Illuminated

'What gets counted, counts'. Working from this simple proposition, the Dying Homeless Project has for some years provided the UK's most complete - and, at times, its only - record of deaths among those who've experienced homelessness. Run by Museum of Homelessness as a memorial to a community that can so easily become invisible, this year the report identified 1720 men, women and children who had...

A moment in the cinema, watching a horror film, made Daniel Kraemer look at his condition - epilepsy - in a new way. Why has epilepsy consistently been painted by society as being a supernatural power? When you hear from the people who have seizures - across the huge range of types of the condition - a fascinating yet uncomfortable answer emerges. Presenter and Producer: Daniel Kraemer Executive P...

Lois Pryce has a mystery growing in her garden. On the banks of the River Thames stands an enormous old apple tree, producing fruit unlike any she has seen before. For years, Lois has wondered what it is. So she sends off a handful of clues - apples, leaves and a twig - to the experts at the National Fruit Collection. The answer comes back - Annie Elizabeth. It sounds more like a person than an ap...

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 cemented the Cold War, confirming the USSR’s dominance over Eastern Europe and the limitations of NATO. Many thousands were killed. As we approach the 70th anniversary, Nathalie Olah, whose own grandfather was one of 200,000 people to flee Hungary as the working-class uprising was violently suppressed by Soviet tanks, visits Budapest in search of its traces. The Pa...

In 1916, struggling across the mountains of South Georgia after the loss of the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton sensed that his party of three had become four. T.S. Eliot carried the idea into The Waste Land with "Who is the third who walks always beside you?", also a reference to the biblical tale of the Road to Emmaus where a mysterious unseen companion accompanies two disciples. The Third Man has...

For much of their lives, Micki, Esther, Nicola and Colin were devoted members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Nigerian Deeper Life Bible Church and Mormonism, respectively. Each recounts the moments when certainty began to unravel. In raw and honest detail, their stories explore the difficult line between deep religious devotion and unhealthy control. Along the way, for each of them, the balance tippe...

Young Polish field-recordist Izabela Dłużyk travels to the Amazonian rainforest of Peru. Izabela, blind from birth, is a self-taught recordist with a wonderful ears for sound and limitless passion for the natural world. She is ‘rather shy and modest’ by her own account, but indefatigable in her adventurous pursuit of lovely recordings, leaving her recorders running night and day. She knows around...

Radio 4 is marking the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry in Britain with a day of programmes on the Norman Conquest and its lasting legacy today. George Parker, political editor of the Financial Times, was first captivated by the tapestry as a young boy when he was taken to see it on a family holiday to Normandy. He went on to discover why the tapestry is first and foremost a deeply political object....

Footsteps on a metal walkway. The jangle of keys and the resonant clang of thick steel doors slamming. The clamour of voices raised in conversation, or argument, or laughter… their echoes ricocheting off brick and concrete. TVs and radios, all tuned to different stations, fighting it out with each other, overlapping and blurring into a muddle of sound. Prison is a swirling soundscape. A cacophony...

You might know Birmingham's Bullring as one of the UK's premiere shopping destinations, or somewhere to pass through on your way to visit Birmingham's famous Christmas Market. But at the heart of the Bullring is a special church – one of only three churches in the world to have 16 bells. And bells have been rung on this site for almost 500 years. The bellringers of Birmingham are arguably the best...

Growing up in rural Derry, author Séamas O’Reilly and his siblings never needed to go to Blockbuster. Instead, they were enraptured by their father’s archive of hundreds of films recorded off the television. With their snippets of old-timey adverts and local telly, the tapes contain a tantalising glimpse of Northern Ireland in the late 1980s, as well as an array of truly memorable double bills. Wh...

Award winning Scottish folksinger, songwriter and storyteller, Karine Polwart celebrates the 300th anniversary of James Hutton’s birth, the Scottish scientist and philosopher known as the father of geology. With specially performed music and song, she explores one of Hutton’s most radical and challenging concepts - deep time. Hutton was the first to hypothesise that the formation of the Earth had...

