Seriously...

David Mitchell investigates meetings from the ancient "thing" to zoom. Also on the agenda: executive coach Sophie Bryan teaches David to chair a meeting; fellow comedian Russell Kane explores how different personality types behave in meetings; and Dutch sociologist Wilbert van Vree sums up several millennia of meetings history. Producer: Chris Ledgard

When Melanie Reid spent a year recovering on the spinal ward in Glasgow after falling off a horse, her world collided with an unlikely collection of ordinary people with incredible stories. Despite their only common ground being a newly broken body, Mel grew close to her ward mates. She sets out to discover what became of them. Danielle was just a 15 year-old school girl, a car crash victim whose spine was crushed by her own seatbelt. She was the first person to utter words to a heavily medicated Melanie. Danielle’s buddy, Daniel, was a year older and hiding a dark secret. Karen's story is more similar to Melanie's, but her outlook is very different. Her passivity has always fascinated Melanie - can she learn anything from it? David sat down for a flight and found, when it landed, he couldn’t stand up. Sammi, was crushed by a fork lift on the family farm - but has now reinvented herself as a top athlete. The ten years that have passed have changed them all, and Melanie reflects on the different ways that they've experienced and adapted to the life less vertical. Presenter: Melanie Reid Producer: Leeanne Coyle Executive Producers: Robert Nicholson & Mark Rickards A Whistledown Scotland production for BBC Radio 4

[Sound of sky splitting] [Sound of heart accelerating] [Sound of shadows behind a door] The poet Raymond Antrobus explores the art of translating sound for the eye, looking at the poetic possibilities of closed captions. What can these captions - designed to illuminate the sound world of a film or TV show - reveal about how we conceive of sound itself? Raymond speaks to fellow D/deaf poets and artists to explore their experiences navigating the spaces between the words. Are closed captions just a simple act of transcription - [Doorbell rings] - or a more subjective act of translation? How might we reimagine them? [Sound of something invented] Featuring the sound artist Christine Sun Kim, poet Meg Day, filmmaker and founding member of FWD Doc Lindsey Dryden and the captioner Calum Davidson from Red Bee Media. With poetic captions inspired by the work of Christine Sun Kim. This documentary has been produced in three forms - as a radio broadcast, as a transcript with annotations from Raymond and as a subtitled video. Produced by Eleanor McDowall A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4

Author Lynsey Hanley and Mykaell Riley, founding member of the British roots reggae group Steel Pulse, tell the story of the search for a ‘common culture’, following its permutations in the post-war era with the rise of ‘the common voice’ and a new wave of documentary making, fiercely negotiated around issues of social class, race and the impact of multiculturalism, to the present. At a time of huge division and polarisation in civil society they ask if its time has come again in the digital age. Writing in post-war Britain, for critics like Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and others 'culture' meant two things: first, a whole way of life and the everyday, not just a series of great works accessed and curated by an elite; second, as a way of sharing the arts and learning with the whole of society, of open access for everyone in a properly civic space. Lynsey Hanley, who has written on the history of council estates and urban planning, explores how these two ideas were conjoined. 'Common culture' was for the first time inclusive, involving all the strands of everyday living from youth culture to the pub, the football terrace and the cinema. ‘Culture is ordinary’ wrote Raymond Williams in 1958. The idea of a common culture meant the opening up of 'high' culture too, tied to mass literacy and learning as part of a wider sense of cultural outreach aimed at the British working class. This was boosted by the work of intellectuals like George Orwell and EP Thompson as well as Richard Hoggart’s landmark book 'The Uses of Literacy' which argued for the democratisation of culture and cultivation of learning through what the author called, in a powerful phrase, ‘civic literacy’. Mykaell Riley builds on this story, of how ‘common culture’ became deeply contested in the 1970s and ‘80s, forged from representations of working-class identity but weaponised around ideas of race. For the post-Windrush generation of Black British youth the idea of a ‘common culture’ was wrapped around the British flag and harshly policed. Music, especially British reggae groups like Steel Pulse, became part of a cultural fightback - an expression of the new political multiculturalism and proliferation of sub-cultures. Perhaps there has never been a truly 'common' culture that belongs everyone – that the very idea has a deep ambivalence when used in public life, either championing inclusivity or excluding diversity. But does the first always have to mean the second, can we move beyond this stalemate? In our rancorous post-Brexit era and a wide sense of fatigue with division always seeming more important than what we could - and perhaps do - share in common, could the idea of common culture be thought again in new, de-toxifying and inventive ways? Or have we just become better at thinking about what separates us than what we have in common, more comfortable with difference than what we share in public space? Contributors include director Ken Loach, curator and writer Aliyah Hasinah, critic and author DJ Taylor, dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, director Terence Davies, literary journalist Suzi Feay, singer songwriter Peggy Seeger, political journalist Peter Obourne, illustrator and author Nick Hayes, urbanist Adam Greenfield, documentary historian John Corner, director at Byline TV Caolan Robertson and Farrukh Dhondy, a founding commissioning editor for Channel 4. Presented by Lynsey Hanley and Mykaell Riley Produced by Simon Hollis A Brook Lapping production for BBC Radio 4

Chris van Tulleken explores the human behaviours causing pandemics, paying the price for getting too close to animals by degrading their territory and allowing viruses to jump. What's clear is that Covid-19 was inevitable; that a coronavirus would jump in Asia was predicted in at least 3 papers in early 2019. It's a symptom of degraded ecosystems leading to intimate contact with animals we don't normally encounter. When examining the origins of Covid-19, perhaps the most amazing aspect is the number of different possibilities. Bats as medicine, bats as food, bat transmission to other intermediate animals - mink farmed for fur or raccoon dogs hunted as game. We don't know if it jumped in a home or a wet market or in a cave. Chris talks to NERVTAG virologist Prof Wendy Barclay who explains why she thinks it's not the case that it escaped from a lab. Plus ecologist and bat enthusiast Prof Kate Jones argues that invasive human behaviours are offering these viruses multiple chances to jump into people – mostly all totally hidden from sight - but is optimistic as the UK Government asks her to advise on spillover risks and how to achieve sustainable landscapes. While Dr Peter Daszak and Dr William Karesh from EcoHealth Alliance highlight how climate change and pandemic risk are interconnected; all the solutions already identified to tackle global warming will also help prevent the next virus from jumping. Produced by Erika Wright Edited by Deborah Cohen

Despite the overwhelming evidence that human sexuality is innate and immutable over time, proponents of conversion ‘therapies’ have sought to change or ‘fix’ queer peoples’ sexuality for much of the 20th century. Presenter Caitlin Benedict speaks with scientists, historians and survivors to uncover the heinous practices that LGBT+ people were subjected to with the guise of changing their sexuality, including lobotomies and chemical castration. Caitlin examines how adherents of these 'therapies' adapted to the improving legal and social recognition for homosexuals by modifying conversion practices to embrace Freudian psychoanalytic techniques. Evangelical churches took up the baton left by the discredited 'treatments' in the effort to suppress or ‘repair’ the sexualities of their LGBT+ congregation, and Caitlin asks what faith groups are doing today to eliminate these practices within their communities. During the summer of 2020, Prime minister Boris Johnson called conversion therapy ‘absolutely abhorrent’ and promised to ‘bring forward plans to ban it’. Caitlin speaks with one of the people responsible for a recent ban on conversion therapies in the Australian state of Victoria, earlier this year, and seeks to understand how easy a ban will be to implement. And how will any ban on conversion practices affect the trans community? Caitlin speaks with the MP Alicia Kearns about why she thinks any bill to enact a ban must protect trans people while ensuring that psychotherapists are still able to provide affirmative support for their patients. Presenter: Caitlin Benedict (they/them) Producer: Rory Galloway (he/him)

Seriously is home to the world’s best audio documentaries and podcast recommendations, and host Vanessa Kisuule brings you two fascinating new episodes every week.

Marie Le Conte explores the shared experiences of people aged 29 to 33, members of the so-called crisis cohort, who have had their adult lives book-ended by the financial crash of 2008 and the huge economic downturn caused by the Coronavirus. Marie examines what defines this generation of young, or not so young, people and what adulthood means for them. She explores the ways that living through the crises has shaped emotional literacy and economic fortunes. Finally, she asks how her generation has seen these twin crises shape their values - both politically and personally.. Presenter: Marie Le Conte Producer: Steve Hankey Sound Design: Emma Barnaby Executive Producer: Will Yates A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4

Psychologist Kimberley Wilson and Dr Xand van Tulleken take a journey around the human body, to find out what it can tell us about our innate capacity for change. In this episode, Kimberley and Xand focus on the heart, which has been branded the seat of emotion by generations of poets and songwriters. They find out whether it’s medically possible to die from a broken heart, hear from a woman who lived for 16 months without a human heart, and Xand opens up about how Long Covid is affecting his heart. Producer: Dan Hardoon Researcher: Emily Finch Executive Producer: Kate Holland A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 4

63 Wycliffe Road is an ordinary house on a quiet South London street, but in 1956, it becomes famous as the site of an alleged poltergeist. The strange events focus around teenager Shirley Hitchings – but is it a haunting or hoax? Ghost hunter Harold Chibbett arrives to investigate. This series blends drama and documentary to explore an intriguing paranormal cold case. As we hear the original haunting brought to life, host Danny Robins begins his own present-day investigation – what really happened to terrify the Hitchings family 65 years ago? Written and Presented by Danny Robins, starring Dafne Keen (His Dark Materials), Toby Jones (Detectorists, Capote), Burn Gorman and Alice Lowe, with original theme music by Mercury-nominated Nadine Shah and Ben Hillier, this gripping 8-part series interweaves a chilling supernatural thriller set in 50s London with a fascinating modern-day investigation into Britain’s strangest ever haunting – a mystery unsolved... until now. Cast: Shirley Hitchings........Dafne Keen Harold Chibbett.........Toby Jones Wally Hitchings........Burn Gorman Kitty Hitchings..........Alice Lowe Ethel Hitchings..........Sorcha Cusack John Hitchings........Calvin Demba Mrs Cameroo..........Amina Zia Written and presented by Danny Robins With thanks to James Clark, co-author of 'The Poltergeist Prince of London' Consultant: Alan Murdie Experts: Ciaran O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow Sound Designer: Richard Fox Music: Evelyn Sykes Theme Music by Nadine Shah and Ben Hillier Produced by Danny Robins and Simon Barnard Directed by Simon Barnard​ A Bafflegab Production for BBC Radio 4

Best-selling author Matthew Syed explores the ideas that shape our lives with stories of seeing the world differently. A criminal walks into a Swedish bank brandishing a machine gun. He takes a handful of bank workers hostage. The police lock the victims and their captors in the vault and then things start to get weird. Despite being held captive and threatened with violence, the hostages side with the criminals. Stockholm Syndrome is born. In this episode, Matthew Syed reexamines the birth of this peculiar psychiatric disorder and discovers that all is not what it seems. Producer: Gemma Newby Music, Sound Design and Mix: Benbrick Series Editor: Russell Finch Executive Producers: Sean Glynn and Max O'Brien A Novel production for BBC Radio 4

Paris Lees hears from two women learning to cope as they deal with the complexities of human touch. One who struggles with intimacy and the other who misses it. Presenter: Paris Lees Producer: Marijke Peters An ITN Production for BBC Radio 4

In the run up to the 2020 Presidential election, journalist Leah Sottile explored the motivations and agendas of America’s far right for the Radio 4 series Two Minutes Past Nine. Recordings were made against a backdrop of a country that felt tense, divided and dangerous. In the past month, a lot has happened. In this reactive and raw programme, Leah explores America’s far-right at this very moment; fired up by conspiracies, frustrations, and the defeat of the first President they have ever supported. On Wednesday 6th January, as a Joint Session of Congress met to certify the election of Joe Biden, Trump supporters breached security lines and stormed the Capitol Building in scenes that looked straight out of the racist hate filled propaganda novel The Turner Diaries. Two pipe bombs were found just blocks away at the offices of the Republican and Democratic national committees. Leah asks how Donald Trump has managed to manipulate a rabble of foot-soldier extremists and asks what’s next - and how worried we should be. Interviews include Kelvin Pierce, son of William Luther Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, Kerry Noble, and former elder of far right militant group The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord. With thanks to Dave Hawkins for the additional archive. Presenter: Leah Sottile Producer: Georgia Catt

Tom Heap introduces an episode of Radio 4's new environmental podcast which looks at 39 great ideas to relieve the stress that climate change is exerting on the planet. Trees soak up carbon dioxide, trees store carbon dioxide. So why not build with wood instead of concrete and steel? The usual reason is strength, but Dr Michael Ramage at Cambridge University has what he thinks is the answer- cross-laminated timber. It's strong enough to build a skyscraper and replaces lots of that carbon from conventional building. Tom Heap and Dr Tamsin Edwards take a look at the global possibilities of cities built of wood. Producer : Alasdair Cross

The first African-American to have a face transplant tells his own story - in a documentary about faith, identity and character. Robert suffered horrific burns in a car accident - but survived and went ahead with a series of demanding surgical operations in an attempt to restore his appearance. A shortage of black donors meant it was a long wait for his doctors to find even a partial match for his skin colour. In a moving narrative, Robert, his friends, family and doctors reflect on his remarkable journey. Producer: Ben Davis

From Victorian novels to the latest Hollywood blockbusters, sci-fi regularly returns to the theme of blindness. Peter White, who was heavily influenced as a child by one of the classics, sets out to explore the impact of these explorations of sight on blind and visually impaired people. He believes a scene in The Day pf the Triffids by John Wyndham imbued him with a strange confidence - and he considers the power of science fiction to present an alternative reality for blind readers precisely at a time when lockdown and social distancing has seen visually impaired people marginalised. He talks to technology producer Dave Williams about Star Trek The Next Generation's Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge, Dr Sheri Wells-Jensen talks about Birdbox and world-building from a blind point of view in James L Cambias's A Darkling Sea. Professor Hannah Thompson of Royal Holloway University of London takes us back to 1910 to consider The Blue Peril - a novel which in some ways is more forward thinking in its depiction of blindness than Hollywood now. And Doctor Who actor Ellie Wallwork gives us her take on why blindness is so fascinating to the creators of science fiction. Presenter: Peter White Producer: Kevin Core

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 questioning has been prompted by her own story. Stephen Gallant, convicted of the murder of Vicky's ex-partner,was out on day licence attending a prisoner rehabilitation event in November 2019 when he tackled the London Bridge terrorist with a narwhal tusk, which caught the attention of the public and the media. He was quickly branded a 'hero' . Vicky Foster talks to Dr Zeno Franco, Associate Professor, Medical College of Wisconsin Emma Kinder, Victim Support’s Homicide Regional Manager Jacquie Johnston-Lynch, Head of Services at Vitality Homes Recovery Centre Mel, a nurse working on a covid ward. Produced by Susan Roberts, BBC Audio North

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 politicised conversations - not something their scientific training has prepared them for particularly well. And the fact that everyone is now an expert on R numbers and immunology has created a new set of challenges. Jim Al-Khalili talks to the scientists who have been in the media spotlight in 2020 and hears about some of the challenges they've faced trying to tell us what they know. We may look to science for certainty (all the more so during uncertain times) but there is no magic moment when scientists can announce with absolute certainty that ‘this is how it is’. And now that science is being reported in real time revealing the bumpy road to discovery, there is a risk that our faith in science will be undermined. But scientists airing their dirty laundry in this way could result in a much greater appreciation of the true nature of scientific knowledge and how it’s formed. Perhaps during these difficult times, a new relationship between scientists and the media has been forged? Scientists have been the source of non-stop news. And maybe journalists have help science to progress by synthesising scientific findings and interpreting what they mean. When the pandemic is over, will scientists continue to be part of the national debate? Producer: Anna Buckley (First aired 15 December 2020)

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 campaigners, particularly on the American right, have been talking up the threat of a nuclear weapon, detonated high in the atmosphere, that could, according to a congressional commission, wipe out 90 per cent of the population in the first 12 months, by bringing down the electric grid and frying electronic devices. They claim that China, North Korea, Russia, and even some terrorist groups might be capable of staging such an attack. Mainstream arms control experts don't give the idea much credence, but they rarely engage with the detail of the argument. So is this a real threat, or just the right's attempt to conjure up an apocalypse that can be survived if you have enough guns, food and defensible real estate? Presenter and producer: Jolyon Jenkins

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 investment and refreshment, some have called the situation an imminent “second pandemic”, but is that really the case? Epidemiologists have previously worked with door-to-door and school-based questionnaires to try to evaluate what younger people are going through, and this way have tracked the ongoing rise in numbers experiencing mental health needs. But those scientific tools of objective data gathering which are so crucial to determine mental health policy have not been available this year. The lack of social contact and the closure of schools and youth groups, necessitated by lockdown measures, have also taken away much of mental health professionals’ ability to support the children and young people they work with. So both at the frontline and at a policy level mental health professionals have had to find new ways to work. Some trends are coming through, and they are not positive. But of more concern are the extremes of the scales. As with many aspects of our pre-Covid society, it seems it is the inequalities that are being magnified. Many vulnerable children and young are at increased risk, including those in mainstream schooling, and those who are being looked after by the state. And as with many physical diseases elsewhere in society, remote rather than face-to-face provision may be storing up problems for the future, as fewer and fewer satisfactory diagnoses can be made, and it’s not clear whether digital interventions can deliver the support needed. Children and young people, as Anne Longford, Children’s Commissioner for England, tells Sally, are in need of their own Nightingale-scale moment. Presenter: Sally Marlow Producer: Alex Mansfield

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 all of the commercial, cultural and now environmental sectors - on Earth and beyond - that have been influenced by his investments and activity. Producer: Jonathan Brunert

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 reveal. Contributors: Rt. Hon. Tony Blair, former Prime Minister Rt. Hon. George Osborne, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rt. Hon. David Miliband, former Foreign Secretary Lord Charles Powell, former Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs to Margaret Thatcher Lord Stewart Wood, former adviser to Gordon Brown Sir Mark Lyall Grant, former National Security Adviser Sir Craig Oliver, former Downing Street Director of Communications Tom Fletcher CMG, former Downing Street Foreign Policy Adviser John Gerson CMG, former adviser on China to Margaret Thatcher Katherine Morton, Professor of Global Affairs, Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University Jonathan Powell, former Downing Street Chief of Staff Nick Timothy, former Downing Street Chief of Staff Presenter: Nick Robinson Producer: Sheila Cook

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 measured up to the reality. How did a local education story become a national security issue? And what dilemmas do journalists face when in receipt of an anonymous tip-off? In a 3-part series, Jo explores how two incompatible narratives developed; how the controversial word ‘extremism’ entered the fray; and what the affair revealed about Britishness. Narrative consultant John Yorke is on hand to explain how storytelling techniques possibly influenced the direction the Trojan Horse story took, and why – in the end – we hear only the version that supports our tribe. Presenter: Jo Fidgen Editor: Emma Rippon

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 relationships; and to a group of 17 year old boys from a London school. "I’ve always tried to avoid writing about love and sex and all the clichéd things you’d expect a poet to write about. But then lockdown happened and as many of us know, lockdown has a very reflective effect on you. I found myself going back to the beginning… to my teenage years, to all the things that shaped my ideas about sex, gender, love, intimacy, how I relate to women, and what I thought it was to be a man. And how difficult it was to talk about it openly - to express my concerns, my curiosities, my insecurities. I began writing a new set of poems about my first experiences with sex, and started talking to other men and boys about their experiences. I guess my hope is that, by talking more openly about these things that are sometimes hard or awkward to talk about, things will be a little bit different for young people, for teenagers coming up and trying to figure out who they are and how they fit into the world." There’s no ceremony that my hands know of But to tremble at the thought of touching you And claiming to know what it is I am touching The history of your skin - the story Of its complexion - the craftsmanship of that birthmark I am an idiot playing the role of a surveyor When the truth is this plain it is believable How you find the patience is the real magic of this moment They said I’d become a man here No such thing has happened Caleb is a poet and director featured in the Dazed 100 list of the next generation shaping youth culture. Using film, photography and music Caleb pushes the boundaries of poetry both on the page, in performance and on digital mediums. He has written and directed short films commissioned by the BBC and Channel 4 and poems by the Tate Modern, The Royal Society for Literature, St Paul's Cathedral, the BBC, the Guardian and many more. Between 2016-2018, Caleb was the Young People's Laureate for London working with young people on a city, national and global level. Caleb performs and speaks internationally on major stages, and at institutions and festivals. He works on global advertising campaigns. Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio in Bristol.

