Seriously...

Vicky Foster's award-winning Radio 4 Audio Drama Bathwater looked at the effect the murder in 2005 in Hull of the father of her children, a firefighter, is still having on her family . In this documentary, Can I talk about Heroes ? Vicky looks at the way society creates heroes, whether the meaning and significance of that label has changed in recent times and if the term is still useful . This que...

Back in 2019, most scientists struggled to get any media attention. Now scientists involved in fighting the pandemic are generating media headlines, daily. On top of working harder than ever to understand the virus and how it spreads, many have become public figures. Some have been caught in the headlights. Others have stepped into the footlights. Many have found themselves at the centre of highly...

In the first of a series looking at existential threats to humanity, Jolyon Jenkins asks whether an electromagnetic pulse bomb could send us literally back to the dark ages The arrival of COVID has brought home to us just how vulnerable we are to external threats, but we've been lucky that it hasn't been a lot worse. So what else is out there that might hit us from nowhere? For many years, some ca...

What has the experience of children and young people living in the era of Covid-19 done for their mental health and wellbeing? Mental health researcher Sally Marlow speaks to epidemiologists, clinicians, parents, and young people themselves to try to evaluate how the challenges of 2020 might have impacted our youngest and more vulnerable members of society. In a sector already in need of investmen...

David Baker reveals the thinking and the values that have made Jeff Bezos the richest man on the planet, and Amazon the most wildly successful company, even in a year when the global economy faces catastrophe. Speaking to senior colleagues within his businesses, longstanding business partners and analysts, David Baker learns the secrets to Amazon's success, and the impact of Jeff Bezos' ideas on a...

How have recent British governments handled the UK's relationship with China and what does this tell us about the way to live with China today? Nick Robinson talks to former leading politicians, diplomats and officials to cast light on the risks and the rewards. Drawing on his personal experience reporting on prime ministerial visits to China, he recalls telling encounters and the challenges they...

In 2014 an anonymous letter was sent to journalists detailing a 5 step plan to Islamise schools in Birmingham. The so-called Trojan Horse Affair sparked hundreds of articles and several investigations. But the letter was not all it seemed. The Corrections asks, what was going on behind the headlines? Presenter Jo Fidgen speaks to key players, reporters and media watchers about how the coverage mea...

Through a set of new poems, Caleb Femi, former Young People's Laureate for London, looks back on his first experiences with sex and explores the pressures on teenage boys around losing their virginity. He speaks to his friend, the writer Yomi Sode, about their experiences growing up; to Nathaniel Cole, a workshop facilitator, writer and public speaker on mental health, masculinity, and relationshi...

Journalist and fan Aja Romano examines their decision to close the books on the boy wizard and hears different viewpoints toward Harry Potter and contemporary readership. Aja Romano has been a Harry Potter fan for many years, but after personally disagreeing with statements by their author JK Rowling regarding gender identity, they are considering closing the books for good. Across the world, mill...

The UK may have a divide north and south, but how about east and west? Chris Mason takes a virtual journey from Whitby in the east to the Lake District in the west to find out. Chris was born and brought up in the Yorkshire Dales, straddling the centre of the country, so he has had a foot in both camps. But is there a real difference in the east from the west? Certainly the weather, the geology, a...

Art has long promised to transport us, to enable us to step outside ourselves and encounter experiences we never would otherwise. Now Jordan Erica Webber explores a possibility only video games can offer, a way to commune with long-dead friends and relatives, sometimes years after their deaths. This experience has a familiar ring to it – finding a photo, a video, or a loved one’s notes scrawled in...

For musician and poet Arlo Parks, 2020 was set to be massive. Festivals, a US tour. Then the world shifted. Her gigs were postponed, festivals cancelled. We watched Glastonbury's empty fields from our sofas where Arlo played, but only for the cows. So instead, she did gigs online, put out new tracks to wide critical acclaim, wrote new music and published poetry on social media. Her thoughtful, int...

