Lives Less Ordinary

The Robertsons' boat was attacked by killer whales and started to sink fast Douglas was 16 years old when his parents sold the family farm in England and took him and his three siblings on a sailing trip around the world. It was the adventure of a lifetime. But in 1972 while en route to New Zealand, their yacht was hit by a pod of orcas and they started to sink fast. Weeks from safety and with no...

Tahir Izgil is one of the most highly respected living Uyghur poets. Tahir was born near Kashgar, in Xinjiang province, and from an early age he was immersed in the poetry of his culture. When the Chinese state clamped down on the Uyghur community, he lived under constant threat of arrest, and says he couldn’t even perform his poems. So he decided to try and escape his homeland. Tahir has a memoir...

Juliana Lumumba had to fight to reclaim the remains of her father, Patrice Lumumba. He'd been the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo and an anti-colonial hero. He was assassinated in 1961 when Juliana was five years old, and no trace of his body was found. So when it emerged 60 years later that one of his gold teeth was in Belgium, Juliana yearned to bring it home. Presenter:...

Under the boot of the Syrian army, Nicole Moudaber brought raves to Lebanon. After sampling the delights of dance music whilst studying abroad in the nineties, Nicole made it her goal to bring this new sound to a divided and conservative society. She faced opposition from her family and the regime, but when scandal hit she decided to turn the tables...herself. Presenter: India Rakusen Producer: Ed...

A mother, a son, and the discovery of a shared dream. Latifa Khamessi and her son Mohamed Toukabri from Tunisia were inseparable until aged 15 when he left for Europe to study dance. It was gut-wrenching to be apart, but an opportunity he couldn't turn down. It wasn't until years later that Mohamed discovered his mother had had the same dream as a girl, but had been forbidden from pursuing it. Sep...

From the page to the stage: William turns childhood fantasies into reality. In London, William Lee Adams is feeling disillusioned with his job, when a Romanian singer on a horse appears on his computer screen and he's inspired to start writing about the Eurovision Song Contest. Wiwibloggs is born, and grows to be the world's most-followed independent blog and video channel about Eurovision. In the...

A bond between brothers, a coming-out story, and an international song contest. William Lee Adams is one of the leading voices covering the Eurovision Song Contest, criss-crossing the continent to interview stars and live-stream shows. But as a child growing up in small-town America, he was made to feel invisible; encouraged to suppress his Vietnamese heritage and questions about his sexuality. He...

Harrison Okene spent three days trapped in an air pocket in a sunken ship. Harrison was the ship's cook, and he'd been in the bathroom when the tugboat he worked on had suddenly capsized in bad weather. The vessel sank 30 metres to the seabed, upside down, and Harrison was trapped inside. Days passed, and up on the surface a mission was launched to recover the bodies of the tugboat's crew. Divers...

In 1982, two Mississippi boys recreated a $22m film, shot-for-shot, on their pocket money. Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala were aged 10 and 11. Their mission would take them seven years to complete, and it would push their friendship to the edge. There’d be amateur stunts, fires, visits to the emergency ward, production shut down by angry parents and many fallouts. It would swallow them whole. But...

How a jump changed daring parachutist Tony Osornio's life forever. Tony was Mexico's best precision skydiver and the first woman to join her country's army. She says she "belonged to the skies", and became a member of an elite team of performance skydivers called the Crazy Birds. She was prepared to sacrifice everything for her love of parachuting - until a jump went badly wrong. If you need suppo...

Tony Osornio would go to dangerous extremes to keep skydiving. She was born into a conservative family, and decided to marry the first man who asked in order to escape the restrictions of home. Her husband was a Mexican military officer with access to the planes used by elite paratroopers. With his help, Tony would sneak on board too, parachute strapped to her back. In love with jumping, she decid...

By 1981, Pakistani-born immigrant Tariq Mehmood had endured years of violent racism in Britain. When he heard that gangs of white skinheads – with a history of attacking Asians – were coming to his home in Bradford, Tariq and his neighbours took desperate measures to defend their community. Underpinning their actions was the principle, “self-defence is no offence.” Tariq would end up being arreste...

As a Pakistani immigrant teenager in 1970s Britain, Tariq Mehmood endured homelessness and years of violent racism. He found shelter and wisdom in a library, and the strength to stand up to the racists. He co-founded the Asian Youth Movement, and their slogan “self-defence is no offence,” would galvanise an entire generation. But it’s a rationale that would see Tariq in court – facing life in pris...