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, millions continue to embrace the Wizarding World in all its forms and JK Rowling has received a lot of support for speaking out on an important issue in a personal way. With this in mind Aja assesses the different factors at play in their choice, speaking to cultural experts, academics and fans and considering influences such as social media, trends in fan communities, "cancelling" , literary theory and more. With contributions from critic Sam Leith, writer Gavin Haynes , journalist Sarah Shaffi, Dr Ika Willis and fans Jackson Bird and Patricio Tarantino. 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' film trailer clip courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures, Director: Chris Columbus. Produced by Sam Peach

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, and the landscapes are contrasting in nature. Chris Mason talks to artists, poets, farmers and journalists about their different identities east and west, and listens carefully as the accents change on his imagined journey across the country.

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 the margins of a book – but it’s also profoundly different, because in video games you can get to interact with your loved one, to play with their ghost. Sometimes this is accidental: a deceased parent’s data left as a high score, a ghostly shape that races you to the finish line, or Artificial Intelligence storing some part of the person and surprising us with them later. But some game designers have memorialised loved ones in their art intentionally, like Dan Hett, who made a series of microgames about the loss of his brother Martyn in the Manchester Arena bombing, or Ryan and Amy Green who coded their son Joel into a video game character that has already outlived him. Can you bear to beat the high score and erase that recording forever? And when do the Greens stop playing with Joel? This programme examines profound questions that have been posed in all kinds of art from poetry to sculpture to performance, and asks what it means when the ghosts are interactive. Producers: Giles Edwards and Patrick Cowling

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, intimate music has been the soundtrack to many people's life in lockdown. But still, live performing is on hold. Her fans, once singing her lyrics back at her at shows, feel very far away. She left a bit of her heart out there, on the road. The Coronavirus pandemic has struck a huge blow to everyone involved in the music industry. While the world gets back to some kind of normal, Arlo explores what the psychological effect will be of a world with - for now - no live music in it. She asks other artists she admires like poet and hip-hop artist Kojey Radical, Ed O'Brien from Radiohead, Yannis Philippakis from the band Foals and indie singer songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, how they've dealt with the void. How have they managed the impact on their creative process and where do the silver linings lie? She asks them what lasting impact this time will have on their live performances once the world's venues are open for business again. And she connects with her fans, the people she can't wait to get back to see in the flesh, down in the auditorium. Presented by Arlo Parks. Produced by Clare Salisbury for BBC Audio in Bristol. Photo by Adrian Lee.

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 behaviours. It’s similar to the male term 'Gammon' in that they both refer to furious opinionated white people. ‘Karen’ began as shorthand in the US's black community but was popularised right across all sorts of service industries. For the Karen on our panel it puts her off complaining about anything, in case she's accused of ‘being such a Karen' especially because that's her name! But is it now being used simply as a means to shut women down when they express an opinion that usually a man doesn't like? Who is the arbiter of when the meme is being correctly used or is that simply the nature of these things that once they're out they take on a life of their own? Producers: Myles Bonnar and Peter McManus Editor: Anthony Browne A BBC Scotland production for Radio 4

'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, Kirsty tells the tales of the spirits that haunted our most ancient forebears, and became the common ancestor for ghost stories across all of human history.

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 alternative approach, including a vegan diet, cannabis oil and coffee enemas. Throughout his treatment he used controversial thermography scans to monitor his progress and was convinced he was getting better. Journalist Layla Wright followed Sean’s journey on social media as he attempted to heal himself, and for a while, it seemed to be working. He raised thousands of pounds to fund his treatment and beat the doctor’s prognosis. But in January 2019 Sean died, and his family believe alternative treatments cost him his life. Through the testimony of those closest to him, and through his own words, Layla explores why Sean – and many others – took this approach. She meets the family of Linda Halliday who also relied on thermography scans for reassurance that alternative treatments were working and investigates the clinic that provided them. Presenter and producer: Layla Wright Producer: Ruth Evans Executive producer: Matthew Price Sound design: Emma Crowe Editor: Emma Close and Philly Beaumont

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 alternative approach, including a vegan diet, cannabis oil and coffee enemas. Throughout his treatment he used controversial thermography scans to monitor his progress and was convinced he was getting better. Journalist Layla Wright followed Sean’s journey on social media as he attempted to heal himself, and for a while, it seemed to be working. He raised thousands of pounds to fund his treatment and beat the doctor’s prognosis. But in January 2019 Sean died, and his family believe alternative treatments cost him his life. Through the testimony of those closest to him, and through his own words, Layla explores why Sean – and many others – took this approach. She meets the family of Linda Halliday who also relied on thermography scans for reassurance that alternative treatments were working and investigates the clinic that provided them. Presenter and producer: Layla Wright Producer: Ruth Evans Executive producer: Matthew Price Sound design: Emma Crowe Editor: Emma Close and Philly Beaumont

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 alternative approach, including a vegan diet, cannabis oil and coffee enemas. Throughout his treatment he used controversial thermography scans to monitor his progress and was convinced he was getting better. Journalist Layla Wright followed Sean’s journey on social media as he attempted to heal himself, and for a while, it seemed to be working. He raised thousands of pounds to fund his treatment and beat the doctor’s prognosis. But in January 2019 Sean died, and his family believe alternative treatments cost him his life. Through the testimony of those closest to him, and through his own words, Layla explores why Sean – and many others – took this approach. She meets the family of Linda Halliday who also relied on thermography scans for reassurance that alternative treatments were working and investigates the clinic that provided them. Presenter and producer: Layla Wright Producer: Ruth Evans Executive producer: Matthew Price Sound design: Emma Crowe Editor: Emma Close and Philly Beaumont

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 exploration of the enduring racial tensions threatening the "rainbow nation". Over the course of three years, correspondent Andrew Harding has followed every twist of the police’s hunt for the killers, the betrayals that opened the door to an dramatic trial, and the fortunes of all those involved – from the dead men’s families to the handful of men controversially selected for prosecution. When a whole community is on trial who pays the price? Presenter, Andrew Harding Producer, Becky Lipscombe Editor, Bridget Harney

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, and a profound exploration of the enduring tensions threatening the "rainbow nation". Over the course of three years, correspondent Andrew Harding has followed every twist of the police’s hunt for the killers, the betrayals that opened the door to an explosive trial, and the fortunes of all those involved – from the dead men’s families to the handful of men controversially selected for prosecution. Presenter, Andrew Harding Producer, Becky Lipscombe Editor, Bridget Harney

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 courtroom thriller, and a profound exploration of the enduring tensions threatening the "rainbow nation". Over the course of three years, correspondent Andrew Harding has followed every twist of the police’s hunt for the killers, the betrayals that opened the door to an explosive trial, and the fortunes of all those involved – from the dead men’s families to the handful of men controversially selected for prosecution. Presenter, Andrew Harding Producer, Becky Lipscombe Editor, Bridget Harney

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 exploration of the enduring tensions threatening the “rainbow nation". Over the course of three years, correspondent Andrew Harding has followed every twist of the police’s hunt for the killers, the betrayals that opened the door to an explosive trial, and the fortunes of all those involved – from the dead men’s families to the handful of men controversially selected for prosecution. When a whole community is on trial who pays the price? Presenter, Andrew Harding Producer, Becky Lipscombe Editor, Bridget Harney

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 tourist town of Parys along racial lines. Blood Lands is a murder investigation, a political drama, a courtroom thriller, and a profound exploration of the enduring tensions threatening the “rainbow nation". Over the course of three years, correspondent Andrew Harding has followed every twist of the police’s hunt for the killers, the betrayals that opened the door to an explosive trial, and the fortunes of all those involved – from the dead men’s families to the handful of men controversially selected for prosecution. Presenter, Andrew Harding Producer, Becky Lipscombe Editor, Bridget Harney

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 as a young adult. In this programme Helen asks why she, like a growing number of others, had to wait till she was well into adulthood before finding her place on the autistic spectrum. She discovers that for many years psychologists believed that autism was rarely seen in women and non-binary people. Now it is accepted that people often display autistic traits in different ways, for example, they may learn to ‘camouflage’ and behave in a neurotypical way - but at what cost? Helen talks to others like her who have had late diagnoses and finds out if knowing they are on the autistic spectrum has given them insight into how they can navigate the pressures on them from contemporary society. She also explores how we can value and celebrate neurodiversity. Helen also talks to psychologists Professor Francesca Happé , of the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience in London, and Dr Steven Stagg of Anglia Ruskin University about their research into autism.

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's higher education sector are fit for purpose. The Covid pandemic is significant but when that crisis comes together with the major issues that Britain's universities already face over their funding, it's clear that the coming academic year will be like no other in living memory. Universities in Crisis examines the changes now challenging students, teachers, researchers and all those connected to higher education. Producer: Jonathan Brunert

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 students in the 1970s. She shares her own story of being taught to become “a palatable black girl with a soft voice and an unceasing smile”. And she talks to other young professionals about the steps they’ve taken to fit in – from adopting a “white voice” in the office to changing how they behave and switching up their look. We also hear from those who, tired of code-switching, are daring to be themselves in the corporate world. Lucrece speaks to: Her friends Emmanuel Ajayi, Cheryl Jordan Osei and Ivan Her Mum and brother Steve Criminal barrister Leon Nathan Lynch Sociolinguist Devyani Sharma from the Accent Bias Britain Project Nels Abbey, author of Think Like a White Man, A Satirical Guide to Conquering the World While Black Elizabeth Bananuka, founder of BME PR Pros and The Blueprint Social Mobility Commissioner and lawyer Sandra Wallace Picture Credit: Jeff Overs/BBC

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic the UK government has stated that its decisions have been “led by the science”. This pithy phrase implies there is a fixed body of knowledge from a consensus of scientists that provides a road map of what to do to stop the pandemic. But there isn’t. And if decisions made by politicians turn out not to work, then who gets the blame? Is it the science? While some scientists have willingly appeared in support of the actions announced, many researchers are furious with the way that the government has used science. They point out that scientists from different disciplines have different expertise to bring to the discussions about what to do in a pandemic caused by a novel virus. Public health doctors say that their experience of local communities has been ignored in favour of mathematical models. Virologists feel their knowledge of how infection works has been sidelined. And psychologists believe the government has taken the idea of nudge as the only way to understand the behaviour of the population. Scientific knowledge changes through debate and discussion, in particular when we are confronted by a novel situation. Philip Ball explores the relationship between science and political decision making in the pandemic. Producer: Alex Mansfield for BBC Radio 4

James Naughtie examines Joe Biden's chances in the forthcoming US election as he tries to beat president Donald Trump at the polls this November. Donald Trump was elected on the promise to 'drain the swamp' in Washington, and in response the Democrats have chosen a candidate who is from the heart of the political establishment. As a state senator for 36 years and then president Obama's VP for eight more, Joe Biden now carries the standard in the strangest American presidential election of modern times, its character completely changed by the coronavirus pandemic. While Mr Biden is 'Washington Man' epitomised, he has always presented himself as the common man and in this programme we chart Joe Biden's blue-collar roots, his political career, and ask what can he and the Democratic Party offer America? Can a party with its own internal divisions unify to beat the Republicans? And is 77-year-old Joe Biden ready to battle with an incumbent president who is a proven political street fighter? Presenter: James Naughtie Producer: Richard Fenton-Smith

When Belfast poet Gail McConnell's son was growing in her partner's womb, Gail was writing poems exploring what it means to be a non-biological parent in a same-sex relationship. Gail's poem 'Untitled/Villanelle' lets go of the binaries of motherhood and fatherhood and imagines these roles in more fluid terms as a parent with a bit of both...a Fothermather. We meet Gail, her partner Beth and their son Finn as Gail tries to find language for a family structure we don't have words for yet. Producer: Conor Garrett

Simon had been sleeping in shop doorways in Manchester for three years when the coronavirus pandemic reached the UK. Suddenly, as the government released emergency funding to get people sleeping rough off the streets during lockdown, Simon found himself being offered an en suite room at the Holiday Inn. This is the story of the unprecedented operation to get the country’s street homeless inside - told through one hotel in Manchester. The experience has been transformational for some, including Simon - proof that radical change can happen and happen fast. Government ministers say this is an opportunity to end rough sleeping “for good”. But homelessness charities are warning that as emergency funding runs out, people will end up back on the streets. So what will happen to Simon and others like him as the country moves out of lockdown? Reporter/Producer: Simon Maybin

From climate change to smoking and cancer, this is the story of how doubt has been manufactured. In this episode we take you to an oil company’s boardroom as they plan their response to the ‘crisis mentality’ that was emerging after the long hot summer of 1988. 5,000 people died in the heat wave, coinciding with the moment NASA scientist Jim Hansen announced that a ‘greenhouse effect’ was ‘changing our climate now’. This looked like a battle for the survival of the oil industry. This 10 part series explores how powerful interests and sharp PR managers engineered doubt about the connection between smoking and cancer and how similar tactics were later used by some to make us doubt climate change. With the help of once-secret internal memos, we take you behind boardroom doors where such strategies were drawn up and explore how the narrative changed on one of the most important stories of our time - and how the marketing of doubt has undermined our willingness to believe almost everything. Producer: Phoebe Keane for BBC Radio 4 Presenter: Peter Pomerantsev

The bodies of 39 Vietnamese men and women discovered in a lorry container in Essex highlighted the growing problem of illegal and dangerous journeys into the UK. With police and governments pledging to do more to uncover illegal smuggling operations Radio 4 speaks to refugees, lorry drivers and to some of the smugglers behind this deadly trade Recent coverage from Greece has highlighted the pressures on borders as desperate people risk everything to cross from Turkey. Dangerous Trade starts by tracking a dinghy full of refugees landing on the island of Lesbos and heading for the now infamous Moria camp. It was constructed for 3,100 people but now has a population of more than 20,000 men, women and children. On the camp refugees speak about their dreams of a new life and many hope to make it to the UK. Following the route of some of those that have, Sue Mitchell joins them in Dunkirk as they negotiate with smugglers and weigh up the risks of crossing the Chanel illegally by boat or stowing away in lorries bound for England. Last year, whilst recording another documentary for Radio 4, Sue met a 14 year old girl who was single-handedly talking to smugglers and raising the money from relatives who had already reached the UK. She details what happens as she and her siblings make the dangerous journey and she reflects on her new life in Britain. Those who make the crossing know they are lucky to have survived. The deaths in the Essex container lorry revealed the shocking risks – as do reports of others who have perished at sea and on land. For the lorry drivers who inadvertently end up smuggling refugees, there’s growing anger that more isn’t being done at the borders. Governments have promised to work together to tackle this growing problem, but solutions are still a long way off. Producer/Reporter: Sue Mitchell

Everywhere she goes, people ask for selfies and tell her how wonderful she is. But what’s it really like to be the world’s most famous climate campaigner when you’re still a teenager? In this revelatory personal essay which she wrote for Swedish Radio, Greta Thunberg describes her journey to deliver a speech at the UN General Assembly, observing the effects of climate change first-hand, her encounters with both powerful and ordinary people and a terrifying trip in a yacht across the Atlantic. This Swedish Radio production is introduced by Justin Rowlatt, the BBC's chief environment correspondent, and Greta's essay is interspersed with excerpts of her favourite music. Producer: Mattias Österlund Sound engineer/technician Lisa Abrahamsson

Nearly two million people are now known to have applied for Universal Credit since the start of the Coronavirus lockdown. For many of them it’s their first time, and is in sharp contrast to how they expected their lives to be. To make a claim, many start off by calling the Universal Credit Hotline, a process that can take hours. Once they start their claim it's likely they'll need to wait five weeks for their first payment. As they wait, in isolation in their homes, we discover more about their lives and follow them on their benefits journey. What led them to this point, how are their personal lives affected and how do they feel? We'll be with them for the ups and the downs. We'll meet Caroline, who works in HR and is battling illness while making a claim, Dan who plays the saxophone and has moved back home to his mum's house because he couldn't afford to live in London and Matt the warehouse worker whose health means he is shielding on his own in a flat with just the birds for company. Plus, we'll have a statement from the Department for Work and Pensions on how they've responded to this extraordinary moment in welfare. Produced and presented by Jess Quayle. Technical Production by Mike Smith.

