Sideways

Back in the 1960s, Bill Strickland was a listless teenager but life as he knew it was about to change forever. One afternoon, while skipping class, something caught his eye - the door to one of the art rooms was ajar and he could hear the whirring of a potters wheel. Stopping a moment to take a look, Bill beheld a sight that would change the course of his life. At the wheel was a ceramics teacher,...

On a January night in Manhattan, a team of lawyers is working to crack open an organised crime case. And at the centre of it all, is Eunice Carter - the first black woman to graduate from Fordham Law and the first African-American woman to pass the New York state bar. Matthew Syed tells the story of how Carter’s brilliance and meticulous attention to detail blew open a case that would bring down t...

Boston, Massachusetts, 1985. Dr Joe Upton is struggling to reattach a severed ear onto a little boy. Using incredible skill and the best in modern equipment he re-attaches the arteries, but the veins are proving difficult. Blood keeps getting congested and the little ear is turning black. Just when it looks like all is lost, Joe remembers leeches. Once used to treat every malady imaginable, the va...

Lee Chambers is an undeniable success. From his parents' single bedroom, with the boiler humming away day and night, he founds an e-commerce video games business that gives him a healthy bank account in seven months. Next comes the car, the house, the fancy holidays with his wife. But all the time, Lee feels like a total failure. Everyone is telling him he’s a success, but he can’t see it. He’s on...

At a school assembly, 16-year-old Simon Day discovers an acute fear of public speaking. Faced with a crowd of expectant faces, panic begins to set in. Soon, Simon finds that words fail him at almost every turn, threatening his career, relationships and, ultimately, his happiness. Matthew Syed follows Simon’s journey to find his voice, uncovering the science of how we speak and the complex factors...

Arlene Blum has scaled some of the most treacherous peaks in the Himalayas. When she’s not climbing mountains, she’s fighting to get toxic chemicals banned from everyday household goods. Arlene says that her experience leading expeditions has helped her acquire the personal skills and attributes required to push through bold new science policies. Matthew Syed asks whether transferable resilience f...

Matthew Syed introduces the new series, which focuses on endurance, courage & resilience.

Matthew Syed has come to a horrible realisation about himself. He is in danger of becoming a big head. He’s worried that, with a successful podcast and best-selling books, every positive affirmation he receives is only serving to inflate his sense of entitlement. The Greeks had a word for this - hubris. In the final episode of this series, Matthew is on a mission to prevent his tragic downfall by...

When the Danish men’s football team are called up to replace Yugoslavia in the 1992 European Championships, just 10 days before the start of the tournament, nobody fancied their chances, least of all the players themselves. In this episode of Sideways, Matthew Syed traces their fairy tale journey towards taking home the trophy and reveals what Denmark's story can teach us about the importance of p...

When Amrou Al-Kadhi steps into a pair of heels and takes the stage, they step into another world, another persona where they can be whatever they want. In this episode of Sideways, Matthew Syed asks whether creating an alter ego is the key to finding our true self. For Amrou Al-Kadhi, performing as their drag alter-ego, Glamrou started out as an escape. Struggling with mental health issues, feelin...

When Ray and Vi Donovan left court after the sentencing of three boys who murdered their 18-year-old son, Christopher, they said they had justice for Chris, but not the truth. They still didn’t know why Christopher was murdered on a May evening in 2001. That was a question the trial didn’t answer and only Christopher’s killers could. Years later, they would meet the three boys, by now men, to ask...

Boston, Massachusetts. 1970. A group of mothers and young children assembles outside the offices of the local TV station. It’s the first phase of a fight to improve kids’ TV that would go all the way to the United States Senate. Matthew Syed looks at how kids' TV got smart, and what we can learn about the developing mind from the programme makers who led the way. In the late 1960s, children’s tele...

