Seriously...

Illegitimacy once meant you were a 'bastard'. The MP Caroline Flint wants to know what the word 'illegitimate' means now. Caroline has always been open about her unmarried Mum having her when she was 17 years old and that she had her first son before she got married. Caroline describes her own family's story as a Catherine Cookson novel. There are suspicions that her widowed great-grandmother had...

The brain - the final frontier. Radio 4 is setting out on an exploration of the creative mind. Gerald Scarfe's drawings have intrigued and alarmed for more than fifty years but where do his ideas come from? Professor Vincent Walsh of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience has a theory he wants to pursue. Vincent is an expert in the workings of the visual brain; he thinks that two specific areas m...

From the nomads of the vast steppe - to the glamour and adulation of the stage. Kate Molleson unravels the story of Mongolia's remarkable rise to being an opera superpower. And, in this special double bill, producer Steven Rajam joins Rhianna Dhillon to discuss the making of the programmes. Mongolia is becoming a global leader in opera singing - and completely breaking the mould. Young nomadic her...

Before 9/11 British attitudes to partaking in faith-inspired armed combat were... different. British Muslims travelled freely to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burma and Kashmir for a few weeks or months, and then returned home to their day jobs or studies - few questions asked. In this programme, Mobeen Azhar sheds light on the people and organisations involved in this early wave of British involv...

Rhianna Dhillon brings you another seriously interesting story from Radio 4. This week, luck. Whether we believe in luck or not, we do use the word- a lot! More as a figure of speech than an article of faith perhaps but some do pray for luck, others fantasise about it - and bad luck or misfortune is a staple of comedy Can luck be said to exist as some force in our lives and if so, what is its natu...

Luke Jerram is that rare bird, a genuinely popular yet acclaimed contemporary artist. And he's obsessed with the moon. So he's made one: seven metres wide featuring 120dpi detailed NASA imagery, and he's taking it around the world. This is his story, as well as the moon's.. Every day Luke Jerram cycles to his studio across the river in Bristol and watches its dramatic changes. It has the second hi...

How do we prepare for the distant future? Helen Keen meets the people who try to. If our tech society continues then we can leave data for future generations in huge, mundane quantities, detailing our every tweet and Facebook 'like'. But how long could this information be stored? And if society as we know it ends, will our achievements vanish with it? How do we plan for and protect those who will...

For centuries tales were shared around the camp-fire; modern settlements share data via wi-fi. But what hasn't changed across the ages is our passion for histories and information - we shape and make sense of our lives by telling stories about what has happened to us, and relax by reading or seeing fictions about the lives of imagined characters. From cave-dwellers to millennials , stories have be...

Zoologist and founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society, Lucy Cooke, unleashes her inner sloth to discover why being lazy could actually be the ultimate evolutionary strategy. The explorers of the New World described sloths as 'the lowest form of existence', but sloths are actually some of the most enduring of all tropical mammals. They make up one third of the mammalian biomass in rainforests and...

Dreaming of a Dark Christmas, in Iceland At the darkest time of the year in Iceland scary creatures come out to play. Storyteller Andri Snær Magnason used to be terrified by his grandmother's Christmas tales of Gryla the 900 year old child eating hag and her thirteen troll sons - the Yule Lads - who would come down from the mountains looking for naughty children in the warmth of their homes. These...

Historian and psychoanalyst Daniel Pick of Birkbeck College, University of London tells the story of how aerial bombardment - from Zeppelins to B52s, from H-Bombs to drones - has made the unconscious mind a field of battle. Daniel explores how, in the shadow of the First World War, Freud turned his analytical eye from desire to the 'death drive', and how psychoanalysts probed what might happen if...

Why do some of us do bizarre things in our sleep? Like riding a motorbike, using a shoe to 'phone for a pizza or even having sex while sleeping? These are complex behaviours and yet sleepwalkers aren't aware of what they're doing and often have no memory of their strange night-time activities. These sleep disorders are known as non-REM parasomnias and include conditions like night terrors and slee...