Shark, bear and crocodile attacks tend to make the headlines but humans fall prey to a much wider variety of predators every year, from big cats and snakes, to wolves, hyenas and even eagles that’ve been known to snatch the odd child. The details can be grim and gory as many predators have developed specific techniques for hunting us humans down. But it was always so, as biologist Professor Adam Hart discovers. Archaeological evidence suggests early hominins in Africa were more hunted than hunter, spending much of their lives scavenging for food and fending off attacks from the likes of sabre-tooth-cats and giant hyenas. Much more recently, legends abound about some of the more infamous serial killers of the animal kingdom, such as the 'man-eaters' of Tsavo and Njombe - the latter, a pride of about 15 lions in Tanzania who, it is claimed were responsible for an astonishing 1500 deaths between 1932 and 1947. Today, estimates and sources vary but most suggest carnivorous predators are responsible for hundreds if not thousands of human deaths every year. But how much of this is active predation and how much is mistaken identity or sheer bad luck? Adam speaks to experts in human-wildlife conflict dedicated to reducing attacks on both humans and predators in Africa and India, where the tensions between protecting agricultural interests and preserving predator habitats are most problematic. He discovers the grim reality for many poor rural populations dealing with the sharp end of living in close proximity to large carnivores and discusses the potential solutions for driving down attacks on both humans and predators that are caught up in the struggle for survival. Closer to home, Adam meets a wolf-tracker, who helps to monitor wild wolf populations that have spread up through Italy and France, attacking livestock with increasing confidence. Could humans be on the menu next? Producer: Rami Tzabar

Gordon Corera asks if the West is losing the technological race with China. Why did the decision to let the Chinese company Huawei build the UK’s 5G telecoms network turn into one of the most difficult and consequential national security decisions of recent times? A decision which risks undermining the normally close special relationship between the US and UK? The answer is because it cuts to the heart of the greatest fear in Washington – that China is already ahead in the global competition to develop the most advanced technology. Some people ask how we have got to a position where the West needs to even consider using Chinese tech. The answer may be because they failed to think strategically about protecting or nurturing their own technology industry over the last two decades. A free-market system has faced off against a Chinese model in which there is a clear, long-term industrial strategy to dominate certain sectors of technology, including telecoms, quantum computing and artificial intelligence. This is a rare issue where the US national security community – the so-called ‘Deep State’ – is in close alignment with President Trump. Now the US and UK, among others, are scrambling to try to develop strategies to respond and to avoid dependence on China. But – asks BBC Security Correspondent Gordon Corera – is it already too late? Producer: Ben Crighton

When football introduced the Video Assistant Referee, better known as VAR, fans thought it would cut out bad refereeing decisions but, as we limp toward some conclusion of this Covid-19 interrupted season, many now want to see the pitch referee back in charge. In 'Life, Uncertainty and VAR', the writer, blogger and journalist Tom Chivers argues that as in football, so in life and society; promises to eliminate uncertainty are liable to end in disappointment. Worse, the better we get at revealing truth, for example weather forecasts, the more furious we become about the sliver of unknown which remains. So, what to do about uncertainty - reject it or live with it? This programme began with a Twitter thread from a West Ham fan, Daisy Chistodoulou, at the London stadium where play was on hold waiting for the VAR to declare if a goal had been scored. Daisy Chistodoulou's day job is measuring attainment in education. In her experience the tools we use to measure progress can become ends in themselves. As with VAR, the question is when does measurement conflict with meaning - it was a great goal; what has a big toe, forensically snapped breaking a line a minute before, halfway up the pitch, got to do with it? And if you can't tell what just happened, how are we meant to cope with figuring out what might? How are we to act when, as with the Covid-19 crisis, we have a paucity of data that changes rapidly? In search of answers as to how we should cope with uncertainty, Tom speaks to a man whose life's work has being trying to help people understand the risks we face in everyday life , Professor David Spiegelhalter - author of the Art Of Statistics and to Jennifer Rodgers of the medical statistics consultancy Phastar, who interprets data from pharmaceutical trials. We hear from Michael Blastland, journalist and author of The Hidden Half: How The World Conceals Its Secrets, a book about how we don't know half of what we think we do but still manage to struggle on; and finally, Michael Story, a man so good at predicting the future he runs a consultancy called Maybe! Presenter Tom Chivers Producer Kevin Mousley

Today there's a booming wellness industry, including luxury spas and hotels as well as personal trainers and supplements, claimed to be worth over $4 trillion a year. Online at least, self-care seems to revolve around buying stuff – luxury oils, face creams, scented candles, face rollers, bath bombs, silk pillows, cleansing soaps and stress-relieving teas. Or we can cherish ourselves by paying someone else for a service, from a yoga session to a delivery of artisan chocolates. With the help of the archives Claudia Hammond explores where the idea of wellness came from. She discovers its roots in the WHO's definition of health and in the counter culture of California in the 1960s, when the residents of Marin County took to hot tubs and peacock feathers. Claudia looks at the thorny relationship between wellness and medicine and those who look after or study our health. There's a Wellness Newsletter that has been produced in Berkeley since 1984 that weighs up the scientific evidence for and against new treatments, and many doctors offer complementary therapies alongside conventional medicine. Yet there is no published research to support the benefits associated with some wellness products.

The coronavirus outbreak revealed an international shortage of ventilators. Across the world, govenrments scrambled to acquire new ones, not just from traditional manufacturers, but from anyone who though they could design a simple yet functional device. As a result, hundreds of teams and individuals have risen to the challenge, including university students and hobbyists. Jolyon Jenkins set out to design and build a ventilator himself, drawing on the wealth of shared informationi and designs that have emerged in the last few weeks. He soon discovers that it's harder than it looks. Much publicity has gone to organisations that have produced ventilators that are not up to standard. And as knowledge of the disease has progressed, it's become clear that coronavirus patients need very careful and specialised forms of ventilation if it's not to do more harm than good. So are non-specialists capable of producing machines that will actually benefit patients? Presenter/producer: Jolyon Jenkins

Susan Bright gets bloody and fleshy with sculptors, performance artists and filmmakers who use animal parts as their raw material. Images of meat in still life paintings have been a staple in art for centuries, but why are artists now incorporating animal flesh, offal and skin into their work. What draws them to this macabre material and what does it enable them to say? Photographer Pinar Yolacan makes meat dresses for her models, frills from raw chicken, bodices from placenta and sleeves from tripe. Riffling through butchers stocks, she makes the perfect outfit for her models, designing and moulding it to them like a second skin. In a high-vaulted church, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva hangs gigantic curtains of white pigs fat that look like long sheets of lace. Walking down through them, they rustle and reek as you feel encased inside an animal’s stomach. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr sculpt with live tissue making a semi-living leather jacket, growing wings from pigs and hosting a dinner party with lab grown meat. While Marianna Simnett violently slices open a cow’s udder reorganising our thinking about the body and gender. And with a cast of 100 performers, Hermann Nitsch's theatrical performances involve climbing inside carcasses, bathing in blood and having sex with offal. Their work is shocking, disturbing and fun, making us face our responsibility to animals, each other and the planet and giving us a language to talk about the challenges ahead. We lick our lips and feed on their creativity. Producer: Sarah Bowen

Tracking the virus hunters who race to understand and extinguish new pathogens. Sars Cov 2 is the virus responsible for the pandemic of 2020. But there are millions of other viruses living around the world, any one of which could mutate and infect us at any time. Scientists are in a never-ending race to identify these viruses and contain their dangerous effects. Oxford Professor Trudie Lang, director of the Global Health Network, hears from some of the virus hunters who work against the clock to research and combat these threats. Fighting epidemics requires effort from across the scientific spectrum. What we learn from the outbreak of Covid-19 will be crucial beyond understanding this coronavirus, but also when the next Virus X comes - and it will come. Producer: Sandra Kanthal

The World Health Organisation calls it an “infodemic” – a flood of information about the coronavirus pandemic. Amid the good advice and the measured uncertainty, there’s a ton of false claims, conspiracy theories and health tips which are just plain wrong. We’ve been working to fight the tide of bad info, and in this programme BBC Trending reporters Marianna Spring and Mike Wendling trace the story of one specific viral post. It's a list of supposed facts about the virus and what you can do to protect yourself. Some of the tips are true, some are false but relatively harmless, and some are potentially dangerous. Who’s behind the post – and how did it spread? Here’s our list of seven key tips on how to stop viral misinformation: 1. Stop and think 2. Check your source 3. Ask yourself, could it be a fake? 4. If you’re unsure whether it’s true … don’t share. 5. Check each fact, individually. 6. Beware emotional posts. 7. Think about biases Presenters: Marianna Spring and Mike Wendling

Edward Stourton tells the story of the BBC in the ”phoney war” of 1939-1940 and the period’s strange echoes of Covid-19 today. When war was declared in September 1939, everyone in Britain expected a catastrophic bombing campaign. Theatres and cinemas were closed and children were evacuated to the countryside. What followed instead was a hiatus when tensions remained high but the bombs did not fall. How does the experience of the Home Front at the start of the Second World War echo the Covid-19 crisis and what did it mean for the evolution of the BBC? The corporation’s initial response became known as the "Bore War". The BBC was berated for broadcasting dreary music and endless, highly repetitive news bulletins. It then changed tack to find a more popular voice, in tune with the needs of its audience. How did it become a trusted source of news in the face of wartime censorship? What did it do to cheer up the nation and enliven public service messages about health and education? Contributors: Peter Busch, Senior Lecturer, King's College, London Martin Gorsky, Professor of the History of Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Sian Nicholas, Reader in History, Aberystwyth University Lucy Noakes, Professor of History, University of Essex Jean Seaton, Professor of Media History, University of Westminster Producer: Sheila Cook Researcher: Diane Richardson Editor: Hugh Levinson With thanks to BBC History https://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/100-voices/ww2

To survive and thrive in an uncertain world, our children need to be creative and resilient. But how do you build these things? What does it take to make creativity a life skill and where might such a skill take a child in later life? These are the questions at the heart of an ambitious new project underway in Leicester on behalf of the Arts Council. It's called Talent 25 and will track hundreds of babies and their families from birth to their twenty fifth birthdays. Academics from De Montfort University will chart how various creative activities affect the children's income, well-being and abilities in later life. Lindsey Chapman meets parents and babies from some of Leicester's most diverse and economically challenged areas. They talk about how to play without toys, how to encourage children to amuse themselves creatively and how their parenting has already changed in year one. Producer: Olive Clancy

Whilst most men become fathers, and men make up roughly half the parental population, the vast majority of scientific research has focused on the mother. But studies have started to reveal the impact of fatherhood on both dads themselves and on their children. We're seeing how fathers play a crucial role in children's behaviour, happiness, and even cognitive skills. Oscar Duke, a doctor, new dad and author of How To Be A Dad, discovers how pregnancy, birth and childcare affect the father, bringing about profound physiological and hormonal changes. Only 5% of mammal fathers invest in their offspring, and human males have evolved to undergo key changes when their children are born. Involved fathers can expect their levels of the 'love hormone' oxytocin to rise, nature's way of helping parents bond with their children. At birth, a dad's testosterone levels dramatically fall, increasing affection and responsiveness, and discouraging polygamy. With more fathers taking on a hands-on role in bringing up their children, how can these new discoveries about the science of dad help support them, and inform social and healthcare policies? Presented by Dr Oscar Duke and produced by Melanie Brown and Cathy Edwards

Stanley Tucci continues his history of California with the story of Silicon Valley's troubled founder, William Shockley. Shockley was the man who first brought silicon to Silicon Valley in the 1950s. He was an undoubted genius. But he was also a hideous boss and an irredeemable racist. California wants to dazzle you with its endless sunshine and visions of the future – but that’s just a mirage. Stanley Tucci plays a hard-boiled screenwriter uncovering the full, sordid truth. He knows exactly where all the bodies are buried. Academic consultant: Dr Ian Scott, University of Manchester Written and produced by Laurence Grissell

The value society places on physical appearance has never quite made sense to blind presenter Lyndall Bywater and yet she's intrigued to discover why it matters so much to those of us in the sighted world. How much of an advantage is it to be beautiful? And what is physical beauty anyway? We've heard about the gender bias, the age bias, and the racial bias but few people talk about the beauty bias and yet it's one of the very first judgements we make when we meet someone. In this programme Lyndall explores this invisible force that controls how we behave - and reveals that when it comes to physical beauty, we all unconsciously discriminate. Producer: Sarah Shebbeare Researcher: Robbie Wojciechowski

Across the world people were presented with what appeared to be a heart-breaking but straightforward story of a father and his motherless daughter struggling to get to Britain. But behind those headlines lay a far more sinister truth. BBC Journalist Sue Mitchell and former soldier Rob Lawrie discover that the little girl appears to have simply vanished. Can they find her in time? Girl Taken is a 10-part hunt - across closed borders and broken promises - for the truth and to find a little girl, taken. Listen to the rest of the series on BBC Sounds. Producer: Sue Mitchell Studio Production and Sound Design: Richard Hannaford

Kerry Hudson, author of Lowborn, has learned to code switch with the literary elite, but how can people stuck in poverty or middle class bubbles make meaningful connections? Kerry starts her exploration in her native Scotland with a project providing 'pre-loved' school uniforms to families in poverty. As vital a service as this is it’s the way people access it that's important. Founder Julie Obyrne makes it as simple, as discrete and respectful as possible. There are no forms to fill out, no referral process or establishing of need. You phone the number, give your first name and simply explain what you require. Julie will then meet you at the local shopping centre and hand it over. Confidentiality and dignity are at the heart of the service. But if this is the way that people who are struggling need to access help why isn't anyone listening to them? Kerry's next stop is with a project aiming to address just that. Expert Citizens put people with lived experience at the centre of service design. It draws on the hard won lessons of people who've lived with homelessness, substance abuse or domestic violence to provide a consultancy service to officialdom. But it’s an uphill battle for people at the bottom to get those in the better off parts of society to even bother listening to them. How can a dialogue even take place between classes? One possible model exists but tellingly it’s not in the UK. Cross Class Circles is a community project in Brattleboro Vermont, Kerry hears from the organisers and participants from both sides of the US class divide about why these conversations are so important. Producer: Liza Grieg

The lift comes to life and tells the story of how the elevator changed the way we live. Emma Clarke plays the voice of the lift in this cultural history of the elevator. As we step inside, the doors close and the lift starts to speak, telling us its story. Before the lift, the top floor was the least desired and most unhealthy place to live. The lift changed all that and made the penthouse glamorous and desirable. The lift made life immeasurably easier but it also brought many anxieties - about safety and the strange, forced intimacy of the lift car. It's also been a source of inspiration for writers - from 19th century German literature right through to Hollywood. And now the lift is about to undergo a radical shift - as engineers develop a lift with no limits on how high it can go. Step inside, relax, and allow the lift to tell you its story. Producer: Laurence Grissell

Many animals can navigate by sensing the earth's magnetic field. Not humans, though. But might we have evolved the sense but forgotten how to access it? 40 years ago a British zoologist thought he had demonstrated a homing ability in humans. But his results failed to replicate in America and the research was largely discredited. But new evidence suggests that our brains can in fact detect changes in the magnetic field and may even be able to use it to navigate. Jolyon Jenkins investigates, and talks to a Pacific traditional seafarer who has learned to navigate vast distances across the ocean with no instruments, and who describes how, when all else fails, he has been able to access what he calls "the magic". Is the magic still there for all of us, just waiting to be rediscovered? Producer: Jolyon Jenkins

What lies behind Boris Johnson's overwhelming election victory? In this programme, Anne McElvoy talks to the key figures across the political spectrum about how the 2019 general election was fought and lost. To what extent was this a 'Brexit election' and how did the Conservative Party reach out to voters in places that it had not won for decades and in some cases generations? Why did the Opposition Parties agree to holding the election in the first place? What led to Labour's worst defeat since 1935 and why did Jeremy Corbyn's campaign fail to make the impact he had made in 2017? Why did the Liberal Democrats struggle to make the breakthrough that they had hoped for and what difference did the Brexit Party's decision to stand down in Conservative held seats make to the result. Producer: Peter Snowdon

"When I was in primary school, I remember being asked to draw our house. I drew our temporary accommodation, which back then was just an ordinary house. And I think about children living in these office blocks - what would they draw?" When Immie was growing up, she lived in emergency and then temporary accommodation with her mum and three sisters. Temporary can be permanent for many people, but today she feels much more secure. Then one day something odd happened. She was on the bus, on the to deck, looking into the first floor of an ugly office block on the side of the busy A12 in north east London. She could see it had been converted, and there were people living up and down all seven floors. In tiny flats. Some of them were much smaller than the government's minimum space standard. Immie wanted to know how this was possible. We often hear that there is a national housing crisis, but don't always understand what that means. Immie, who is just 22, has made over 80 freedom of information requests to find out how many people are being temporarily housed in office blocks. She discovers that it is perfectly legal to do this - developers can bypass normal planning regulations thanks to Permitted Development Rights or PDR. She meets an architect and a council leader who both say it's wrong, though their reasons are not the same. Features interviews with architect Julia Park of Leviit Bernstein; and Joseph Ejiofor, the head of Haringey Council ... plus some dramatic location recordings too. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde

Eddie was set to become another statistic, another teenager killed by rising levels of knife crime. But Eddie’s life was saved by the new field of trauma science. It is revolutionising the way people are treated after shootings, traffic accidents or any injury that causes catastrophic bleeding. The doctors that pioneered the work call it Code Red. Your chances of surviving major bleeding are now higher than ever before. So what changed? Quite simply trauma medicine has been turned on its head. Before 2007, doctors would have treated Eddie’s catastrophic bleeding by trying to replace the fluid leaking out of his stab wounds. Salty water, called saline, and just one component of our blood – the oxygen carrying red blood cells – would be put back into Eddie’s body - in what's called a massive transfusion. It seemed like a good idea. Keep the blood pressure up, keep oxygen moving round the body and keep the patient alive. But that’s not what happened - around half of people died on the operating table. The principles were wrong. They were damaging the body’s natural way of stemming blood loss – clotting. It was around 2003 that the ideas behind the Code Red protocol started to take shape. The poster child of the new field of trauma science was revealing the vital role of clotting. Karim Brohi, Professor of Trauma Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London, discovered that major trauma could disrupt the blood’s ability to clot within minutes of the injury, and patients affected were more likely to die. What's more, saline was diluting the blood and making the bleeding worse. Over a decade ago, the Royal London Hospital decided to do something radical. It introduced Code Red, also known as damage control resuscitation, and shifted the focus from blood pressure to blood clotting - get blood products into patients to get on top of any abnormalities there first. Making that happen took a huge culture shift. This is not a normal research environment. There’s no time to ponder, patients are hovering between life and death; and every second counts. But now the innovation has been accepted across the NHS, and recent research reveals a massive drop in the death rate of patients with catastrophic bleeding. Producer: Beth Eastwood

In the hands of artists, smog, landfill and sewage become beautiful, witty and challenging statements. As the scale of pollution intensifies, Emma meets the artists who are finding original and compelling ways to make us understand and feel the crisis of filth. Zack Denfeld and Cat Kramer harvest air pollution in cities around the world, whipping up egg whites on street corners. They bake them into meringues and hand them out to the public who can’t help but react to eating the city’s pollutants. Mexican collective Tres guide Emma through their studio, piled high with collected rubbish: they’ve filled a gallery with 300,000 stinking cigarette butts, taken over the streets to preserve fossilized chewing gum and crawled for months on Australian beaches filtering through marine plastic. Nut Brother has courted controversy with his performance of dragging 10,000 bottles of polluted water from Shaanxi to Beijing while John Sabraw wades through Ohio’s filthy streams, capturing iron oxide from unsealed mines and turning sludge into glorious paints. Emma delves through rails of Kasia Molga’s costumes which glow red in response to carbon, she listens to an orchestra of Lucy Sabin’s breath and takes us down under the River Thames to meet her collaborator Lee Berwick: they're working on an installation about underwater sound pollution, experimenting with sounds in the Greenwich foot tunnel for an installation opening in March. These provocative and entertaining artists discuss the relationship between art and activism, taking us beyond the facts and figures to face head on and experience the contamination we are inflicting on the planet. Producer: Sarah Bowen

In the heart of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, members of the Resistance worked tirelessly and at great risk to themselves to help those whose lives were threatened. Amongst them was Elisabeth Charlotte Gloeden – known as Liselotte or “Lilo” – who, along with her husband Erich, hid Jews in their home in Berlin, before arranging safe passage for them out of Germany. Both Lilo and Erich had Jewish fathers. Hers was a prominent skin specialist and he was hounded from his job by the Nazis. Lilo’s Jewish heritage led to her being driven from the legal profession at the outbreak of war in 1939. The couple’s efforts went undetected until 1944 when they took in General Fritz Lindemann, who was being hunted by the Gestapo for being part of the plot to assassinate Hitler. They stood trial in November 1944 before one of Germany’s most feared judges, Roland Freisler. This programme tells the remarkable story of the couple and of others who hid and were hidden in Nazi Berlin. Presenter: Fergal Keane Producer; Alice Doyard Editor: Andrew Smith

The KLF aka The Jams aka The Timelords aka The K Foundation aka K2 Plant Hire aka The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu... it's complicated. Whatever name or weird mythology they happened to be operating under at the time, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty managed to top the UK pop charts in the early nineties with songs about love and ice-cream vans - often with plastic horns strapped to their heads. Then they turned their backs on the music industry, deleted their entire back catalogue and cremated £1 million of their own earnings on a remote Scottish island. Scroll forward 23 years and Drummond and Cauty re-emerge to announce they're building a pyramid in Liverpool out of bricks containing the cremated remains of just under 35,000 people. As more bricks are added to The People's Pyramid at the 2019 Toxteth Day of the Dead, Conor Garrett tries to work out what's going on... Produced and presented by Conor Garrett.