Stany Nyandwi's rescued chimpanzees helped him through war and loneliness. As a young boy Stany made money selling sugarcane and worked as a 'houseboy' for families in Burundi's capital city Bujumbura. But later, a job with rescued chimpanzees became about more than just money. When ethnic conflict in Burundi escalated into civil war, Stany fled to safety with the chimps who, with histories of the...

My search for the truth about my father and Martin Luther King’s assassination. Leta McCollough Seletzky grew up knowing that her father was the ‘kneeling man’, photographed tending to the head wound of Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr just moments after he was shot in April 1968. As a teenager she stumbled across an alarming detail about why her father was there on that infamous day; it plunged...

Marine engineer Chirag Bahri was trapped for eight gruelling months on a chemical tanker. Chirag loved his job working in the engine rooms of huge commercial ships. But in May 2010, while sailing through the Gulf of Aden, a group of pirates boarded the ship and held the crew to ransom off the coast of Somalia. Over the next eight months the pirates became increasingly violent, torturing the crew w...

Mariam and Mohammed are Yemeni filmmakers who turned the lens on their own relationship. Mariam Al-Dhubhani and Mohammed Al-Jaberi's love story started in friendship, and it didn't take long before they fell for each other. Not even living in different continents – or a civil war – could get in their way. But when a heartbreaking loss shook the foundation of their relationship for the first time,...

Aaron Stark now works to raise awareness around why mass attacks happen. Aaron had a chaotic and violent childhood, and by the time he was a teenager he was homeless, angry and traumatised. At his lowest point, he began to plan an appaling act of violence in a bid to punish the world around him. He wanted to get hold of a gun, but before he could, his best friend Mike changed the course of his lif...

At the age of 13 Laura Dekker fought for her right to sail solo around the world. Laura comes from a family of sailing enthusiasts, and her father taught her the ropes early. By 11 years old she was sailing unaided for weeks at a time, and at 13 she felt ready to tackle her biggest challenge yet. Her parents supported her decision, but the Dutch authorities had concerns; was it responsible to allo...

Rowena Chiu was kept silent for 20 years by former film boss Harvey Weinstein. Rowena thought that speaking up about her alleged sexual assault by Weinstein would end up with him in court. But instead she was pressured into signing an NDA so severe that she could tell no one, at times even fearing for her safety. Keeping this secret sent Rowena to a very dark place. But decades later the #MeToo mo...

Rowena Chiu on surviving the Hollywood sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. Rowena was just 24 when she became an assistant to Weinstein at his film company. She knew he was a difficult boss, but nothing prepared her for what happened one night in Venice in 1998. She says he told her he ‘liked Chinese girls’, and sexually assaulted her in his hotel room. It was the start of a story she never wanted t...

Raised by addicts, Dr Katriona O'Sullivan defied the odds to become a university lecturer. Her parents were addicted to heroin, she was neglected and not fed. But for the care she received from two influential teachers and the occasional stroke of luck, life may have gone in a very different direction. Katriona's written a book about her life called Poor. Presenter: Mobeen Azhar Producer: Edgar Ma...

Martial arts kept him out of jail, but drag artistry made him whole. Diego Garijo was bullied for his femininity as a child, so as he grew up he toughened up his image. He was in trouble with the law, until he found his focus as a professional Mixed Martial Arts fighter. But when Diego’s career came to a brutal halt, creating a drag persona, Lola, gave him a new lease of life. Presenter: Andrea Ke...

Wheeler Parker is Emmett Till's cousin and the last surviving witness to his abduction. Emmett's brutal murder in Mississippi in 1955 sparked a wave of protest in America. The 14-year-old African American was lynched for whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, who recently died aged 88. Reverend Wheeler Parker was Emmett's cousin and was in the next room to him when he was kidnapped. Th...

Joseph Mbilinyi pioneered Swahili rap and then turned to politics, but ended up in jail. In the 1990s he'd become one of Tanzania's biggest stars under the stage name Sugu. He'd released albums, toured the country and abroad, and helped create a new genre called Bongo Flava. He's known for hard-hitting, often political, lyrics. In 2010 he took that message to parliament when he was elected as an o...