he had become the most famous television personality in Japan, his life broadcast to millions...

Trent Dalton discovered he was on the fringe of one of Australia’s biggest crime stories.  Back in the 1980s, when Trent was a kid growing up in Brisbane, he discovered that there was a secret underground room behind his stepfather's wardrobe. There were plenty of other strange things happening to him too. Like when he found a bundle of cash in the pocket of his bathrobe. Or there were the rumours...

In 1998 Finnish journalist Johanna Aatsalo uncovered a huge news story: a member of the much-revered Finnish cross-country ski team had taken banned substances. After six months' intense investigation Johanna published her findings, and within just a few hours the backlash began. Johanna even received death threats. Because she wouldn't reveal her sources she was also taken to court and found guil...

When he slid off a 40-metre cliff in the jungle, Morgan Segui thought he was sure to die. Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food; that is the rule that every mountaineer knows by heart. For Morgan Segui, a French acrobat-turned-explorer, he knew it meant his chances of survival were vanishingly small. He lay at the bottom of a dry gorge in the Timorese jungle...

Bestselling writer Lesley Pearse never stopped looking for her son. An agent once told Lesley Pearse to "write what you know", but her own story is more extraordinary than any of her bestselling novels. In this, the second episode of two, Lesley makes a selfless decision on behalf of her baby son Warren, and spends the six decades that follow searching for him. Presenter: Asya Fouks Producer: Laur...

Bestselling writer Lesley Pearse's own story is wilder than any romance. An agent once told Lesley Pearse to "write what you know", but her own story is more extraordinary than any of her bestselling novels. In this, the first episode of two, we follow her from playground storyteller to lost teenage girl in 1960s London, to brave single mum determined to go it alone. Presenter: Asya Fouks Producer...

Dominic and Justin Hardy were young boys when their father, the director Robin Hardy, began a gruelling and obsessive quest to make The Wicker Man. Now the film is regarded as a masterpiece and beloved by fans across the world, but when it was first released in 1973, it was a major flop. The fallout for the Hardy family was painful, tearing them apart. It would take many decades, a bundle of lost...

Kieran Quinlan was on his way to a party when a man with a knife attacked him. Kieran Quinlan was an aspiring boxer living in his hometown of Birmingham in the UK. When he was 17 he was on the bus heading to a party when a man confronted him. The man counted down: 3, 2, 1 – before stabbing Kieran through his lung and into his heart. Kieran should have died that night. But instead he survived, spen...

In May 2024, 90-year-old Ed Dwight Jr. from Kansas City, Missouri travelled to the edge of space – he was an honoured guest in the Blue Origin rocket. His trip was 60 years overdue. Ed had been chosen by President John F Kennedy to be the first African-American astronaut at a time when racism was rife and segregation a reality. But JFK’s plans for Ed were scuppered – and Ed had to pick himself up...

Joshua created an AI simulation of his deceased fiancée to help him deal with his loss. When gaming enthusiast Joshua Barbeau met Jessica, he knew he had found his soulmate. But his happiness didn't last. Jessica died from a rare health condition aged just 23, leaving Joshua struggling to cope with his grief, and his life. Eight years later, in 2020, while playing around with a website that used A...

Nemonte Nenquimo’s passion for her rainforest home, and her love for an unlikely man, propelled her to achieve an historic victory for indigenous people in Ecuador. She took the national government to court to protect 500,000 acres of rainforest from destruction by the oil industry. Nemonte and her husband Mitch Anderson have written a book together called We Will Not Be Saved: A Memoir of Hope an...

Maxwell Smart survived the Holocaust by living in a makeshift bunker on the forest floor. Maxwell Smart was just 11 years old in 1941 when the Nazis took over his town in eastern Poland. One by one his Jewish family were disappeared or killed, but his mother implored him to run for his life just as she and his sister were being loaded onto a German truck. Using his extraordinary ingenuity he manag...

Maxwell Smart survived the Holocaust by living in a makeshift bunker on the forest floor. Maxwell Smart was just 11 years old in 1941 when the Nazis took over his town in eastern Poland. One by one his Jewish family were disappeared or killed, but his mother implored him to run for his life just as she and his sister were being loaded onto a German truck. Using his extraordinary ingenuity he manag...

American endurance swimmer Diana Nyad faced down box jellyfish, cold and extreme fatigue to become the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage for protection, in 2013. She was 64 and had always been drawn by intense, seemingly unachievable feats of marathon swimming. It was after shooting to fame for swimming round the island of Manhattan in the 1970s that Diana first seized...

Gilbert Alaskadi grew up in the African country of Chad. His family was poor, and he spent much of his childhood hungry, with people frequently making fun of his small stature. Then, when he was a teenager, he encountered a bodybuilding pamphlet, promising quick muscle growth in a handful of weeks. He wanted the physique, but first he'd need money and calories. At the first oppurtunity he ran away...

Osel Hita Torres was a Spanish toddler when he was recognised by the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of a well-known Tibetan Buddhist monk and teacher called Lama Yeshe. As a child he was sent to a monastery in India to prepare for life as a monk and scholar. Many expected him to carry on Lama Yeshe’s work of teaching Buddhism around the world when he grew up. But Osel had other ideas. Presenter:...

At the age of 11 in 1985, Salva Dut was separated from his family by the Sudanese civil war. After a decade moving between different refugee camps, and presumed an orphan, Salva was recommended for resettlement in the United States as part of a UN-backed programme to support some 4,000 so-called 'lost boys' who'd been displaced by conflict. Salva settled with a host family in Rochester, New York....

Salva Dut is one of Sudan's so-called 'Lost Boys.' Separated from his family at the age of 11 when the civil war reached his village in 1985, Salva walked for weeks to reach safety in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. There, he lived out most of his teenage years, amongst thousands of other orphans. Like most of them, Salva had no idea what had happened to his family. With little adult supervision, the...