Photographer Garry Fabian-Miller has spent much of the last 30 years either in his dark room, or out walking on Dartmoor. That is about to end. Fabian-Miller began his career in the 1960’s but quickly tired of the typical black and white verite’ style that was then so much in vogue. Rejecting both the city streets, black and white film, and eventually the camera itself - his camera-less photography gives his work an utterly unique and other worldly quality - light pulses from deep yellow circles; the flicker of a naked flame peers through a slashed curtain of deep blue. His inspiration the moors he walks twice daily, passing through his eyes, his imagination and onto the photosensitive paper. The result is a body of work which plays with light and dark, exposure and developing – producing an acclaimed body of work recognised by both buyers and museums as like no other - collectors range from Sir Elton John to the V & A. But the onslaught of digital has signalled to him that things are changing – both the resources, and the techniques he has developed over time, are threatened, and with the near disappearance of dark rooms, he feels it time to make his last print and close his dark room for ever. His photographs are unconventional, dazzling, and use techniques honed over decades. He abandoned using cameras long ago, opting instead to use techniques based on early 19th century prints - long exposures, tone, and images funneled into shapes made by the sun. Always dazzlingly coloured, he uses a developing substance which is no longer in production. Occasionally he gets a phone call from a dealer in London…. “Garry, I’ve just been offered 11 litres of CibaChrome, you want it? We join him as he uses up the very last of the chemistry which enable him to use the techniques he has spent a lifetime perfecting, before his dark room is closed forever. Reflecting a change out of his studio and in the world - in 2007 there were 204 professional dark rooms in London, by 2010 there were 8. We hear his story of printing - a physical, technical skill, as well as a dangerous and smelly one. We envisage the end of the analogue era of photography, and celebrate the alchemical eclipse. Curator of photography from the V&A Martin Barnes salutes his work, and how it harks back to the very start of photography, just as this chapter is coming to an end. From the spooky mists of Hound Tor to making pictures in the dark, Fabian-Miller takes us one step closer to the end of an era. Producer: Sara Jane Hall

For most of her life, Janice Wilson suffered from strange and terrifying attacks at night. She would wake up, suddenly, feeling as though she was being choked or strangled. The next day, there would be blood on her pillow. Sometimes she’d have up to 50 of these attacks a night. It left her terrified and exhausted. For years, doctors put it down to psychological problems due to a trauma in her past. Then she met a doctor who found the astonishing, true cause. In “The Diagnosis”, Janice and the doctor who diagnosed her come together in a studio, to tell this remarkable story. The programme is presented and produced by Helena Merriman, who was inspired to tell other people’s stories of diagnosis after receiving her own surprise diagnosis a few years ago. Editor: Emma Rippon

Life is getting better. Child mortality rates have tumbled worldwide, more girls are in education, malaria is in decline and hunger is a thing of the past for most of us. So why don't we believe it? Why are so many of us convinced that we're heading for hell in a handcart? It's a question that really bothers the editor of the Spectator, Fraser Nelson. Is it the fault of journalists like him, peddling conflict and disaster rather than tales of human progress? Or are we all born with a negativity bias? Do we seek out stories of death and danger just as our ancestors listened out for sabre-toothed tigers padding ever closer to our cave? In search of answers Fraser meets some of the best-selling thinkers on human happiness- Harvard psychology professor, Steven Pinker, author of Notes on a Nervous Planet, Matt Haig and co-author of Factfulness, Anna Rosling Ronnlund. Armed with the combined intellectual heft of these purveyors of positivity Fraser returns to his Whitehall office to persuade his cynical staff that the world is crying out for a new Spectator with a positive spin. Producer: Alasdair Cross

Why do we hold our opponents in contempt? Former politician Douglas Alexander believes that disagreement is good, it's how the best arguments get refined. But, today, public discourse has become so ill-tempered, snide and lacking in respect that we are no longer engaged in a battle of ideas but a slanging match. He talks to people with personal tales about how we might all raise our game and disagree better, among them a relationship counsellor, an ex-soldier, a peace broker and a foster mother. Their tips? Civility is not enough. And knowledge is essential, as well as radical honesty, fierce intimacy and openness. So, dial down the rhetoric, rein in the insults - they will persuade no-one that your opinion is worth listening to - and pay attention. Producer: Rosamund Jones Researchers: Kirsteen Knight and Gabriela Jones

Sally Marlow talks to some of the men and women who have self-harmed, and the experts who treat them, to find out what is driving so many people to self-harm. Clinical guidelines define self-harm as any act of self-poisoning or self-injury carried out by a person irrespective of their motivation. However, research reveals a worrying association between self-harm and the risk of suicide. While rates of self-harm are particularly high among teenage girls, the true picture is far more nuanced. Rates have gone up in all age groups and both genders and, more recently, in groups such as middle-aged men. So what is driving so many people to hurt themselves, and what can be done to help them? The media is quick to point the finger at social media, but Sally discovers that the reasons behind this question are as varied and complex as the people who do it. Producer: Beth Eastwood

In the first of the three-part series "Playing Well" Chris Hawkins has an intimate conversation with the band mates of Scott Hutchison, who took his own life in May 2018. In conversation with Scott's brother Grant, drummer in Frightened Rabbit, and guitarist Andy Monaghan, Chris discovers more about the anxious child who reframed his family nickname as a band name - and how he channeled a rare lyrical talent, determination and energy into the creation of one of Scotland's most important and influential rock bands. Charting the rise of the band and Scott's intense, occasionally hilarious approach to live performance, Grant frankly addresses the pressures his brother faced - and the structural pressures faced by anyone in the music industry. Charting the exhausting aftermath of suicide, Grant talks about defining Scott as a songwriter, in the hope that the existence of works which appear to presage his death don't create a misleading impression of Scott's life. It's a moving portrait of a fascinating artist, and an attempt to reclaim Scott's musical legacy from the inaccurate assumption that the combination of musical celebrity and mental illness can only end in tragedy. Details of organisations offering information and support with mental health are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline, or you can call for free, at any time to hear recorded information on 08000 155 998. Presented by Chris Hawkins Produced by Kevin Core

As a teenager, the writer Varaidzo lost interest in school. She investigates the so-called "educational dip" and talks to teenagers about ways they think the school curriculum might be made more appealing and useful to them in later life. She also meets Lord Baker, the minister responsible for setting up the national curriculum more than thirty years ago; and she talks to futurists and those researching the future of work, to find out what they think the students of today should be learning. Producer: Ellie Richold

Between the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the policy's hastily enforced end on 29 December 1989, East German citizens claimed an estimated four billion Deutschmarks in so-called ‘Begrüßungsgeld’ or ‘welcome money’ from the West German authorities. Tens of thousands stood in line at banks and town halls up and down West Germany, waiting to collect their state-sanctioned gift of 100DM (around €80 today). For most East Germans, shortages of basic goods were a fact of daily life and luxuries were all but non-existent, this modest windfall represented the first true spending money that they had ever possessed, and in spending it they would have their first encounters with modern-day capitalism and consumerism. In this programme, journalist and teutonophile Malcolm Jack heads to Berlin to find out what East Germans bought with their Begrüßungsgeld and, 30 years on, what became of those purchases. In Berlin, Malcolm meets Jens ‘Tasso’ Muller from Saxony, who, on his first trip west, travelled with friends to Kreuzberg in Berlin. It was the first time he had ever seen graffiti tags, on every corner in every place. Having never seen graffiti tags before, he worked out it must be done with a marker so that was the first thing he bought. As it cost an exorbitant 11DM, he just bought one, but it would be the first of many. Today Jens is better known by the alias 'Tasso' and his tag is recognised all over the world - as a professional graffiti artist he has visited 31 different countries and counting; all thanks to one black ink Edding marker, igniting a passion for street art he didn't even know existed. Amongst other East Germans and East Berliners, Malcolm meets fashion designer and former international model Grit Seymour. Grit’s welcome money was spent on fresh exotic fruit and a copy of Italian Vogue which was previously inaccessible to her in the GDR. Malcolm also visits a former Stasi prison with tour guide and former inmate Peter Kreup, whose welcome money provided a sense of power and freedom that he had previously been denied after spending 10 months incarcerated by the regime. Performance artist and lecturer Else Gabriel shares her unorthodox approach to the welcome money, and the bounty it brought her which she still keeps in her studio. Nicole Hartmann was just 11 years old when the wall fell, and remembers the feeling of solidarity that she felt when her East German village banded together to look after the people in the streams of cars, all travelling to Berlin to collect their Begrüßungsgeld. We also hear from Professor of German History at University College, London about the reasons for the introduction of the welcome money itself, and its impact on the process of reunification.

Young men are facing a crisis of masculinity. To deal with it, they have options - the manosphere, a mainly online world where the challenges facing 21st century men are exclusively the fault of women, or the anti-manosphere. Philip Tanzer is a Men Rights Activist (or MRA) and manosphere convert who lives in Scotland. He’s already a keyboard warrior, fighting the ‘feminist establishment’ from the highlands of Scotland and giving motivational talks to the young men who come to his salon and art gallery. He allows producers to follow him as he attends the International Conference on Men’s Issues in Chicago where many of the main leaders and thinkers that together form the nebulous community congregate, including a British MP, far-right YouTubers and a surprising number of women. Along the way, he gives a unique insight into the individual stories behind the growing group of men in the UK and US who find their tribe in the online forums dedicated to reversing the feminist agenda. He also meets and debates with men and women who believe the manosphere is a dangerous and misogynist place and looks at alternative ways to address the growing levels of mental ill health and suicide in young men – could drumming around a campfire be a better way for men to connect? Produced by Lucy Proctor and Alvaro Alvarez

“At the end of the day, with DNA, we have difficulty in the forensic arena of separating identical twins, we can do it with a hand no problem at all.” - Professor Dame Sue Black In 2006 the Metropolitan Police came to Professor Sue Black with an image. An infrared snapshot of a man’s arm, taken from a computer camera in the middle of the night. They wanted to know if she, as one of the world’s most respected forensic anatomists, could find any details that could match the limb in the picture, to a potential child abuse suspect. That case sparked the development of a new kind of forensic science - Hand Identification. A science that in the past 13 years has aided in securing convictions in some of the most high profile child abuse cases in the UK. In this programme we explore how Sue and her teams in Dundee and Lancaster University have developed the science of Hand Identification, how it can be used in conjunction with digital forensic techniques to identify offenders, and how by creating a library of hands, Artificial Intelligence can be developed to quickly and accurately assess hands and link child abuse cases around the globe - protecting not just children, but the investigators who put their own mental health at risk as they work to protect the most vulnerable. Produced by Elizabeth Ann Duffy Illustration by Seonaid MacKay

Steph McGovern returns to her home town of Middlesbrough to ask why we aren’t better equipped to deal with the practical maths that we need to work out phone contracts, energy tariffs and any number of other challenges thrown at us in everyday life. She argues that too much emphasis is put on abstract maths in the school curriculum, and visits a Teesside primary school that is bucking the trend by emphasising practical maths to see what difference it is making. Steph meets university maths lecturer Sven Ake Wegner and hears about his struggles with cucumbers and tax returns, as well as the crucial relationship between theoretical and applied maths. Finally Steph attends the finals of a young enterprise competition to talk with teams of schoolchildren learning about profit, loss and percentages through running their own businesses. Along the way Steph sets a series of puzzles to test the listener’s own ability to make the numbers add up. Producer: Geoff Bird ANSWERS: 1/ It's cheaper to pay off the card in equal amounts for 12 months than pay the transfer fee. 2/ Shorts were £5.25 3/ Less than £100.00

Can a robot host a radio show? Georgia Lewis-Anderson is a conversation designer for voice technology, writing answers to the more human questions that people ask voice assistants like 'what's your favourite food', 'will you marry me' or 'what's the meaning of life'. As voice assistants become better and better talkers, Georgia is doing an experiment to test whether she can push their chit chat to the limit by making a LoveBot driven by AI that can host a relationship advice radio phone-in. Building the bot, she unravels how our conversations with computers work, explores ethical concerns, and shines a light on the ways more and more of us are looking to machines to help with our emotions.

The comedian Russell Kane traces his success back to the day his Dad bought his council house in Enfield in the 80s. Now, in 2019, he wrestles with the impact of the Thatcher policy which allowed that to happen – Right to Buy. Russell’s family lived in an end of terrace, which meant a bigger garden, and the potential for an extension. His Dad built pillars onto the entrance of the house and, in his most audacious of moves, hand-dug a 21-foot swimming pool. The house became known as “The Castle” to their disgruntled neighbours, and Russell started to feel different. He felt he could strive for more and he thinks it was the trigger for the events which led him to university, and beyond. In all the debate about housing and the Right to Buy policy, Russell thinks that the social impact on families like his has been forgotten. But he also feels like the drawbridge was pulled up behind him – as if his family’s luck was potentially to the detriment of others. The social housing in Enfield was depleted, and his community divided between those with the extensions and the fancy entrances, and those without. Here, he tries to reconcile his feelings about a policy which changed the lives of working class communities across Britain – for better, or for worse? Featuring the architect of Right to Buy – Lord Heseltine, sociologist Lisa McKenzie, and Russell’s mum Julie. Produced in Bristol by Polly Weston.

The Corrections re-visits four news stories which left the public with an incomplete picture of what really happened. In August 2017, The Times published a piece with the headline ‘Christian child forced into Muslim foster care’. The story was front-page news the next day as well - and the next – but was it right? Produced and presented by Jo Fidgen and Chloe Hadjimatheou

Shappi Khorsandi’s life is disorganised. A single mother of two and a stand-up comedian and writer, Shappi is busy. She doesn’t know what money is coming into or out of her account, her love of charity shopping is getting out of control, her prized family photographs are shoved in a box in the back of the wardrobe and the clutter is overwhelming. She's tried the famous Marie Kondo method of tidying up, but it hasn't helped a bit. She hates being disorganised. She wants to do something about it! Should Shappi just learn to embrace the chaos? Or can professional help put her life in order? Produced by Amy Wheel for BBC Cymru Wales

Generation Z is self-taught. No-one any older really gets that. The children born around the turn of the millennium came into a digital world and had to find out for themselves how to navigate it. Sure, we all live it now - but we weren't formed by it. We came to digital from the safety of adulthood. In this programme, six wise school-leavers take us on their digital journey in their home town of Huddersfield. Simone has lived there her whole life and is about to leave for university. But before she goes, she's joined by a group of her friends who take us around Huddersfield and back through their digital adolescence. They tell us their stories of self-education, from friendship to flirting, memes to messaging, and talk about the lessons that they had to learn. Presenter: Simone Dawes Producer: Camellia Sinclair

The story of Scotland's deadly drug crisis narrated by the voice of the narcotic itself. Scotland has the highest rate of reported drug deaths in the European Union. There has been a rapid rise of cheap, imported synthetic drugs - especially Etizolam, an illegal tablet similar to Valium but with an unpredictable potency often many times higher. But why do so many people, especially young men, feel drawn towards this dangerous self-medication? Scottish poet Niall Campbell explores the lives and deaths of a small number of drug users and of their families in Dundee. Using original music by Jon Nicholls and found sound, Niall’s poem weaves through first-hand accounts of the addictive process to create an elegy to the lost and those they leave behind. The Ballad of the Fix is a companion piece to The Ballad of the Blade (2018) in which Momtaza Mehri listened to the voices of young people involved in knife crime. Producers: Monica Whitlock and Liza Greig If you’ve been affected by addiction, help and support is available. https://www.bbc.co.uk/actionline/

Gemma Cairney brings together artists from two different countries to combine their talents to make a new piece of music. In this episode Gemma invites 24-year-old London rapper Loyle Carner to Guyana, South America to join flautist and composer Keith Waithe, a leading figurehead and champion of Guyanese culture. Loyle aka Benjamin Coyle-Larner was raised in Croydon South London by his Scottish mother and stepfather. His biological father is of Guyanese descent, but he has never visited the country. Loyle earned a Mercury Prize nomination for his debut album Yesterday’s Gone in 2017. His second album Not Waving, But Drowning was released earlier this year exploring everything from his ADHD and the pains of moving away from home, to his mixed race heritage. His other passion is food and he launched the Chilli Con Carner cookery school for kids growing up, as he had, with ADHD. Loyle will be immersed in the culture, food and music of Georgetown, working with Keith and other traditional Guyanese musicians to learn about the roots of Guyanese music and explore his black identity and create a brand new track together . Presented by Gemma Cairney Produced by Jax Coombes A BBC 6 Music Production for BBC Radio 4

