Illuminated

When you look at the moon, what do you see? Producer and artist Siddharth Khajuria encounters competing human imaginations for the moon. Starting with some of the earliest lunar maps, he works with moonlight to illuminate thornier questions about our own behaviour on earth. What motivates the desire to etch a name into the landscape? The humanity woven through our modern map of the moon – Seas of...

An extraordinary one-off symphony brings to life the stories of five people and their relationship with one of their vital organs. Like a symphony orchestra, our organs work in harmony to execute the movement that is human life. We don’t often think about our relationship to these internal cogs that keep us alive. For most people, the connection remains distant. For others, it is ever present. In...

As their 30th birthday approaches, Saba Husain (they/them) receives an unexpected and life changing box. It contains ‘the life’ of their mum; never before seen diaries, love letters, poems, photos of a person who died when Saba was born, 29 years earlier. With no note or message, it must have been sent by Saba’s father - but why now? Why not before? And what should Saba do with these incredibly in...

In his memoir of surviving the brutal apartheid prison Robben Island, South African activist Sedick Isaacs recalls an extraordinary event about which little has been recorded - "the creation and training of the eighty-member choir [of political prisoners] for the production of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus'. The incongruous beauty of the choir’s performance – and the rich history of the Messiah in S...

How many questions have you asked today? How many were rhetorical, “boomer-asking”, passive/aggressive or just boringly functional? Did you know that our appetites for question-asking peak at the age of five, then steadily diminish? That kids ask an average of 40,000 questions between the ages of 2 and 5, while adults ask fewer than ten questions a day? Why are we asking fewer, meaningful question...

If a person dies without friends or relatives, the authorities can instigate a 'public health funeral'. Once called pauper's funerals - the services are referred to on the administrative form with a poignant phrase: "Nobody to Call." These funerals often see online appeals for mourners to attend. And when the BBC's Kevin Core spots a particularly moving appeal on behalf of a 102 year old woman, he...

Welcome to the feast! We’re invited to a traditional Georgian ‘Supra’ to immerse ourselves in the magic of Georgian polyphonic singing. The table groans with food, the wine flows, and the singing fills the heart. Led by toastmaster Levan Bitarovi, diners are guided through a narrative, weaving together their personal and collective experiences, through song. At home in the mountains, in Georgia's...

Author Owen Hatherley goes in search of the lost future of Solent City – the extraordinary plan, devised in the mid-1960s at the height of the post-war modernisation of Britain, to join the historic city-ports of Southampton and Portsmouth with a vast, Los-Angeles style grid. The plan was finally rejected, but why? - and what were the consequences of its defeat, not only for the region but for the...

Ian Burke was not someone who grew up riding buses. His school was in walking distance, his parents had a car. But one night in his 20s, he had a dream which began a love affair with bus travel. Any spare moment is now spent exploring undiscovered routes or revisiting old favourites. “It’s about the journey, the out-of-the-way, the overheard snippets of conversation, the weird and unfamiliar place...

Estimates from NSPCC suggest around 1 in 20 children in the UK have been sexually abused. This documentary brings together survivors whose experiences span different backgrounds, relationships and generations - challenging misconceptions that abuse only happens in certain communities. Through intimate conversations with Laura, Bryony, Joe, and Chris, we witness how institutional silence has allowe...

The story of how a heterosexual, Indian immigrant to England, ignorant of the gay scene, ended up delivering heartfelt eulogies to 30 homosexual men at the height of the AIDS crisis. The experiences of Suresh Vaghela take us behind the headlines of the infected blood scandal and into a transformative relationship between a hemophiliac and the people who he came to regard as his new family. (Includ...

The 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis forced North Devon farmers into a traumatic 6 month lockdown, cut off from their neighbours and living with the death and destruction of their animals. When restrictions were finally eased, the ringing of church bells signalled the end of the lockdown, bringing communities back together. For artist and farmer Marcus Vergette it was a sound that would change his life....

Over 80% of people in Britain choose to be cremated rather than buried after death and the scattering of a loved one's ashes is a ritual that's increasingly familiar to many of us. In a lyrical and bittersweet meditation on grief and memory, writer and producer Tim Dee reflects on a West Country road trip to scatter his father’s mortal remains in places of significance to both of them. Each stop h...