When a major earthquake hits California, it has to rebuild - but at what cost? A sunny afternoon in October, 1989. In San Francisco's Candlestick Park stadium, a pair of local sporting rivals are about to go head to head - the Oakland Athletics against the San Francisco Giants. But before the first ball is pitched, the game is interrupted - by a major earthquake. A section of the San Francisco-Oak...

It's 1990 and Birmingham metal band Judas Priest are on trial in court in Reno, Nevada. The band are accused of influencing the suicide and suicide attempt of two of their young fans by placing subliminal messages in their track Better By You, Better Than Me. What follows is a six week trial - the first to be filmed for Court TV - in which the lives of the boys’ families are devastatingly pulled a...

Bonfire night, November 5th 2015, 9.30pm. An agent fires off an email. An author is accused of plagiarism. His new book lies ready to be pulped. In the first of a new series of Sideways, Matthew Syed asks why we’re doomed to be unoriginal and why it hurts so much to be, well, not that special. In 1998, Hollywood directors Matthew Bay and Mimi Leder went head to head with suspiciously similar disas...

Matthew Syed returns with the new series of Sideways, all about the ideas that shape our lives, with stories of seeing the world differently.

American science journalist Joshua Foer was a perfectly normal guy with a perfectly normal memory. Then he entered the USA National Memory Championships - and ended up giving the country’s brain power prodigies a run for their money. How did he do it? Matthew Syed takes a deep dive into the heady world of brain training - where ordinary people challenge themselves to reach new peaks of mental athl...

You might not have heard of Max Martin, but you've definitely heard the songs he's written. You probably know the words whether you like the songs or not. Martin has written many of the world's biggest pop hits. He has 23 number ones, second only to Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Matthew Syed explores the extraordinary career of the enigmatic pop powerhouse who's one of Sweden's most significant...

A young entrepreneur builds the ‘happiest company in the world’, an online shoe retailer so profitable that Amazon snaps it up for over a billion dollars. But what if the company’s profits and happiness could be boosted by a radical reimagining of the workplace? No more bosses, no more job titles, just creativity, equality and pure joy. Matthew Syed tells the extraordinary story of Tony Hsieh, a v...

On the spacecraft Voyager, hurtling through deep space sits a golden record, filled with the music of planet earth. It is a cultural gift for unknown extraterrestrial life forms. If an alien species discovers this unique double LP, they'll be greeted by the singing of the Mbuti people of the Congo recorded by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull. Matthew Syed examines Turnbull's seemingly utopian exp...

Matthew Syed asks what the world's greatest fighter pilot can tell us about decision making. He discovers a theory that transformed warfare and might have played a key role in Brexit. John Boyd was a rebel. The quintessential cigar-chomping fighter pilot. A legend within the US Air Force, he was known to be able to shoot down any opponent in a dogfight in under 40 seconds. He developed a decision...

Did a shift in our sexual behaviour 2000 years ago lead to the rise of the west as a globally dominant force? Matthew Syed wants to put the western mind in the spotlight. There’s a good reason for doing this. It turns out that 96% of psychological experiments have been carried out on western students. Why is this? Because western students are easy to access for a psychologist working in a universi...

Best-selling author Matthew Syed explores the ideas that shape our lives with stories of seeing the world differently. In this episode, Matthew tells two stories, both of which raise profound questions about how we think. A group of terrified teenagers discover a disturbing app on social media. A world renowned doctor sets out to uncover hidden crimes. The tragic events Matthew examines lead to a...

Best-selling author Matthew Syed explores the ideas that shape our lives with stories of seeing the world differently. A criminal walks into a Swedish bank brandishing a machine gun. He takes a handful of bank workers hostage. The police lock the victims and their captors in the vault and then things start to get weird. Despite being held captive and threatened with violence, the hostages side wit...

Join bestselling author Matthew Syed as he explores the ideas that shape our lives. With sound design from Peabody Prize winner Benbrick, Sideways combines big ideas with narrative storytelling, offering a new perspective on the way we live.