LGBTQ+ venues are closing across the UK. Research from the UCL Urban Laboratory indicates that, since 2006, the number of venues in London has fallen from 125 to 53 - with some still at risk of closure. Conversely, there's been a 144% increase in hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people, with one in five experiencing a hate crime this year. Performance artist and writer Travis Alabanza asks if the venues have served the purpose they were originally built for or if now, more than ever, LGBTQ+ people need these spaces. Speaking to Professor Ben Campkin from UCL, Travis finds out why individual venues are closing and the impact of their loss. Travis hears personal accounts of how these venues shapes individuals, and visits one of London’s oldest LGBTQ+ venues, The Black Cap, which closed in 2015. Campaigners have since held weekly vigils there, but developers want to turn the upper part into luxury apartments and say a new pub will have an "LGBT flavour". Travis also visits a venue being threatened with closure, The Eden Bar in Birmingham, as well as other LGBTQ+ spaces beyond nightlife; Gay's The Word bookshop, and The Outside Project. Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell explains the impact of these venues in the 70s and 80s compared to today, and London’s Night Czar Amy Lamé discusses how London is working to protect venues. Finally, Travis speaks with Phyll Opoku- Gyimah, the co-founder of UK Black Pride, to consider whether these venues truly serve the entirety of the LGBTQ+ community. Produced by Anishka Sharma and Sasha Edye-Lindner Researcher: Eleanor Ross A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4 LLGC Oral History clips and First Out Oral History clips courtesy of UCL Urban Laboratory. Photo credit: Tiu Makkonen

We hear from one of the world’s last remaining globemakers and reflect on the globe’s cultural and symbolic currency. While Google Earth may give us intricate detail of every inch of land, there’s nothing like clutching a globe to properly comprehend our place in the world. We’ve been fascinated by replicating our planet since ancient times; an art and science that’s developed as our understanding has evolved. In this programme, we step into the studio of Bellerby & Co Globemakers, one of the few companies remaining that are making globes by hand today. From their Stoke Newington warehouse, we follow the journey of a globe from design to dispatch. We hear about the challenges they face daily, from retraining their hands to querying geopolitical protocol, and the customers who’ve commissioned their unique bespoke worlds. Alongside this creative process, we visit installation artist Luke Jerram, who is touring his replica earth artwork, Gaia. We also hear from writer and cartography enthusiast Simon Garfield and globe conservator Sylvia Sumira to explore the rich history of globemaking as well as some bigger ideas around the influence of those who represent our planet to us. The globe is crucially illustrative of our shared experience. Do we need its symbol today more than ever? Produced in Cardiff by Amelia Parker Photo by kind permission of Bellerby & Co Globemakers (credit: Sebastian Boettcher) Gaia soundtrack courtesy of Luke Jerram and Dan Jones

Why do you keep going back to the fridge after dinner? Fruit and vegetables, a balanced diet, low salt, low sugar and moderate exercise seem to be the silver bullets loaded into a revolver that has only ever fired blanks at the problem of Britain’s obesity crisis. More than ten years ago, the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver came to Rotherham in an effort to help combat obesity, by providing information on how to cook healthy foods. A decade on Rotherham still has a high proportion of people that are overweight or obese. In What’s Eating Rotherham, local resident Joanne Keeling, who is 28 stone and trying to lose weight, looks at the emotional side of overeating and examines the effect Jamie Oliver - and the spotlight he brought to Rotherham - can have on a town at the centre of media attention. With the help of Producer Jay Unger, Joanne soon discovers an uncomfortable truth about why some people emotionally eat. As well as questioning whether or not traditional methods of treating obesity, like prescribed exercise and diet regimes, actually work she wants to learn about the psychology of why people overeat in the first place.

In an age of certainty, of assertions without facts, and sometimes assertions with facts, Mark O’Connell makes the case for a different virtue – ambivalence. Six years on from his thought-provoking, witty and charming Four Thought, he returns to make the case for ambivalence. In those six years almost every trend in public life has been away from ambivalence rather than towards it. Populist movements from the left and the right are about certainty, and even the idea of balance often ends up sharing single, entrenched views, just neatly arrayed on either side. Yet in real life few decisions are truly clear-cut, there is often a case on both sides, and a reasonable person could easily reach a different conclusion with the same evidence. Most of us, much of the time, have complex and mutually contradictory views on issues small and large. And that's also true in public life: the arts and business, politics and the military are all properly in the realm of ambivalence, with complicated, messy and marginal decisions. Mark begins this programme in Dublin, speaking to a philosopher, a psychologist, an essayist and an art critic about what ambivalence is, how central it is to the human experience, and how we might embrace it. Then he travels to London, to examine areas of public life, and issues, where ambivalence feels less comfortable, more challenging. But as someone who is profoundly ambivalent about most things, much of the time, can he sustain the courage of his own ambivalence? Producer: Giles Edwards

David Baker, contributing editor of Wired, explores the challenges Facebook must meet and overcome in order to survive after a disastrous period which has seen the reputation and the business model of the social media giant questioned like never before. Producer: Jonathan Brunert

Lucy Cooke sets out to discover why honesty is almost certainly not the best policy, be you chicken, chimp or human being. It turns out that underhand behaviour is rife throughout the animal kingdom, and can be a winning evolutionary strategy. From sneaky squid, to cheating cuckoos, some species will resort to truly incredible levels of deception and deviousness to win that mate, or get more food. And when it comes to social animals like we humans, it turns out that lying, or at least those little white lies, may be the social glue that binds us all together. Lucy heads to the RSPB cliffs at Bempton, with Professor Tim Birkhead to discover why so many bird species appear to be such proficient deceivers, as well as visiting the very crafty ravens at The Tower of London. She speaks to psychologist Richard Wiseman about how to spot when someone is lying, and finds out whether she is any good at it. In fact, can we trust any of what she says in this documentary at all? Presenter Lucy Cooke Producer Alexandra Feachem

Hannah Jane Walker argues that sensitivity is overlooked, dismissed and under-utilised, and argues that our society would be much better off if we embraced it instead. Two years ago, Hannah gave a Four Thought talk about sensitivity, and received hundreds of emails from strangers, reaching out to tell her the same things: that sensitivity in our society isn’t considered useful, and that, well, ‘that’s just the system that we live in, isn’t it?’ Since then, Hannah has felt slightly ashamed at having started such a powerful conversation without offering a solution. And so in this programme she sets out to do just that. She’ll be talking to several of her correspondents, as well as a psychologist, a neuroscientist, an economist and even a newly-minted activist for the highly sensitive. The programme focuses on highly sensitive people, but sensitivity is a spectrum and as Hannah hears more about it, she also finds out more about the benefits all of us can take from being in closer touch with our sensitive sides. Producer: Giles Edwards

Anxiety has become one of the defining characteristics of our modern age, with millions of us suffering from its various damaging effects. It comes in many shapes and sizes - status anxiety, social anxiety, and more recently Brexit and Eco-anxiety. Figures indicate a big rise in its prevalence, particularly among young people and members of minority groups. In this editon of 'Archive on Four' Professor Andrew Hussey how this new age of anxiety has come about, how it compares with previous moments of national stress, and also why he believes it to be a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Hussey makes the case that while pathological forms of anxiety can be crippling, anxiety can also bring with it positive benefits - and rather than attempt to destroy it we should attempt to make it a useful ally. Producer - Geoff Bird

What happens when top graduates work behind bars as prison officers? Lucy Ash meets young people who have forsaken lucrative careers in the City or elsewhere, for what many see as one of the world’s worst jobs. They’re part of Graduates Unlocked, a scheme which, which is trying to replicate in the prison service the success of Teach First, the programme that sends high-flyers into inner-city schools. The aim is to raise the status and reputation of prison officers, to boost recruitment and cut reoffending. It is hoped that youthful enthusiasm plus resilience and empathy could bring a much needed revolution to the criminal justice system. But faced with acute understaffing and assaults on prison officers at record levels, how much of a difference can the graduates make? Lucy meets a group of young men and women who are are sent to HMP Aylesbury, which holds the longest-sentenced young adult males in the English prison system. The youth offender institution in Buckinghamshire is "in a perpetual state of crisis" according to the Howard League for Penal Reform. A few months into the graduates' stint there, the youth prison is placed in special measures for keeping some inmates locked up for 23 hours a day. Can the graduates' early idealism survive the reality of life behind bars? Producer: Arlene Gregorius

A tense debate is taking place in states across America. At what age should someone be allowed to marry? Currently in 48 out of 50 states a child can marry, usually with parental consent or a judge's discretion. In 17 states there's no minimum age meaning in theory a two year old could marry. But there's a campaign to change the law and raise the minimum age of marriage to 18 without exceptions across all American states. But changing the laws state by state is not as easy as one may think. There's resistance and raising the minimum age to 18 has often been blocked by legislators. Jane O'Brien speaks to child brides, the campaigners pushing to make it illegal and the people who say that the laws don't need to change. Producer: Rajeev Gupta Editor: Amanda Hancox

Hate seems to be everywhere - whether it’s white supremacists marching on the streets of America, jihadists slaughtering Christians in Sri Lanka or the massacre of Muslims in New Zealand. In this five part series, BBC journalist Allan Little unpicks the mechanics of hatred and reveals how this dangerous emotion has been whipped up and disseminated throughout history. Allan Little begins with the hatred he witnessed on the killing fields of the Bosnian War, deconstructing how Serbian leaders like Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic manipulated and weaponised history to inculcate a violent loathing that would lead to the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. It's a hatred and an ideology that continues to inspire today's extreme far-right. Presenter: Allan Little Producer: Xavier Zapata Editor: Helen Grady

While the video games industry is big business, it's also breaking new ground in the arts. We're at a cultural tipping point for the industry. For the past decade the process of producing and distributing games has become easier so there's now a wider array of games than ever before. And games, which are the meeting point for so many art forms, are now at the forefront of creativity, pushing boundaries and making players think differently. In this programme, Alex Humphreys speaks to leading video games designers, composers and writers from around the world about their craft, and discovers the ongoing battle to have video games recognised on a par with other creative mediums. Produced by Glyn Tansley

Radio 1 Breakfast Show host Greg James digs into the BBC's archives, taking some of the week's news stories as a starting point for a trip into the past. Greg, who describes himself as a "proud radio nerd", is let loose in the vast BBC vaults, home to a treasure trove of radio and television programmes as well as some revealing documents. He says "As someone who spends too much time searching for oddities online, the opportunity to gain access to one of the greatest media resources on the planet was too good to miss." This audio journey uncovers some surprising moments. As the UK prepares for the state visit of President Trump, Greg discovers some of his first encounters with British broadcasters - and also finds that searching for 'trump' in the archives delivers an unexpected series from the early 1980s. The Elton John biopic Rocketman arrives in our cinemas this week and the BBC archives reveal that Elton's journey to global success had a very bumpy start. And following the announcement that Yorkshire-born Simon Armitage will be the next Poet Laureate, we hear from a long-overlooked Yorkshire writer who wrote hundreds of royal poems. And there's an art review format which Greg describes as 'astonishing': two Beryls consider paintings by an artist called Beryl. Producer Paula McGinley

We assume the instruments we know and love today will be around forever. What if they're not? What new forms and ideas could take their place? Hannah Catherine Jones takes you into the world of the prototype, meeting instrument inventors challenging traditions and shifting boundaries. Sarah Kenchington is an artist and inventor living on a derelict farm in the Campsies, Scotland. Her curiosity for how instruments would sound if they were freed from humans led to a life-long endeavour. Twenty years later and she's still tinkering with her semi-mechanical orchestra, complete with hurdy-gurdy, 100-year old gramophone and ping pong machine. Savinder Bual is an artist, animator and now instrument-inventor. She's fascinated with the pineapple - a fruit that symbolises Britain's dark colonial history whilst being a fun, popular motif. By spinning the pineapple head, she realised its leaves could pluck strings and make music. That discovery led to her making a complete orchestra of pineapple instruments. The Mi.Mu gloves were invented by a team of scientists, technologists and e-textile designers. Using your movements to trigger sounds from a computer, they allow the performers the flexibility to move on stage without being connected to a computer. But if the sound isn't coming from the gloves themselves, does this still make them an instrument? Hannah enlists the expertise of Adam Harper (musicologist, music critic, former church organ player), important grime figurehead Elijah (who runs the record label Butterz), multi-instrumentalist and producer Swindle, and the luthier Bill Bunce. Hannah Catherine Jones is an artist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, conductor and founder of the Peckham Chamber Orchestra. Produced by Eliza Lomas.

Tom Heap sets off on a guilt trip road trip to find out why people like him won't give up the things they know are destroying the planet. Tom loves his powerful car. Despite a pretty thorough knowledge of the science of climate change and the contribution that his petrol-powered Subaru makes to a warming world he doesn't want to give it up. He's not alone. Most of us have dirty pleasures we have no intention of foregoing, whether that's eating meat, buying fast fashion or flying to our favourite holiday destinations. So what will make Tom and people like him change their behaviour for the sake of the planet? Tom hits the road to find out, dropping in on people who have influenced his thinking on the environment. There's food writer and cook, Jack Monroe who has helped make veganism a pleasure rather than a pain. There's John Browne, the oil company CEO who tried to push BP, Beyond Petroleum, Christiana Figueres, the diplomat who persuaded Presidents and PMs to sign up to carbon reductions. And there's the Bishop of Salford who thinks we should heed the Gospels and accept that personal sacrifice is essential to save the world. Producer: Alasdair Cross

Social media, especially Twitter has changed the way we consume the news. Articles, commentaries and opinions are put into our news feeds by the people we choose to follow. We tend to only follow the people we agree with and like, and block and unfollow the people we disagree with. We're creating our own echo chambers and social media bubbles. These bubbles are making us more polarised than ever, and we’re less likely to listen to views that are different from ours. Are we missing out on hearing the other side, because we're not hearing why they think the way they do? In this programme, for two weeks, two people with opposite views swap Twitter news feeds. One Labour voting Remainer, and one Conservative Leaver. They’ll keep audio diaries using their smartphones documenting what they’re consuming. Are they angry at what their opposite is consuming? Will it change their viewpoint on politics and world events? At the end of the experiment they’ll meet each other for the first time to discuss what they learned. Will they confront each other, or will they be ashamed of themselves? Will they be disappointed by how the opposite side thinks or will they learn from each other? Presenters: Joanna Fuertes and Cameron Bradbury Producer: Lydia Thomas

Mona Chalabi asks why female facial hair still seems to be a source of such shame. Last year, when she sent a lighthearted tweet about hairy women, she was deluged with replies. Hundreds of women wrote to her to describe the physical and emotional pain they experienced about their body hair. But there was one area they really wanted to talk about - their facial hair. And in this programme Mona will do just that – talk about female facial hair – including to some of the women who contacted her after her initial tweet. What can be dismissed as trivial is a source of deep anxiety for many women, but that’s what female facial hair is, argues Mona, a series of contradictions. It’s something that’s common yet considered abnormal, natural for one gender and apparently freakish for another. Removing it is recognized by many women - including Mona - as a stupid social norm and yet they strictly follow it. And as well as gender demarcations, this discussion touches on the intersections of race and age, too. As she tries to unravel this question, Mona will examine her own complicated feelings about this subject - as she takes us to her laser hair removal appointment. Producer: Giles Edwards

Animal senses reveal a wealth of information that humans can't access. Birds can see in ultra violet, and some fish can 'feel' electricity. But how do different species sense time? If you've ever tried to swat flies, you'll know that they seem to have super-powered reactions that let them escape before you can blink. Presenter Geoff Marsh asks whether flies have some sort of super-power to see the world in slow motion. Are they watching your hand come down at what might appear a leisurely pace? Science reveals a window into the minds of different species and their temporal perceptions. Some flies have such fast vision that they can see and react to movement at four times the rate you can, and our vision works at more than six times the speed of one species of deep sea fish. This programme delves into each moment of experience to ask 'what is time, biologically?' When birds have to dodge through forests and catch flies on the wing, or when flies have to avoid birds, it would seem that a faster temporal resolution would be a huge advantage. So what is their sense of time? Geoff meets physicist Carlo Rovelli and asks him to jump outside of physics to answer questions on biology and philosophy. Geoff explores the mind of a bat with Professor Yossi Yovel in Israel, and dissects birdsong at super slow speeds with BBC wildlife sound recordist, Chris Watson. Getting deep into the minds of animals he questions whether our seconds feel like swordfish seconds, or a beetles' or birds' or bats..? Presenter: Geoff Marsh Producer: Rory Galloway

Life for the child of an alcoholic can be lonely, locked inside a house of secrets. A code of silence means they don't want to talk to friends, or neighbours, or even their brothers and sisters. Journalist Camilla Tominey, whose mother was an alcoholic, hears their stories. Since having her own children, Camilla has longed to travel back in time and ask her, mother to mother: "What made you start drinking before noon?" Here, she and her two brothers sit down for the first time in twenty years to talk about their memories. Alcoholism is by no means a one-size fits all experience. It cuts across class lines and manifests itself in many different forms. We hear stories from people across Britain. How have they been changed by their experience and what has helped get them through? The Monster Downstairs features intimate, wrenching stories - of young people and adults - as they talk about an unpredictable existence. Producer: Caitlin Smith

Women once made up 80% of the computer industry. They are now less than 20%. Mary Ann Sieghart explores the hidden and disturbing consequences of not having women at the heart of the tech. Who is the in room today when technology is designed determines how society is being shaped. Justine Cassell, from Carnegie Mellon University, says young men in Silicon Valley are told, “Design for you. Design what you would want to use” and so virtual assistants, such as the ever-female Siri, Alexa and Cortana play with “cute talk” and female game characters still have their “tits hanging out of their blouses.” Artificial Intelligence is now making life-changing choices for us - about our health, our loans, even bail. But it isn’t faultless; it is biased. AI is only as good as the data it’s been fed and if it’s learning from prejudice, it will only amplify it. Apps designed by men are overlooking women’s health, algorithms are rejecting women outright and as MIT Professor Catherine Tucker explains, they aren’t even being sent jobs adverts “because their eyeballs are more expensive.” Mary Ann looks at why women left the computer industry and what still deters them today. She hears the challenges that tech entrepreneur Steve Shirley faced in the 1960s are almost identical to those voiced by organisers of the Google walkout last year. Women are harassed, side lined and not taken seriously; they are put off by a cult of genius and techno-chauvinism. But there is hope. Mary Ann meets campaigners trying to regulate AI gender bias and those succeeding in getting more women into tech, finding a small tweak in classroom design or style of university marking can make a real difference. Producer: Sarah Bowen.