"Some losses feel seismic. The ground shifts, familiar landscapes tilt, and nothing is the same. Dad’s death changed our world. But it also left us with a distinctly geological conundrum. What on earth are we going to do with his rock collection?" Three years after the death of Jenny Hill’s father, the family are still coming to terms not only with their grief - but a cumbersome inheritance. Arthu...

How do you tell the story of your life when you have no memory of the events that shaped you? At 15, Stephen McAll was a promising musician with a head full of songs. He was booked into a studio to record an album. Then, one night walking home from his girlfriend’s house in East Kilbride, he was attacked and beaten. The assault left him with serious head injuries and diagnoses of psychosis, excruc...

Writer Tim Dee is trying to make a most extraordinary Zoom Call that will transport him across the centuries to have a most magical encounter with a scholarly looking guy with a white beard who is his namesake. Dr John Dee was astronomer and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. He was a wizardly necromancer with a Europe wide reputation who ended up desperately trying to converse with angels to unlock...

When museum curator Mark Hignett began buying WWII-era letters online, he believed he was piecing together the life of an ordinary soldier. At first glance, the letters looked like typical correspondence: full of yearning, daily details, and hopes for peace. But what emerged wasn’t just a wartime chronicle - it was a love story. As he kept on reading, he slowly realised they were letters from one...

This is a love letter to a special kind of letter, a 'later life letter' - a letter that can 'speak across the years', telling an adopted child where they come from, and helping them understand who they might be now. In this documentary, poet Luke Wright opens his 'later life letter' and shares what it reveals, and why he keeps it in his bedside drawer. It's one of the most meaningful documents an...

We're at the Black Sea coast on the last night of June. Everything is building up to the sunrise. This is Bulgaria’s ‘July Morning’ observance - somewhere between a counter-cultural musical festival, and a secular pilgrimage marking the start of July. It revolves around reaching the coast in time to meet July’s first sunrise. This celebration has an unlikely origin story - a 1971 song, also called...

What does it take to choose peace when you have every reason not to? Aziz Abu Sarah is a Palestinian who grew up under Israeli occupation in East Jerusalem. He was first shot at when he was seven years old, and in 1991, when he was ten, his older brother Tayseer died after being arrested and beaten while in Israeli military custody. Maoz Inon is an Israeli who grew up in a community just 200 metre...

Water has always been a threshold - a space between worlds where transformation unfolds. But what if the lakes, rivers, and seas we surrender ourselves to are not merely passive bodies, but keepers of our grief, our burdens, and our memory? Feature maker Hana Walker-Brown explores what pulls so many of us to the water at moments of rupture or change. Tracing the unseen currents that bind us to eac...

On a hot summer’s day in 1991, a violent crime took place that shook Consett, a town in the North East of England. When threatened with the legal demolition of a property he owned, a former steelworker called Albert Dryden went on a murderous rampage, killing the council’s chief planning officer and seriously wounding a policeman and a journalist. Furthermore, the brutal crime was filmed and broad...

The young British poet Saili Katebe was born in landlocked Zambia, and grew up with an imagined beach in his mind. Palm trees would grow in the golden sands. The sun would shine all day, and naturally there’d be romance. Moving to the UK as a teenager, Saili visited a real beach for the first time. He was underwhelmed by the hazy sun and soft ice cream, and the sea at low tide was so far away he c...

When Laura's sister could no longer care for her daughter, Laura had a few hours to decide. If she said yes, she would become a parent again overnight, no training, no paid leave, no warning. If she said no, the little girl would go into care. She said yes. Most families do. My Sister's Daughter weaves Laura's story, told through the small, exhausting, tender details of a life rearranged, with the...

“Each one of us, we’re a constant radio station communicating and receiving. It’s just that we’re not taught how to read, how to interpret the energies and intuitions we pick up. The tarot card is a really important component in this… " Ben Okri Tarot cards are rich in visual symbolism and the stories they tell help people make sense of the ups and downs of human experience. They’ve been around fo...

World champion Strongwomen Lucy Underdown, Rebecca Roberts and Donna Moore redefine what it means to be strong. They reveal what we can all learn from these record-breaking athletes, while also challenging what it really means to be powerful woman. Contributors: Rebecca Roberts, Lucy Underdown and Donna Moore Produced by Justine Potter Executive Producer: Geoff Bird A Savvy production for BBC Radi...