Byron Vincent joins the Violence Reduction Unit in Glasgow to see how they turn young men away from lives of violence and chaos. Three years ago, after he discussed his own violent and chaotic youth in a Four Thought talk on Radio 4, Byron was invited to come and speak at the VRU. Since then he has been back several times - now he experiences the unit's work directly. Byron spent two weeks embedde...

"The more we reinforce the stereotypes of who writes and who reads, the more the notion of exclusivity is reinforced. It takes balls to gatecrash a party." Kit de Waal, published her first novel, My Name is Leon, in 2016 at the age of 55. She has already put her money where her mouth is - using part of the advance she received from Penguin to set up a creative writing scholarship in an attempt to...

Filmmaker Mike Figgis explores the story of edited film, audio and culture, and how the simple process of cutting and splicing has changed the way people view the world. We are living in an age of the edit. From the jump-cuts of Eisenstein and Hitchcock, to the fractured narratives of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, from the cut-and-paste sounds of musique concrete and hip-hop, to the sensibility...

A century ago, the Russian Revolution took place. It was a seismic event that changed the course of the 20th century. In this special, bonus episode of Seriously…, we visit four cities closely linked to the events of 1917. With Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg as our guide, we travel the 4000 mile journey across Russia, asking if the repercussions of Red October are still being felt today. Ste...

Savitri Devi-devotee of Hitler, proponent of Hindu nationalism, associate of both the British BNP and the American Nazi party-was a prolific author and energetic member of the international Nazi network after the Second World War. Now, her paeans to the mythical Aryan race and apocalyptic theories of history are circulating once again, revived by European white nationalists and the American alt-ri...

"3 May. Bistritz. Left Munich at 8:35 P. M, on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late." The first line of Bram Stoker's Dracula makes it clear what the novel will be about: trains. As the book begins, the English solicitor Jonathan Harker is travelling across Europe by train, en route to meet his mysterious new Transylvanian client,...

The events in Charlottesville were just one example of the sharp rise in the number of violent confrontations in America between far-right white nationalists and left-wing groups known as 'antifa' - short for "anti-fascists". Those on the right claim they're fighting to defend free speech or other deeply held American principles. But their opponents say they're promoting extremism and a brand of r...

Once upon a time, total surveillance was the province of George Orwell and totalitarian states, but we now live in a world where oceans of data are gathered from us every day by the wondrous digital devices we have admitted to our homes and that we carry with us everywhere. At the same time, our governments want us to let them follow everything we do to root out evil before it can strike. If you h...

The relationship between fathers and daughters has been the subject of countless cultural explorations down the centuries, from Elektra's distress to Bonjour Tristesse. Some of them are idealised ('To Kill A Mockingbird', 'All the Lights We Cannot See'); some highly damaging and dysfunctional ('This is England', 'The Beggar's Opera'); some, as any A'Level pupil who's studied 'King Lear' can attest...

The Russian Revolution unleashed a brand of humour that continues to this day. In this two-part series, comedian and Russophile Viv Groskop explores a century of revolutionary comedy and asks how it continues to shape the national psyche. The series will rediscover comedy of the Revolution: Bolshevik satire, early Communist cartoons and jokes about Lenin, as writers, satirists and comedians recall...

A portrait of singer, songwriter and truck driver Will Beeley. The myth of the road is deeply rooted in America - it's the thing that delivers escape, promises freedom, fuels new hopes and, once upon a time at least, thoughts of a new nation. And it provides its own opening onto the vastness and variety of the country today. The distances can be dizzying. And these days Will Beeley spends more tim...

Not everyone appreciates the tonalities, lyrics or even the shrieky voice of Canadian artist and musician Joni Mitchell but in a dusty class room in 1971 Lynne Truss decided she loved the writer of Woodstock, Big Yellow Taxi and Both Sides Now. It was a bond forged in the face of the frosty indifference of fellow pupils in Miss Cheverton's music class at the Tiffin Girls School in Kingston Upon Th...

Tiny bathers relax in a puddle of oily water on a pavement; a galleon sails on the head of a pin, a dancer twirls next to a mote of dust under a microscope - Dr Lance Dann, lover of miniature worlds, crouches down on hands and knees to better observe the world of tiny art. Prompted by advances in technology, and the enduring wonder of things created on a really, really tiny scale, Lance Dann follo...