Effigies, aliases, and a 'golden cage': it all comes down to this in the series finale about Vladislav Surkov, the most powerful man you’ve never heard of. Presented by Gabriel Gatehouse.

Is it all getting too much for the hero – or is he the villain of our series? His name is Vladislav Surkov and his enemies are circling. Gabriel Gatehouse continues the story of the most powerful man you've never heard of.

The story of Vladislav Surkov, the most powerful man you’ve never heard of, continues. His background is in theatre and PR, but his profession is politics. And in this episode, Gabriel Gatehouse tells the story of how it all comes together in a bold statement of Surkov's power and confidence.

This is the story of the most powerful man you’ve never heard of. He can spot an ex-spy with presidential potential and help turn him into a world leader. He creates opposition movements out of thin air. He’s got a nation’s news directors on speed dial. Billionaires seek his advice. He’s even got his own little war. He’s at the heart of the standoff between East and West. Some even credit him with pioneering the concept of post-truth politics. Yet few even know his name. He is Vladislav Surkov. And in this episode, Gabriel Gatehouse charts his rise from small-town Russia to the heights of power in the Kremlin.

The Puppet Master is a series that gets to the bewildering heart of contemporary Russia by exploring the fortunes of a secretive, complicated and controversial man called Vladislav Surkov. Reporter Gabriel Gatehouse speaks fluent Russian and has access to a vast cache of leaked emails from Surkov’s Kremlin office. Using these, plus archive and sources gained over a decade of covering Russia and its wars, Gatehouse goes in search of the man pulling the strings. The journey is by turns dramatic, surprising and surreal, ranging from the battlefield to the theatre and the Kremlin itself. The destination? The post-truth world we inhabit today.

On the 14th floor of Grenfell Tower, firefighters moved eight residents into flat 113. Only four would survive. Using evidence from stage 1 of the Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry, Katie Razzall pieces together what went wrong that night in flat 113. The answer reveals a catalogue of errors which may help to explain the wider disaster.

In April 1993, a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack in the London suburb of Eltham. The Metropolitan Police bungled the investigation into his killers. The Inquiry which followed by Sir William Macpherson produced one of the most damning documents ever to emerge from the heart of the British establishment. Most famously, he concluded the force was “institutionally racist” issuing wide ranging recommendations for reform. 20 years on, barrister and broadcaster Hashi Mohamed, examines what’s changed since the Macpherson report was published. What difference did it really make? The programme includes the first broadcast interview with Sir William Macpherson for nearly 20 years. Producer: Jim Frank

What do you do when you realise you’re non-binary? How do you come out to yourself? How do you find people like you? Caitlin Benedict is coming out. But before they begin, they need to really understand what it’s like to live as non-binary: to exist as neither completely male nor completely female in a world usually confined to two options. So Caitlin has enlisted the help of their friend and mentor Amrou, and together they set off for Brighton, and the Museum of Transology where curator EJ Scott shares his wisdom about life outside the gender binary, the incredible trans community in the UK, and how best to transport a pair of breasts. And Amrou takes Caitlin to meet their best friend, artist Victoria Sin. Presented by Caitlin Benedict & Amrou Al-Kadhi Produced by Caitlin Benedict, Arlie Adlington and Georgia Catt

With “toxic masculinity” high on the agenda, are we are now viewing boys as potential perpetrators of sexism and violence? Is this fair - and what should we be teaching them? After #MeToo with phrases like “toxic masculinity” on everyone's lips, are we now beginning to view boys as potential perpetrators of sexism and violence? If so, what effect is it having on them? How do we teach boys positive behaviour and prevent them repeating the mistakes of previous generations, without also making them feel that they are being vilified as emerging men? Producer Emma Kingsley, herself a mother of sons, explores this delicate balancing act. She talks to one of her boys and meets boys and girls at Moreton School near Wolverhampton to hear their views. She meets developmental pyschologist Dr. Brenda Todd from City University, London to talk about how problematic ideas around boyhood can develop from an early age. She speaks to Dan Bell from the Men and Boys Coalition who has concerns about how current debates impact on boys and she also hears from feminist writer Victoria Smith about how she balances awareness of toxic masculinity with being the mother of sons. We hear how boys are being guided towards constructing new models of behaviour with a glimpse into a workshop run by David Brockway of the Good Lad Initiative at Wetherby Senior School in London. Also taking part in the programme are Dr. Michael Ward from Swansea University who has researched how place impacts on young men's identity, anthropologist Samuel Veissière from McGill University who has researched toxic masculinity and Courtney Hartman, CEO of the company Free to be Kids whose clothing reflects anxieties about the perception of boys. Produced and presented by Emma Kingsley

Who owns Shakespeare? The English? The tourist industry? The world? Branding and Graphic Designer Teresa Monachino goes in search of the 21st century phenomenon that is William Shakespeare and uncovers his contradictory brand values, with the help of a distinguished cast: Rev Dr Paul Edmondson from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Nick Eagleton and Katharina Tudball from SuperUnion Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company Vikki Heywood, Outgoing Chairman of the Royal Society of the Arts Chino Odimba, Writer Professor Michael Dobson, The Shakespeare Institute Duncan Lees, Warwick University Michael Pennington, Actor, Director, Writer and Founder of the English Shakespeare Company Alicia Maksimova, Filmmaker Wind up Will Producer: Ellie Richold.

Bill sets off on a mission to shake up the music industry by causing chaos and confusion.

Beanbags! Beanbags are what Millenials want from a job - along with free food and the lofty idea of ‘making an impact’. That’s what academic Simon Sinek's video about "Millennials in the Workplace", enjoyed by over 10 millions viewers, would have you believe. Everyone born between 1980 and 2000 are hobbled by a thin skinned sense of entitlement, weak education, coddling parents and an addiction to social media - and therefore, are terrible to deal with in the workplace. But does that idea of the ‘snowflake’ generation really ring true? How can it be that the most educated, most tech savvy generation to ever exist are the most incompetent in modern history? Why has the Millennial generation become the most mocked and derided in the workplace? By exploring the experiences of Millennials working in the real world, combined with expert inside on the political, economical and psychological anchor points that moulded the Millennial Generation India Rakusen explores the a fundamental clash of life experiences and values between the generations and uncovers the truth about Millennials in the working world.

At a time when we're being told we need more empathy, some experts claim that narcissism - empathy's evil twin - is on the rise. Narcissism has vaulted off the psychotherapist’s couch, sprinted away from the psychiatric ward, and is now squatting in the mainstream of popular conversation. Social media seems obsessed with "narcs", and with detecting narcissism personality disorder in people. It may or may not be a coincidence that we ended up with an apparent world-class narcissist in the White House at just the time when we seemed to be undergoing a public crisis about narcissism and narcissists. Blogs and books about narcissists are everywhere. Jolyon Jenkins talks to people who make a living from advising the public about narcissists, and a self-confessed celebrity narcissist who offers consultations to people who think they may be living with one of "his kind". The evidence that there really is more narcissism around seems thin, but that doesn't mean to say that we shouldn't take it seriously when it flips into a personality disorder. Producer/presenter: Jolyon Jenkins

Empathy is the psycho-political buzzword of the day. President Obama said - frequently - that America's empathy deficit was more important than the Federal deficit. Bill Clinton said "I feel your pain", and Hillary urged us all "to see the world through our neighbour’s eyes, to imagine what it is like to walk in their shoes". Many people have taken up the idea of empathy with gusto, and the United Nations has poured money into virtual reality films that led us allegedly experience the world of, for example, a Syrian refugee. As we seem to be driving ourselves ever deeper into silos of mutual incomprehension, the idea of taking another person's perspective seems an obviously useful one. But what's the evidence that feeling someone else's pain, or even understanding it, actually does any good? Jolyon Jenkins speaks to one self-described intuitive empath, who says she can sense the feelings of strangers in a room or even in the street. She describes it as both a gift and a curse. For the rest of us, is there not a danger that, having felt a brief emotional engagement, we move on, our fundamental attitudes and beliefs unchanged? Producer/presenter: Jolyon Jenkins

As she prepares to perform two roles in a new production of the classic "White ballet", La Bayadere, the Royal Ballet's charismatic Argentinian-born principal dancer, Marianela Nunez shares her life behind the scenes. Marianela Nunez is considered one of the greatest ballerinas in the world, combining passion and flare from her Argentinian background with discipline and experience from her many years with the Royal Ballet. As she celebrates 20 years dancing with the company, she takes Radio Four's Beaty Rubens behind the scenes, sharing what it means to be a Principal Dancer today. The programme focuses on her preparations to dance the two key roles in the much-loved classic, La Bayadere - the temple dancer Nikiya and the princess Gamzatti. It reveals glimpses of her at home in her native Buenos Aires over the summer, follows her as she travels into work, attends specially - designed Pilates classes and studio rehearsals with the great Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova (who recreated Marius Petipa's 1877 Indian Classic for a contemporary audience in 1989) and culminates with her triumphant opening night, leaving her in her dressing room with her feet in a bucket of ice and surrounded by vast bouquets of pink roses. Beaty Rubens also hears from Natalia Makarova, the Royal Ballet's Kevin O'Hare and the leading Russian dancer who partners Marianela, Vadim Muntagirov. Now at the very top of her game, Marinanela Nunez is also a wonderfully charismatic individual, whose love of dance and enthusiasm for life in the Royal Ballet effervesces in this lively depiction of a true artist. Producer: Beaty Rubens ,

From H.P. Lovecraft: The investigation into a mysterious disappearance.

In 1969 Harold Wilson's Government lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Fifty years on, with calls for votes at 16 gaining support, Professor James Tilley explores not just whether reducing it further makes sense, but if arguments could be made for raising it back to 21. As most other areas of the law restrict the rights and responsibilities of 16-year-olds, why should voting buck the trend of our rites of passage into adulthood happening increasingly late? Former Labour leader Ed Miliband offers his take on why 16-year-olds should be allowed to vote, and there's some voting mythbusting from Professor Phil Cowley, who honestly answers the question as to whether 16-year-olds really dislike him. LSE Professor of Social Policy and Sociology, Lucinda Platt offers insights into the changes in the age at which key milestones of life happen now compared to in the late 60s, and Dr Jan Eichhorn of the University of Edinburgh explains the picture in Scotland where 16-year-olds can vote. And Maisie and Lottie, campaigners from York's Youth Council, put forward their views as to why they should be allowed to vote. Presented by Professor James Tilley Produced by Kev Core

Six months before Neil Armstrong’s ‘one small step’ came humanity’s giant leap. It was December 1968. Faced with President Kennedy’s challenge to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade, NASA made the bold decision to send three astronauts beyond Earth orbit for the first time. Those three astronauts spent Christmas Eve orbiting the moon. Their legendary photograph, "Earthrise" showed our planet as seen from across the lunar horizon - and was believed to have been a major influence on the nascent environmental movement. Through extraordinary NASA archive, the first British astronaut Helen Sharman goes inside the capsule to tell the story of the first time man went to another world. Written and produced by: Chris Browning Researchers: Diane Richardson and Colin Anderton

Two families from very different backgrounds, one street and a baby on a doorstep. This series charts the story of how a young Christian couple came to entrust the care of their little daughter to a Muslim family that lived nearby in 1990s Watford. They were strangers but the couple - Peris Mbuthia and Martin Gitonga - needed help, as immigrants from Kenya working in low paid jobs with a child to support and no family to step in. They were struggling and their relationship was under strain. Early one morning, Martin left his flat with six month old Sandra zipped inside his jacket and handed her over to the Zafars across the road while he went to work at a warehouse. This arrival at the door was an event that changed the course of all their lives - that day the baby girl became the Zafars' Doorstep Daughter. And a special, enduring bond developed between Sandra and the Zafar’s daughter Saiqa. It is a story of faith, trust and love - a modern day telling of how it takes a village to raise a child. In this first episode, Peris and Martin meet as they begin their new lives in London and Saiqa is on a gap year, deciding what will be in store for her. Then along comes a baby. Producer: Sally Chesworth Sound: Richard Hannaford Editor: Gail Champion Exec Editor: Richard Knight

How did Twitter, invented to allow friends to keep track of each other's social lives and interests, become a key forum for political debate? And what effect has the social media platform had on the nature and quality of public life? Presenter David Baker speaks to the man who taught President Trump everything he knows about Twitter, the head of President Obama's social media campaign, and Twitter's own leader on strategy for public policy, to explore the real effect that it has had on politics. Producer: Jonathan Brunert

Young UK adults talk about the issues that matter most to them - and why they should matter to all of us. A new podcast from Radio 4.

'Gagging clauses' - NDAs or non-disclosure agreements - have been rarely out of the headlines in recent months. High profile cases in business, politics and celebrity life have prompted calls for an outright ban, particularly when used to cover up apparent sexual impropriety. This programme explores the rise and rise of the NDA. Who uses them, why, and when? Are they an invisibility cloak, helping the rich and powerful to silence victims of their bad behaviour? Or are they a vital tool for those looking to protect personal privacy and business interests? Tiffany Jenkins investigates. Producer: Dave Howard

The Berlin-based Argentinian artist, Tomás Saraceno, trained as an architect. He was struck by the beauty of spider webs, their structural intricacy and began making them into sculptural works. Then he realised that every time a spider tugs a string as it spins a web, or moves along the silken strands, this causes vibrations. Using microphones and amplifiers it is possible to hear the tiny music they make. The different species create various sounds - bass, treble, percussion - and the result is an orchestra of arachnids. On Air is Saraceno's latest and most ambitious exhibition. He has filled the Palais de Tokyo in Paris with extraordinary, beautifully lit spiders' webs, some connected to microphones so their occupant's movements echo round the gallery. There is an African spider that spins large webs which lift in the wind and so they travel, gliding places new. This inspires Saraceno's light-weight sculptures that do the same, and an aeolian harp of spider silk, which sings in response to the turbulence caused by gallery visitors. In another piece, the amplified sound of a spider's movements cause dust motes in a beam of light to move, and these, too, produce sound. A whole room is strung with elaborate patterns of tensed ropes. Visitors move among them, plucking and stroking the strings which sound, the floor itself vibrating - the closest humans can get to the experience of a spider in its web. Saraceno's work is a collaboration between artist, spiders and people, a kind of jam session. He also invites musicians to to respond to them, to play along with spiders. The famous experimental composer Alvin Lucier does this in a concert, featured in this programme (and he bounces the sound of his heartbeat off the moon). In the gallery in Paris, and his Berlin studio, Saraceno reveals his thinking and observations. The Spider Orchestra captures these, and all these sounds in a sonic web, and combines them. It, too, is a collaboration, between artist, spiders, people and producer - creating a compelling composition, for radio. Producer: Julian May

The sounds of casting, chiming, singing and clanging are fused together to make a magical sound track to the story of how meat cleavers have been used as musical instruments for over 300 years.. Growing up in Suffolk, Nathaniel Mann, heard stories passed down by his grandma about a tradition of the village Rough Band, made up of pots and pans, iron and metal implements, including meat cleavers - delivering a sort of sonic warning to anyone stepping out of line, committing adultery or behaving in way considered unacceptable. As part of the Avant-Folk trio 'Dead Rat Orchestra', Mann, a singer and composer, has long been playing music with strange percussive instruments. Coming across an old meat cleaver in his dad's garage he was inspired to make a set of cleavers to play music on - so turned to a bronze bladesmith to help turn meat cleavers into musical gold. In a chance discovery, he discovered the idea wasn't new - and so he sought out Jeremy Barlow, author of “The Enraged Musician”, to find out the coded messages of Hogarth’s musical prints, including marrow bones and meat cleavers. He also visits BathIRON 2018, as a new bandstand is being cast for the city of Bath, and gets the chance to conduct and sing with an orchestra of master smiths. The freshly cast meat cleaver is finally used in one of the Nest Collective's Campfire Concerts, where the Dead Rat Orchestra join a trio of female folk musicians from Poland - Sutari - who have developed their own parallel world of Rough Music. A joyful celebration, some nail biting forging, and some entrancing music. You've never heard cleavers like this before.... Producer: Sara Jane Hall

Artist Emma Critchley meets filmmakers, photographers, sculptors and painters who are drawn beneath the sea to create underwater art. Julie Gautier performs a graceful, lyrical ballet on the floor of the deepest pool in the world. Without a tank of air or mask, she dances magically through crystal-clear waters across a sunken stage. In the azure waters of the world, sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor uses the seabed as his canvas. He has installed hundreds of life-sized, concrete people on the sea floor. Fish weave through his couple playing on sea-saw, tourists taking photographs or migrants huddling in a raft. As Jason works towards the opening of his first cold water installation, Emma asks what draws him to the sea, the meaning of his work and how audiences can engage with underwater art. She explores the unpredictability of working with the sea, hearing stories of storms, seasickness and near drowning. Suzi Winstanley is petrified of the deep, but her passion for documenting wildlife has taken her to the remotest and coldest places in the world. With fellow artist Olly Williams, they collaborate to paint, lightning-fast, their experience of encountering white shark and leopard sea. Emma braves the wintery British waters to talk concentration, boundaries and time with artist Peter Matthews who immerses himself in the ocean for hours, sometimes days, floating with his drawing board and paper. Sunlight dances on the twisting fabrics of headless bodies in photographer Estabrak’s pictures. For her, working in Oman, underwater is the only safe space to tell stories. For some the pull of the sea is political, for others environmental, but all the artists find extraordinary freedom in this huge untapped underwater world. Producer: Sarah Bowen

Laurie Taylor investigates the people who hear the voices of the dead in recorded sounds - and uncovers the strange and haunting world of auditory illusion. Believers in EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomena think they're hearing the voices of the beyond - messages captured in the throb and static of white noise. Laurie Taylor's a rationalist - he doesn't go in for this mumbo-jumbo. But whilst the peculiar world of EVP may not be evidence of the afterlife, it does show how we're susceptible - far more susceptible than we might have ever believed - to be deceived by our ears. Laurie takes us on an mind-bending journey through the world of aural hallucination and illusion - revealing how the ghosthunters of EVP actually are showing off something rather profound about the flaws in our auditory perception...and they way we scrabble for meaning in the booming, buzzing confusion of the world around us. Contributors include the acclaimed expert on auditory illusion Diana Deutsch, writer and sound artist Joe Banks, neurologist Sophie Scott and parapsychologist Ann Winsper. Producer: Steven Rajam for BBC Wales

Alex Bellos is brilliant at all things mathematical, but even he can't hold a candle to the amazing mathematical feats of the supercalculators. Alex heads to Wolfsburg in Germany to meet the contestants at this year's Mental Calculation World Cup. These men and women are the fastest human number crunchers on the planet, able to multiply and divide large numbers with no need to reach for a smart phone, computer or calculator. So how do they do it, and is it a skill that any of us can learn? Alex talks to Robert Fountain, the UK's two-time winner of this prestigious prize, about his hopes for this year's competition and the mathematical magicians of the past who have inspired him. He also meets Rachel Riley, Countdown's number queen, to find out what it takes to beat the countdown clock.