Tricky is the place to discuss difficult questions away from the bear pit of social media. Drag artist Vanity Von Glow, poet Iona Lee, relationship & sex educator, Esther De La Ford and actor Karen Bartke discuss the 'Karen' meme. Karen is a slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman, who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people's beh...

'When was the first time a human felt haunted?' Kirsty Logan travels back to the world’s earliest civilisations to uncover where tales of ghosts first emerged. From the earliest evidence of belief in an afterlife, seen in decorated bones in early grave sites, to Ancient Egyptian letters to the dead, and predatory Chindi unleashed to wreak deadly vengeance in the snowy wastes of North America, Kirs...

False Hope? Alternative Cancer Cures is a three-part investigate series into the death of young musician, Sean Walsh. Sean was 20 when he found out his cancer was back. He’d been in remission for less than two years and was determined that this time round, he would not have conventional treatment. He turned down chemotherapy in the hope that he could cure his Hodgkin’s Lymphoma through an alternat...

False Hope? Alternative Cancer Cures is a three-part investigate series into the death of young musician, Sean Walsh. Sean was 20 when he found out his cancer was back. He’d been in remission for less than two years and was determined that this time round, he would not have conventional treatment. He turned down chemotherapy in the hope that he could cure his Hodgkin’s Lymphoma through an alternat...

False Hope? Alternative Cancer Cures is a three-part investigative series into the death of young musician Sean Walsh. Sean was 20 when he found out his cancer was back. He’d been in remission for less than two years and was determined that this time round, he would not have conventional treatment. He turned down chemotherapy in the hope that he could cure his Hodgkin’s Lymphoma through an alterna...

The final episode of Blood Lands - a true story told in five parts which takes us to the heart of modern South Africa. A group of white men are on trial accused of murdering two black South Africans, but as a long and explosive trial comes to an end, could muddled medical evidence see them walk free? Blood Lands is a murder investigation, a political drama, a courtroom thriller, and a profound exp...

Blood Lands is a true story told in five parts which takes us to the heart of modern South Africa. A family betrayal leads to a murder trial in a small farming town in South Africa. But who is telling the truth about a frenzied attack that left two black farm workers dead, and a community bitterly divided on racial lines? Blood Lands is murder investigation, a political drama, a courtroom thriller...

Blood Lands is a true story told in five parts which takes us to the heart of modern South Africa. Police investigating a suspected double murder in a small South African farming community uncover crucial new evidence. But will it be enough to break the farmers’ wall of silence and solve a case that has divided a town on racial lines? Blood Lands is a murder investigation, a political drama, a cou...

Blood Lands is a true story told in five parts which takes us to the heart of modern South Africa. A white farming family falls silent following the brutal deaths of two black workers. Were the dead men really thieves? Or has South Africa’s tortured past come back to haunt a racially divided community? Blood Lands is a murder investigation, a political drama, a courtroom thriller, and a profound e...

Blood Lands is a true story told in five parts which takes us to the heart of modern South Africa. At dusk on a warm evening in 2016, two men arrive, unexpectedly, at a remote South African farmhouse. The frenzy that follows will come to haunt a community, destroying families, turning neighbours into traitors, prompting street protests, threats of violence, and dividing the small farming and touri...

Autism is a lifelong condition, often seen as particularly ‘male’. Yet a growing number of women, and those assigned female at birth, are being diagnosed as autistic in their 30s, 40s, 50s - and beyond. Writer and performer Helen Keen is one of them, and she’s found this diagnosis has helped her make sense of many aspects of her life, from growing up with selective mutism, to struggling to fit in...

Sam Gyimah, former minister for universities in Theresa May's government, asks if Britain's universities can survive the crisis they now face. Many are calling the immense challenge that Britain's universities now face an existential crisis. With access to leaders of universities from the most traditional to the most modern, Sam Gyimah explores whether the business and education models for Brtain'...

Like many young black people, Lucrece Grehoua is an expert in code-switching - used to changing her voice, accent and mannerisms when she enters white-majority spaces. But should she really have to? In this programme, Lucrece reveals the cost of hiding who we really are in the workplace and explores the mechanics of code-switching, a term first used to describe the experience of African-American s...