Memory is fragile. We are driven to capture it. But is this possible when the memories of the person we love have fragmented? Julian’s mother has no memory. Both her long and short term memory were destroyed by different viruses. His mother still has an emotional memory of Julian. She recognises him - his personality, his manner. But she doesn’t know how old he is, what he does for a living, or th...

Siblings Sam and Bon Stone are angry. Sam directs her anger inwards while Bon’s anger can be explosive. Through sharing parts of their lives with each other for the first time, they explore how we process anger and whether we can change it. With contributions from Noel Oganyan of Forrest Flowers (recorded at the New Cross Inn, London in November 2024) and Ronnie Turner, founder of The Anger Clinic...

For some, burnout feels like an unravelling - a slow, creeping dissolution where the threads of your life and identity loosen and fray until you are completely undone. For others, it’s a breaking point - a sharp, sudden, collapse where everything shatters all at once. It doesn’t just kill physical vitality it also guts the entire internal mechanism of us. Like lifting the hood off a car and findin...

Distracted, privatised, enchanted - do you ever think about how you listen? For the last 20 years, sound anthropologist Dr Tom Rice has been collecting different ways of listening from the world’s leading sound experts. He’s gathered more than 100 – some of these may be quite familiar, others will definitely surprise you. We are at a critical moment when it comes to listening. The world is increas...

What drives us? What makes us who we are? For one of the BBC’s most experienced foreign correspondents, the multi-award-winning Mike Thomson, it was a near-death experience in Australia’s worst natural disaster this century. Having been kicked out of school at 17 for refusing to cut his hair, Mike opts to go travelling. With an older family friend, Mick Kendall, he journeys overland from Ivybridge...

It's the most intimate moment of the Radio 4 schedule: The late-night Shipping Forecast, a prelude to the close-down of the station, read every night at 00:48. But who is really listening along, and why? Guided by Radio 4 Announcer Al Ryan, we'll cross the world to meet the people who find comfort in this unique broadcast for a variety of reasons. Produced by Luke Doran

Ceefax has just reached its 50th birthday, and to celebrate this unique golden anniversary, the BBC's once-mighty teletext news service is receiving the greatest gift of all - the gift of life, courtesy of the greatest novelty politician in the omniverse, Count Binface. For eight years, Binface has pledged in his election manifestos to bring back Ceefax and now, at last, the BBC is granting his wi...

Every year's end, as the days shorten and the nights grow darker, you might be fortunate enough to hear a distinctive knock at your door. Upon opening it, you'll be met with a group of Guisers - men in disguise - here to perform their mystery play, part of the ancient Mumming tradition. There's the Enterer In, Saint George, The Prince of Paradise, The King, The Old Woman, The Quack Doctor, Beelzeb...

The best stories have a certain WTF factor.. a weird little fact that draws you in…something you can’t ignore because it’s so contrary to what you previously thought. So it was for Geoff Lloyd when he heard that the story that Karaoke was invented in Stockport, by a charismatic shopkeeper called Roy Brooke who claimed the Japanese adopted his discovery and marketed it around the world. Geoff’s a m...

For 2000 years beneath layer upon layer of peat, the remains of two bodies - a man and a woman - lay buried in the earth. Within 12 months of each other, they were discovered on Lindow Moss, the cut-over peat bog in Cheshire. It's now more than 40 years since the remains of Lindow Man were found, the best-preserved bog body ever discovered in the UK. A year before that, the skull of Lindow Woman w...

Mike is a carpenter, a boat builder, and a keen amateur sailor. Now, in his 60s he feels the time has come for a big adventure, so he signs on as crew for a transatlantic sailing voyage. But when the skipper turns to tyranny and his only ally on board loses touch with reality, Mike is faced with his own demons. There's no storm, no shipwreck, no sea monster - only three men trapped together, each...

Composer Aidan Tulloch is fascinated by the physical process of making music – but fears he knows very little. He gains a unique insight from some of the most precise and gifted technicians in the country – members of the Association of Blind Piano Tuners. Aidan traces their journey into this field, goes along to their annual curry lunch, and finds out why the highly skilled craft of piano tuning...