Donald Trump's pledge to build a "big beautiful wall" along the US-Mexico border has inserted a political urgency into the mainstream art world and made the Latino experience a point of inspiration for many. Seven artists working on either side of the border wall, from the Pacific Ocean in the west to the Gulf of Mexico in the east, describe their work and how recent US immigration policy has helped to shape it. From music, to sculpture, virtual reality and performance art, the Art of Now explores the diverse artistic scene thriving along the 2000 miles border. Producer: Sarah Shebbeare

How instant noodles, now 60 years old, went from a shed in Japan to global success. What is the most traded legal item in US prisons? Instant Noodles. According to the World Instant Noodles Association, 270 million servings of instant noodles are eaten around the world every day. Annually, that's 16 to 17 portions for every man, woman and child. At the turn of the millennium, a Japanese poll found that "The Japanese believe that their best invention of the twentieth century was instant noodles." The Taiwanese-Japanese man who invented them (Momofuku Ando) was convinced that real peace would only come when people have enough to eat. In the bleak wreckage of post-war Japan, he spent a year in a backyard hut, creating the world's most successful industrial food. Crucially, he wanted the noodles to be ready to eat in less than three minutes. That convenience has since become a selling point for noodles that are consumed by students, travellers and, yes, prisoners the world over. Instant noodles first went on sale in 1958, and they've changed little since. Sixty years on, Celia Hatton explores the story behind instant noodles. It's a journey that starts in Japan, at the nation's instant noodle museum, and then takes her to China, still the world's number one market for "convenient noodles" as they're known there. Chinese sales of instant noodles are falling, though, as the country becomes wealthier. But noodles are still on sale in every food store in the country. The story ends with Celia being shown how to make a "prison burrito" by an ex-prisoner from Riker's Island prison in New Jersey, in the US. We hear why instant noodles have emerged as the prisoners' currency of choice. Momofuku Ando's invention lives on. Producer: John Murphy.

The story of knife crime, told in verse by the weapon itself. Why do teenagers carry knives? How does it feel to live in a world where that's normal? How should we respond to the moral panic generated by the current wave of youth crime? Momtaza Mehri, Young People's Poet Laureate for London, presents a verse-journey into the thoughts and feelings of those for whom knife crime is an everyday reality. Perpetrator or victim, armed or defenceless, all the lines blur in "Ballad of the Blade" - a poem told in the voice of the knife as it travels on a chilling arc out of a child's bedroom, through fear, a yearning to belong and succeed, ruin and - sometimes - redemption. First-person voices from London and Sheffield splinter through the poem, reflecting the mosaic of lives affected by youth violence - bereaved youngsters and determined parents, criminals and youth workers. "Ballad of the Blade" is scored by Jon Nicholls. The programme was devised by Andrew Efah of BBC II! Producer Monica Whitlock.

The Sound Odyssey is a new series in which Gemma Cairney takes British artists for musical collaborations in different countries around the world, hearing the musicians in a new light, and exposing their artistic process as they create something new in different and unfamiliar surroundings with an artist they have never met before. In the first of a series of journeys Nadine Shah a British Muslim artist travels to Beirut, to collaborate with Lebanese singer songwriter and musicologist Youmna Saba. The challenge will be for them to create a track together in Beirut in just two days. Both have very different musical styles and cultural heritages. Nadine was born in Whitburn, South Tyneside, to an English mother of part-Norwegian ancestry and a Pakistani father. Her music is very much inspired by conflict, immigration, and cultural and religious identity, and her latest Mercury Prize nominated album, Holiday Destination was written about the Syrian refugee crisis. Although Nadine's lyrics have been very much inspired by the conflict in Syria she has never been to the Middle East. Youmna Saba holds a master's degree in Musicology, focusing mainly on the parallels between classical Arabic music and Arabic visual art. She is a part-time instructor at the musicology department at the Antonine University. Her sound borrows elements from the Arabic music tradition, and blends them with electronic treatments, sonic textures and loops. They will meet and collaborate in Beirut, a city once ravaged by civil war that has been gaining a reputation as a burgeoning cultural hub where cultural and religious diversity sits side by side. Once dubbed "the Paris of the Middle East", the Lebanese capital is a beautiful and daringly hopeful vision of what the future of the region might hold - A city of new ideas -art, fashion, political movements, multiculturalism and a thriving music scene. Whilst in the city Gemma Cairney meets local artists including Dima Matta the host of Cliffhangers, a storytelling group and platform which offers a safe space for people to express themselves in a country where this is very problematic and censorship is very much a real thing. And we hear from Syrian rock group Tanjaret Daghet, who now live in Beirut as exiles, anxious about their families and homes. Presented by Gemma Cairney Produced by Jax Coombes A BBC 6 Music Production for BBC Radio 4.

A story of love, denial and a curious death. Philippe Sands investigates the mysterious disappearance of senior Nazi, Otto Wachter, and journeys right to the heart of the Ratline.

In February 2017, President Trump made a speech to his supporters. He moved on to the topic of immigration and Sweden. "You look at what's happening last night in Sweden," he told the crowd at a rally in Florida. "They took in large numbers; they're having problems like they never thought possible". This confused the Swedes because they hadn't noticed anything happening on that Friday night in their country. What Trump was referring to was a Fox News report he had seen about immigration and crime in Sweden. The report twisted a story done by Ruth Alexander for Radio 4's More or Less programme and used misleading statistics to try to show that recent immigrants were responsible for a crime wave in Sweden. More or Less debunked the report and its use of statistics but since then there has been spate of violent crime in Sweden. Ruth Alexander travels to Stockholm and Malmö to find out the truth about what's going on. Producer: Keith Moore.

According to Charles W. Eliot - President of Harvard and cousin of T.S. - everything required for a complete, liberal education could fit on a shelf of books just 5-feet in length. In 1909 the first volume of the Harvard Classics were published - and grew to become a 51-volume anthology of great works, including essays, poems and political treatises. But what if people today from all walks of life were asked to recommend books to be included on a five foot shelf? Which books do they think might be required for a complete home education? Ian Sansom has set a course for Wigtown - Scotland's National Booktown - to find out. Local craftsman Steve has been busy creating just the shelf for the job - exactly five foot long - and fashioned from elm wood and whiskey barrels recycled from a local distillery. Ian will be playing shopkeeper at the Open Book in Wigtown - a B&B meets bookshop which allows visitors to indulge their fantasy of running their own bookstore. With Ian parked behind the counter, all that's needed is for visitors to drop by and try to persuade him of the books they think deserve a rightful place on The Five Foot Shelf. But of course not everything will make it on and as custodian of the shelf, Ian can be ruthless. Well, kind of... No academics. No critics. No nonsense. The Five Foot Shelf is a guide for readers by readers about the books which matter to them. Producer: Conor Garrett.

If you are a parent, you probably do not need an introduction to Fortnite Battle Royale. It's the online video game that's been absorbing the minds and time of millions of children and young adults since its launch last September. To the uninitiated, it's an online shooter game that has elements of The Hunger Games movies and the building video game Minecraft. In each match, 100 people are air-dropped onto a cartoon-rendered island where they run around searching for weaponry, building defensive forts and fighting to the death. The winner is the last one standing. It's free to play on multiple devices from computers to games consoles to smartphones. Presenter Kevin Fong (medical doctor, broadcaster and father of two) asks, is Fornite more like the new crack cocaine or more like the Beatles? It's estimated that more than 125 million people have played Fortnite Battle Royale and that 3 million people around the world are playing it at any one time. Its creators Epic Games have earned more than US$1 billion from Fortnite within the last year, and that is just from players buying virtual outfits and victory dances for their avatars. These dances or 'emotes' have leaked out of Fortnite's virtual world into the real one as anyone watching the World Cup will have seen. Football players now emote on scoring goals. There are also professional Fortnite players who are making millions by playing the game while vast numbers of people spectate via live streaming internet channels. Fortnite's Ronaldo is Ninja, a 26 year old man in Illinois, USA. It's said he makes US$ 500,000 from the 300 hours he spends playing the game each month. There are now Fortnite e-sports scholarships offered to students at one university in the United States. Is Fortnite a revolutionary development in video gaming and what is the formula of its undoubted success? With the World Health Organisation recently adding Gaming Disorder to its list of disease categories, how concerned should parents be about the risks of gaming addiction for their Fortnite-playing offspring? Kevin Fong explores the culture and conversation around Fornite with gamers of all ages, games creators, games culture experts, psychologists and psychiatrists. Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

In a special edition of the science and comedy podcast to mark the 100th episode, Brian Cox and Robin Ince reminisce about their favourite moments from the show.

Broadcaster and comedian Steve Punt scours the archives to exhume the often pretentious and opinionated philosophical outpourings of pop stars through the ages. With the help of music journalists Paul Morley, Kate Mossman, DJ and record producer Ras Kwame and surprising soundbites from the archive, Steve explores the concept of the pop star as philosopher. From pop star hobbies, to politics and theories of aliens and the Illuminati, Steve explores the attempts of pop stars to make sense of a chaotic world. Presenter: Steve Punt Producer: Georgia Catt.

The American satirist Joe Queenan goes in search of sovereignty. He wants to know what it is, what's it for, and how old it is "Now I know this is a big issue for you all right now. Over here we've been fighting over sovereignty since the eighties. The 1780s. But I still don't really understand what it is, nor why it's making everyone so mad." With contributions from Professor Richard Bourke, editor of Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective; and Edith Hall the author of Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde

Donegal is an Irish county where silence is a virtue. You can find it in the desolate landscape, the big skies and far horizons - but silence can be found in the people too. Maybe it's discretion or reticence. It could be shyness or a kind of wisdom. So when radical free-thinking commune, The Atlantis Foundation, set up home in the remote Donegal village of Burtonport in the mid-1970s, it seemed like an unlikely choice of location. Led by charismatic Englishwoman Jenny James and inspired by an experimental brand of counter-cultural psychology, the foundation practised 'primal scream' therapy. This was about letting it all out, yelling; shouting; shrieking to release deep rooted fears in the most challenging and visceral way. The locals simply called them the Screamers. Author and Donegal native Garrett Carr was a boy when he first heard of the Screamers. His family would lower their voices when mentioning them. While he found the name unnerving, Garrett was intrigued. On the coast near his home, he liked to imagine he could hear their cries echoing across the water. Now Garrett is returning to Donegal to find out who the Screamers were, what they wanted and if they ever managed to find it. Most of all he wants to know what happened when the quiet restraint of his local community was confronted by the outward abandonment of the Atlantis Foundation. Garrett is going home to discover what happens when silence meets scream. Producer: Conor Garrett.

BBC political correspondent Chris Mason examines the changing accents of politics and politics of accents, with help from politicians, language experts and an impersonator. The programme examines the ways that stereotypes and prejudices can be loaded onto accents, how the voting public responds to different voices, and what politicians can do and have done about it all. With the help of the archive, the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock and former Conservative minister Edwina Currie reflect on the political soundtrack of their lifetimes. How have their voices, those of their contemporaries and the sound of the national political conversation changed? How is it possible and when it is sensible to change your accent? Chris is joined by Steve Nallon, who impersonated Lady Thatcher on Spitting Image, to listen back to her as a new backbencher and later as Prime Minister. And what about the sound of political reporting? The archive allows the former Today Programme presenter Jack Di Manio to give Chris (a son of the Yorkshire dales) a lesson in speaking 'properly'. So are we really becoming more open minded about this aspect of political communication? The programme hears from two MPs who say they still struggle to be understood in the Commons today. Producer: Joey D'Urso.

Michael Sheen explores Aneurin Bevan's roots in Tredegar. A spectre is haunting Tredegar. It feels a little like that at least. This town high in the South Wales Valleys is understandably proud of its most famous son and makes the most of his memory. Aneurin Bevan was born in Tredegar in 1897. And he was the local MP there until his death in 1960. Memories of Bevan still populate the streets. Aneurin Bevan was a coalminer at the age of 13. He was a troublemaker with a stutter. An autodidact. He won a scholarship from his union for further study in London. He joined committees. He was a town councillor, then a district councillor, before reaching Westminster in 1929, where his greatest legacy must surely be his central role in the founding of the NHS in 1948. The civic religion of the NHS. And he fought for it in the image of Tredegar. It's perhaps ironic then, that it's in Aneurin Bevan's home town that the effect of the NHS was felt least of all. By that time an estimated 96% of the town's population was covered anyway, by a voluntary scheme: the Workmen's Medical Aid Society. This is what Aneurin Bevan was referring to when he said, "All I am doing is extending to the entire population of Britain the benefits we had in Tredegar for a generation or more. We are going to 'Tredegar-ise' you." He said that while he was battling to establish the system nationwide. Or he said it with a jeer to Winston Churchill across the dispatch box in the Commons. Or maybe he wrote it somewhere. Anyway, it's etched on a plaque outside the old Town Hall in Tredegar. The now dilapidated town hall, just down the street from one of Bevan's old meeting places, which is now a DWP Assessment Centre, itself just down the hill from the Medical Centre, which has been trying unsuccessfully for months and months to recruit new staff. Those details shouldn't be the beginning or the end of anyone's image of Tredegar. It's more various and interesting - and more beautiful - than they might suggest. But those details, and others like them, do lead eager programme-makers to feel pleased with themselves when, after spending a necessarily small amount of time in the town, they reverse that old slogan of Bevan's and ask, idly it must be said: who is going to Tredegar-ise Tredegar today? With Dr Alfazuddin Ahmed, Eryl Evans, Iwan Fox, Megan Fox, Alwyn Powell and Nick Thomas-Symonds MP With grateful thanks to the Tredegar Brass Band and the Tredegar Local History Museum. Producer: Martin Williams.

The writer and illustrator Judith Kerr has created some of our best-loved books for children since publishing her first, and perhaps most famous book, 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea', which celebrates its 50th birthday this year. Judith's life has always inspired her writing, from fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, a story she told in 'When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit', to the peculiar family cats whose adventures she chronicled in the Mog series. Now 94 years old, Judith is still hard at work, still writing and drawing in the study overlooking the common where she has written all her books and in this programme Judith invites us into her study as she works on her latest classic. Producer & Presenter: Jessica Treen.

A convent of Mexican nuns is helping to save the one of the world's most endangered and most remarkable amphibians: the axolotl, a truly bizarre creature of serious scientific interest worldwide and an animal of deep-rooted cultural significance in Mexico. The Sisters of Immaculate Health rarely venture out of their monastery in the central Mexican town of Patzcuaro. Yet they have become the most adept and successful breeders of their local species of this aquatic salamander. Scientists marvel at their axolotl-breeding talents and are now working with them to save the animal from extinction. BBC News science correspondent Victoria Gill is allowed into the convent to discover at least some of the nun's secrets and explores why axolotls are a group of salamanders so important to protect from evolutionary oblivion. Axolotls are able to regrow lost limbs and other body parts. As a result, the aquatic salamanders are of great interest to researchers worldwide who study them in the hope of imitating the trick: to grow tissues and organs for medicine. The nuns also began to breed and rear their axolotls for medical reasons. They use the salamander as the key ingredient in an ancient Mexican remedy for coughs and other respiratory illnesses. The Sisters of Immaculate Health sell the medicinal syrup to the public. As well as being the basis for a popular folk remedy all over Mexico, the axolotl is also the manifestation of one of the ancient Aztecs' most important gods. The big problem is that all species of axolotl are critically endangered. The nun's species is known locally as the achoque. It only lives in nearby Lake Patzcuaro and it has been pushed to the edge of extinction because of pollution and introduced fish species. This is why the sisters began to breed the animals in the convent about 30 years ago. They were advised to do this by a friar who was also a trained biologist because the supply of achoques from Lake Patzcuaro's fishermen diminished. In the 1980s, 20 tonnes of axolotls were fished from the lake every year. Today they are very few left in the wild. Biologists from the nearby Michoacan University discovered that the nuns are expert breeders of the species and have started to collaborate with them in a conservation programme to make the Lake Patzcuaro an axolotl-friendly habitat once more and (if necessary) to introduce convent-bred animals to restore the lake's tiny population. The project is being supported and funded by the UK's Chester Zoo. The zoo's curator of amphibians Dr Gerardo Garcia visits the convent with Victoria, and demonstrates some of the technical help being offered to the nuns. For example, he micro-chips and takes DNA samples from the nun's breeding salamanders so the sisters can refine their breeding success even further. Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

So - how slow are we talking about, when it comes to art? French anarchist vegetarian artists Elizabeth Saint-Jalmes & Cyril Leclerc rescue snails bound for the cooking pot, and display them as a sound and light installation - Slow Pixel - before setting them free. To watch illuminated snails crawl across a concert hall for 6 hours is one way of bringing your heart beat right down! Twenty-two ash trees, shaped and sculpted as they grow quietly for 40 years, in a secret location; an extinct volcano filled with subterranean light passages; music to play for a 1000 years; a mile of writing, and a 5 hour composition for a string quartet called 'Slow', played as slowly and quietly as possible... As the 21st century continues at break-neck speed Lindsey Chapman brings you a moment of calm, as she meets some extraordinary musicians and artists, to find out the motivation behind creating slow art. Lindsey - a performer herself, as well as presenter for BBC TV's 'Springwatch' - explores what added value the length of time of creation gives to an artistic idea. Does it make time shrink? Or does it distract us from our awareness of our own finite existence? The biggest art project in progress in the world today is the Roden Crater. You may not have heard of it yet, but Leonardo DiCaprio has been booked to open it, although no one yet knows when that will be. It's the work of artist James Turrell who dreamed, in the 1960's, of sculpting an extinct volcano as a celestial viewing post. and he's spent 40 years working on it so far - Tim Marlow, artistic director of the Royal Academy, has been watching its progress. Also in progress for 40 years, the Ash Dome - created by world acclaimed wood sculptor David Nash. he gives Lindsey is given the coordinates to find the secret circle, and she comes across it on a bluebell strewn forest floor at dawn, a magical moment of pure beauty - but one which leads her to consider where she might be in 40, or 400 years from now. Slow art has that effect - seeing into the future, and sometime fearfully into infinity. Jem Finer, musician and ex-Pogue bassist, has created a piece of music called 'Longplayer', which has already been playing for 18 years and which has another 982 to go - and of course he knows he won't be there to hear it end. Tanya Shadrick knelt beside an open air swimming pool, day after day, month after month, writing a diary, line by line, a mile long. What inspired her to create "Wild Patience?" and what did she learn? Composer Morton Feldman is well known for his long slow quiet pieces of music - but what is it like to actually hold and play the violin on stage for five hours? Darragh Morgan recounts the intensity, and how he never gets bored, and in fact falls in love with the beauty of the music - lie being wrapped in a beautiful shawl of sound. Slow art in under half an hour - sit back and relish the moment. Producer: Sara Jane Hall.

