Illuminated

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...

MRI machines are a miracle of modern medicine. A long white tube that can scan inside our bodies, detecting all manner of illnesses. Getting into one though can leave many people anxious. Something called 'scanxiety'. When it's his turn to lie down and be rolled inside, presenter Ciaran Tracey must confront his claustrophobia and submit to the machine that can see what's inside his body. His scan...

Andy Mycock has one of the world’s worst surnames. Despite being a renowned political scientist, his life has been punctuated by friends and strangers making fun of his name. Daily acts like meeting new people or being called in to see the doctor can be both hilarious and fraught. His surname has impacted on his professional life, meeting a partner, and forming meaningful relationships. But there...

A farmer, a cheesemaker, a philosopher and a scientist take us on a guided tour through a cow. Told in five acts, this programme weaves together the voices of our four guides - artist-philosopher Samar Nasrullah Khan, cheesemaker Peter Dixon, farmer Nikki Yoxall and Professor of Animal Science and Microbiology Sharon Huws. They take us on a journey from deep in the soil, through a plant, into a co...

John Betjeman wrote that it was 'worth cycling forty miles in a head wind to visit St Wendreda's church in March, Cambridgeshire, because of the 118 angels in the roof. The wings of the C16th oak carvings are inspired by hen and marsh harriers. Once common locally - they are returning now. Nature writer Robert Macfarlane looks at the carvings, drawing connections between angels and harriers, what...

In 2018, the writer and actor Harriet Madeley found out that she was going to die. At least, that’s what she heard when a doctor diagnosed her with Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis, a progressive disease for which there is no medical treatment, no cure, poor understanding and a long list of frightening Google stats.. None of her loved-ones knew how to respond to this bombshell. Her best friend kept...

‘Do nothing’. So exhorts Jimmy as he overhauls the strokes, kicks and breathing of his adult swim learners at Cardiff International Pool. They plunge, roll, extend. As they learn to let go and glide, they’re overcome with a sense of joy, freedom and bodily ease. For journalist Selma Chalabi, Jimmy’s classes have been a lifeline. She joined the class to improve her swimming technique, but what she...

Historian Maurice Casey reveals the story of an anti-Nazi resistance network and the family at its heart, told through a newspaper crafted by two young girls. In the dusty corners of a Galician villa on Spain’s northern coast, Casey uncovered a forgotten archive of revolution, resistance and love. Among the documents was something extraordinary. The Alpenpost - a newspaper lovingly hand-crafted by...

Alan Hall and his siblings have a shared story from their childhoods - their mum, Jackie, describes walking through a Liverpool park with her mum, their grandma, Hettie. It must be the 1940s. Hettie is a single mum. She'd fallen pregnant, according to family mythology, while working as a domestic servant in Scotland. Jackie has had spells in foster care. "Don't stare," Hettie says. "Those men over...

Hilik Magnus is Israel’s foremost search and rescue specialist. He has performed missions, public and private, for over 30 years across six continents. He has worked under the radar during disasters such as 2004’s tsunami and 2008’s Mumbai attacks. He has worked with everyone, from grieving families to cartels and the Taliban, all for the simple purpose of returning people to where they belong. No...

The Indri lemur, also known as the singing lemur, can be found only in Madagascar’s rainforests. Famous for their eerie, melodic calls, they are one of the few primates that sing and, as it turns out, they have a surprising relationship to rhythm - one that’s very similar to our own. After hearing news of these unlikely rhythmic capabilities, Georgie Styles ventures into one of the most biodiverse...

If you ask many women in recovery from alcoholism what the term ‘functioning alcoholic’ means to them, they will laugh. In truth, a large percentage of women who end up in treatment had been, to the outside world, ‘functioning’. Holding down jobs, raising children, paying their rent or mortgage. However, internally, ‘functioning’ is about the last word they would use to describe their mental and e...

In the 1930s a group of researchers descended on the northern mill town of Bolton to observe the natives. They christened their chosen case-study 'Worktown'. It was a ground breaking study of working class culture - and one thing they wanted to know was what makes people happy. The people of Bolton were asked a simple questions "What is happiness to you and yours?" The letters written in response...

Time is a journey - the future ahead of us, the past behind. Our burdens are a weight that we carry, our problems are a puzzle that we solve. Metaphor is at the heart of how we understand our existence. In a period of huge change and global uncertainty, are we outgrowing the metaphors we have lived by? The poet Jack Underwood is offering his services as a metaphor consultant, for a very reasonable...

For decades, Nigerian hall parties have been the hub for communities in the UK, it was the place where they could bring a little bit of home and be transported through music, food and fashion. Full of extravagance, warmth and culture, the word Owambe, both noun and adjective, directly translates to ‘everything is there’. Now, first generation British Nigerians continue this tradition, their way. P...

Bass guitarist and record producer Jah Wobble has had a lifetime’s immersion at the low end of the musical spectrum. Over four decades, his hypnotic bass riffs have powered music from punk to reggae, fusion to world music. He relates his first experiences as a teenager attending blues dances where Jamaican sound systems played cuts of reggae dub where the bass felt like a force like gravity, and s...

What does Christmas Day mean to you? This raw, kaleidoscopic audio portrait, made up entirely from voice notes recordings, tracks the emotional contours of the day as it unfolds. Through midnight churchgoing and moments of quiet reflection to frenetic gift-giving, culinary chaos and karaoke, the programme evokes and questions our own multifarious experiences of what Christmas Day ‘means’. Variousl...