It is 175 years since the word "commuter" was used for the first time. (The word does not in fact describe a traveller, it describes a transaction: regular travellers on the railroad into Manhattan were given the opportunity to "commute" their individual tickets into a season pass. Ever since, commuters have been both travellers and revenue stream.) Today our great cities inhale and exhale millions of commuters, who start their journey in the darkness of winter mornings in the suburbs, resurface blearily in the heart of the city and return to long tucked-in children in darkness. It wasn't meant to be like this. Matthew Sweet looks at our imagined world of fantasy journeys and asks if driverless cars, monorails, or high speed transport systems might deliver them in the future. Producer Mark Rickards.

Since Ireland's independence, the Catholic Church has played a preeminent role in defining morality south of the border. However in recent decades, its position as moral arbiter has come under attack. Congregation sizes have fallen dramatically, and constitutional referenda have legalised contraception, divorce and gay marriage despite the vehement opposition of the Catholic Church. As Ireland goes to the polls to vote this time on abortion, William Crawley asks could this signal further decline in the Catholic Church's authority in society and its relationship with the State. Producer: Neil Morrow.

Are plants rather cleverer than once thought? Scientists from around the world are claiming that plants cannot just sense, but communicate, learn and remember. In an experiment in Australia, plants appeared to learn to associate a sound with a food source, just as Pavlov's dogs linked the sound of a bell with dinner. In Israel they've found that plants communicated a message from one to another, and that the information was then used to survive drought. In British Columbia and the UK researchers have shown that trees pass information and nutrients to each other through an underground fungal network. This even happens more with closely related trees or seedlings than with strangers. And in California it turns out that sagebrush shrubs have "regional dialects"! Botanist James Wong explores these findings and asks whether, if plants can do all these things, and if, as one scientist says, they are a "who" and not a "what", then is it wrong to eat them? Producer Arlene Gregorius Contributors: Prof. Richard Karban Dr Monica Galiano Prof. Ariel Novoplansky Prof Suzanne Simard Dr Brian Pickles Prof Michael Marder.

In 2014 Polly Weston's sister Lara died. She had just turned 22. Lara and her family had never discussed organ donation, and she wasn't on the register. But when the family were asked if they would consider donation, they said yes. Out of the tragedy of her death, medics managed to donate her organs to four women, while her eyes saved the sight of three men. In February a bill passed its second reading in Parliament to say that England would seek to move to an organ donation opt-out system - meaning citizens would be presumed to consent to their organs being donated unless they actively withdrew from the system. It seemed like there was universal support for the announcement. Labour were behind it. Newspapers rejoiced. But having been through the process, Polly's family were unsure about whether this policy change would bring about an improvement in donations. Now she asks what does organ donation really mean to families - and will an opt out system really make a difference? Produced and presented by Polly Weston.

Journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera returns to his home town of Wolverhampton where a battle raged over the right to wear the turban on the buses in Enoch Powell's constituency at the time he made his Rivers of Blood speech. In 1967 Sikh bus driver Tarsem Singh Sandhu returns from his holidays wearing a turban and a beard, both against the uniform regulations. The Wolverhampton Transport Committee insists rules are rules and there will be no exceptions, so Mr Sandhu enlists the help of a Punjabi political party, the Akali Dal, who employ radical tactics. They bus in Sikhs from around the UK for the biggest march in Wolverhampton since the war, and one of their leaders, Sohan Singh Jolly, announces that he will set himself on fire if their demands are not met. Right in the middle of the dispute, Enoch Powell makes his infamous Rivers of Blood speech, specifically citing the Sikh campaign as a dangerous example of communalism, where religious or ethnic groups seek special rights that threaten the very fabric of society. Sathnam Sanghera discovers the real story behind the dispute with surprising revelations that shed light on the history of race relations in the UK.

Adam Tjolle is a vet with two brains - who once starred on the BBC's Animal Hospital. His second brain - in reality a slow-growing tumour - was discovered by accident on a scan when he fell off his bike. The presenter of the programme, his friend (and psychologist) Claudia Hammond is really interested in what's going on inside his head, so has kept a record - before and after the life-changing surgery. Adam's biggest fear is losing his memories - so he asks friends and family to send patches of fabric to make a special hat - to remind him of them as well as keep his head warm in chilly Edinburgh. The surgeon will operate while Adam is wide awake - being careful to cause the least damage possible to the area of his brain which controls spatial awareness, time perception and his decision-making skills, while also removing as much of the tumour as possible. Producer: Paula McGrath Presenter: Claudia Hammond.

BBC 6 Music's Chris Hawkins listens to new music every day - and he's noticing a trend. More and more of the bands he plays on the station are writing about politics. Acts like Nadine Shah, Cabbage, Idles and Life are covering topics as diverse as The NHS, the refugee crisis of 2016, austerity and rail privatisation. Chris visits the performers to ask them what is fuelling their music, considering whether supposedly radical bands are operating in a form of musical filter bubble - singing radical songs to an audience who already agree with their point of view. From the blues to grime, music and politics have always been intertwined, but Chris Hawkins provides a snapshot of the topics which are driving a generation of rock bands right now. Presented by Chris Hawkins Producer Kevin Core Music featured: Nadine Shah: Out the Way. Holiday Destination. Mother Fighter. Jolly Sailor. Idles: Mother. Divide and Conquer. Life: In Your Hands. Euromillions. Cabbage: Tell Me Lies About Manchester. Preach to the Converted.

Rajesh speaks with Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University who has been collecting stories of coincidence since 2011. Rajesh wants to find out why he is so prone to coincidence. Along with discovering mind blowing coincidences Rajesh sets out on an experiment to see if he can seek out coincidence and he's very surprised by the results. David Spiegelhalter believes its not that these things occur, it's that we notice them. As well as giving an opportunity to study probability and chance David believes that coincidences are important to us, because they are uplifting and good for us. Rajesh does not disappoint and in the making of the programme hears and experiences several coincidences which will leave you thinking what are the odds of that. Produced by Kate Bissell.

The relationship between mothers and sons as depicted in the arts is complex and, as anyone familiar with Medea's story will attest, not always terribly positive. As Lauren Laverne discovers, however, there are many examples of stories, films and dramas in which the love between mums and sons is very much celebrated, and as a mother of two boys herself, Lauren is very keen to unpick the particular facets of the relationship as depicted on page, stage and screen. She meets Sophie Ellis Bextor, mother of four boys, and hears about carving out a space in which she can continue her career as a singer - even if that has meant at times recording songs with a baby in her arms. Patrick Ness is the author of the novel 'A Monster Calls' and also wrote the screenplay for the successful film. He tells Lauren how the story, about a boy dealing with the imminent death of his mum from cancer, was originally conceived by another author, Siobhan Dowd, who died before getting chance to complete it. Madisen Ward and the Mama Bear, a highly successful mother and son band from Kansas, talk about how they came to play together and the various upsides of being together on the road. Finally, Lauren meets Jonathan Butterell and Dan Gillespie Sells, who helped create the West End hit 'Everybody's Talking About Jamie', the musical version of a true story about a teenage boy from County Durham who is determined to go to the school prom in a dress. The story appealed to both Jonathan and Dan because each of them recognised the 'fierce and open hearted relationship' they shared with their own mothers. Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Geoff Bird.

For thousands of years, bald men have been the subject of ridicule. As a result they've felt ashamed and have resorted to desperate measures to hide their condition. During the decades when hair style was a cultural battleground between youth and the establishment, the balding man was at the bottom of the heap. No prime minister since Clement Attlee has been bald. But increasingly, bald men are coming out of the closet and shaving their heads - and some women too. Research shows that bald men are perceived as less attractive but more dominant. Now that we are more relaxed about hair style, and more willing to tolerate tonsorial diversity, are bald men finally able to shed the stigma? And could the comb-over finally make a come back? Ian Marchant, who has shaved his head since the early 1980s, investigates. Producer: Jolyon Jenkins.

Twenty years ago, in February 1998, one of the most serious public health scandals of the 20th century was born, when researcher, Andrew Wakefield and his co-authors published a paper in the medical journal The Lancet suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. As we know, in the years that followed, Wakefield's paper was completely discredited as "an elaborate fraud" and retracted. Attempts by many other researchers to replicate his "findings" have all failed and investigations unearthed commercial links and conflicts of interests underpinning his original work. Wakefield himself was struck off the medical register. And yet, the ripples of that episode are still being felt today all over the world as a resurgent anti-vaccine movement continues to drive down inoculation rates, particularly in developed Western societies, where measles rates have rocketed particularly in Europe and the United States. But the Wakefield scandal hasn't just fostered the current ant-vax movement but has played a key role in helping to undermine trust in a host of scientific disciplines from public health research to climate science and GM technology. Through the archive, science journalist Adam Rutherford explores the continuing legacy of the anti-vaccine movement on the anniversary of one of its most notorious episodes, and explore its impact on health, on research and on culture both at home and abroad.

Dawn Walton, artistic director of Eclipse, the black theatre touring company, was bored of only ever coming across three black stories in British theatres - slavery stories, immigrant stories, and gang stories. She knew there was a far greater range of stories out there and she wanted to tell them. Revolution Mix is the result - a programme of new plays inspired by 500 years of black British history and it will be the largest ever presentation of black British stories performed in regional theatres. In this intimate portrait of artistic director Dawn Walton, we follow her as she leads her company, Eclipse Theatre, to its premiere of the first play in her ground-breaking Revolution Mix programme - Black Men Walking. It's a new play inspired by a real-life black men's walking group in Sheffield. Not only does the play challenge clichéd representations of black people, it's also an experimental work fusing music, movement, and magic. In this programme, as well as hearing from some of those involved in the production, we hear Dawn rehearsing her company, coping with a significant bereavement, discussing her life before entering the world of theatre, and finally sharing her ambitions for British theatre. Revolution Mix is an enterprising programme and in Dawn Walton it has a doughty champion. Presenter: Ekene Akalawu Interviewed Guest: Dawn Walton Interviewed Guest: Ola Animashawun Interviewed Guest: Testament (aka Andy Brooks) Interviewed Guest: Dorcas Sebuyange Interviewed Guest: Tyrone Huggins Interviewed Guest: Trevor Laird Interviewed Guest: Tonderai Munyevu Producer: Ekene Akalawu.

How cunning is Donald Trump? In Queenan on Cunning, the satirist Joe Queenan explores a word rarely associated with the current President of the USA. "From Odysseus to Bismarck, via Brer Rabbit and Machiavelli's The Prince, there's a fine tradition of tricksters and hucksters, but where does the Donald fit in the mix? You need patience, intelligence, forward planning - some of these are Trump-like qualities. Stress on the some. But he's by no means a modern day Odysseus. Not much of a sailor." With contributions from Adam MacQueen, author of The Lies of the Land; Edith Hall, who wrote a cultural history of Homer's Odyssey; and Tibor Fischer, whose forthcoming novel is called How to Rule the World. Plus John Sergeant, Kathy Lette, Richard Nixon, Alistair McAlpine, Laura Barton ... and a campaigning American president cross-faded with a much loved song from The Jungle Book. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.

The work of the entomologist very often involves the killing of insects in large numbers. This happens in the search for new species in the exploration of the planet's biodiversity and in ecological investigations to monitor the health of wild insect populations and the impact we are having on the environment. But the methods of entomologists have come under criticism. Last August presenter and entomologist Adam Hart was involved in a citizen science project aimed at surveying the abundance and distribution of the various species of social wasp around the country. The survey entailed members of the public setting up wasp traps in their gardens for a week and then sending the dead insects to the lab running the project. Many people took part but the study also generated negative newspaper coverage and stinging criticism on social media. The reaction got Adam Hart thinking: can his profession really defend the death of thousands and sometimes millions of insects for the sake of science, especially when there's so much concern around insect conservation? How do entomologists feel about killing their subjects, and might the insects themselves feel something akin to pain and suffering themselves? Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.

Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia or CLL, is the most common form of leukaemia. It's a disease which kills. The most common treatment is with chemotherapy. If that doesn't work, most patients can only expect to live for another few years at most. But there are dramatic developments with new targeted treatments which are less toxic than conventional chemotherapy. In this programme, reporter Simon Cox follows a medical trial based at St James' hospital in Leeds which uses a unique combination of drugs designed to defeat the cancer. It's the last hope for many patients but will it work? Can researchers find a cure? Presenter: Simon Cox Producer: Jim Frank Editor: Andrew Smith Image: Illustration of man in a white coat looking at a test tube Credit: BBC.

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 an illegitimate child. Her grandmother's older sister had an illegitimate child during WW1 with an American soldier who was brought up as though his mother was his sister. She explores the archives to find out if the stigma has died out with social historian Jane Robinson and discusses the issue with best-selling crime author Martina Cole and fellow MP Jess Phillips. Martina, who is also an ambassador for the single parent families' charity Gingerbread, became a single parent by choice when she was 18 and then again 20 years later. Jess conceived her son when she was 22 and had been with her boyfriend for barely a month. Is the biggest deal today not whether a child is illegitimate but whether she bears her father's surname? Has the cloak of illegitimacy really fallen because daddy is willing to say publicly: she's mine? This programme contains archive clips of the stories of Betty, Ada and Gina from 'The Secret World of Sex: In Disgrace' (1991), sourced from Domino Films, copyright of Testimony Films - http://www.testimonyfilms.com/

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 may be talking to each other in an unexpected way, resulting in recognisable faces being mixed up with recognisable objects, hence Mrs Thatcher as an axe, a handbag, and even a shark. Now, cartoonist and neuroscientist are going to meet. "I for one would be fascinated to know what's going on in my brain - please pursue this," says Gerald Scarfe. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.

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 herders and horsemen are being plucked from the vast plains and taken to Ulaanbataar - where they're transformed into the next generation of top-flight tenors and baritones. It's a fascinating synergy of young men with the perfect physique, often honed in a rugged, traditional outdoorsmen culture, and a superb Soviet-era music and arts education system that - just over half a century after its State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet first opened - is delivering the next generation of global singing superstars. Radio 4 brings you a hypnotic audio portrait, taking you from the open plains, horse lullabies and throat singing of the endless Mongolian landscape to the cultural melee of Ulaanbataar - a place of stark contrasts where gleaming 21st century skyscrapers rise, yet where around half the population live in traditional gers (tents). A nation numbering just 3 million people, yet the size of Western Europe, and sandwiched between the gigantic superpowers of Russia and China - how much can Mongolia harness its cultural might to have a voice in global geopolitics? In the first episode, journalist Kate Molleson documents the story of Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar - last year, the winner of one of the most prestigious prizes in global opera: the BBC Cardiff Singer Of The World Song Prize, whose previous winners include Bryn Terfel and Ailish Tynan. Ariunbaatar was born to a family of nomadic herders, who still live a traditional lifestyle in the immense Mongolian steppe. At his family's ger, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, Kate is treated to a performance of Mongolian longsong - the nation's traditional classical singing art - as well as joining Ariunbaatar on horseback to hear the songs he sang as a young boy, alone in the vast wilderness. Is Mongolia's unique traditional culture - perhaps even its landscape itself - the secret of its extraordinary vocal alchemy? In the concluding episode, Kate explores the political value of Mongolia's musical prowess. In the Soviet era, the communist government used the people's love of traditional song to advance opera, and with it a certain idea of "civilisation"; in 2017, the current government see Mongolia's operatic might as a way of punching above its weight in global geopolitics. The buzzword on everyone's lips is "soft power" - a way for Mongolia to be part of a global conversation with nations - like its neighbours Russia and China - they could never compete with militarily or economically. As Mongolia's foremost opera star prepares to take the stage in Ulaanbaatar, Kate explores the diversity of Mongolia's musical makeup in 2017 - from breakout indie acts and hip hop DJs to women throat singers causing ripples in the nation's venerable traditional classical singing art. Producer: Steven Rajam Presenter: Kate Molleson A BBC Wales production for BBC Radio 4.

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 involvement in Jihad - the youth organisations which helped send hundreds of young Brits to fight overseas. The programme also reveals reports featured in magazines published in the 1990s by Lashka-e-Taiba - the terrorist group behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Within its pages are detailed reports on how its leader Hafiz Saeed came to Britain in the mid-90s to spread the word on fighting a holy war, find recruits and raise money. The programme hears from those who answered his call - the British Muslims who built bridges with militant groups in South Asia and beyond. Many of these 'pioneers' came from Britain's Salafi community - followers of a strict, literal interpretation of Islam. Since 9/11 the Salafis - sometimes known as Wahhabis - have often been named as the key influencers in the global jihad, but is that accurate? The programme also explains the nuances of Salafism and how this early period of British involvement in Jihad was itself hugely divisive within the British Salafi community, creating a schism between a peaceful pious majority, and those who chose to take up arms. Producers: Richard Fenton-Smith & Sajid Iqbal.

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 nature? How have people thought about luck in the past and what's changed today? Can you bring good luck upon yourself - there's a school of thought these days that thinks you can without appealing to the divine or supernatural. In Good Luck Professor Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University looks at notions of luck in gambling, traces the origins of how we think about fate and fortune, the religious and psychological view of luck and how the emergence of theory of probability changed our view of it. He is convinced by the philosopher Angie Hobbs that there is one form of luck it is rational to believe in and by psychologist Richard Wiseman that there is a secular solution to bringing about good fortune in your life. Good Luck Professor Spiegelhalter, is presented by David Spiegelhalter and produced in Salford by Kevin Mousley.

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 highest tidal range in the world and it's the moon that makes this happen. Luke's become fascinated with finding out everything he can about the cultural, artistic and poetic significance of the moon, and the latest scientific developments around it. It both reflects our culture and inspires it. Being colourblind he's interested in all forms of light, and moonlight is fascinating and has very particular properties. The fact we see 'the man in the moon' is a perceptual and optical illusion. But again, different cultures see different imagery - in China they see the Hare in the Moon. Luke presents his own story of making these works and hearing people's responses to them, woven in with the new soundtrack he's commissioned from composer Dan Jones. We talk to fellow contemporary moon obsessives James Attlee and Jay Griffiths, but it's all filtered through the very particular consciousness of one artist and his imagination, and the hard slog of his creative process. Producer Beth O'Dea.

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 be our distant descendants and yet may have hopes, fears, languages, beliefs, even religions that we simply cannot predict? What if anything can we, should we, pass on?

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 been organised in pretty much the same way - with a beginning, middle and end, although, in contemporary culture, now less frequently in that order. All storytellers have used techniques of tension, delayed revelation, surprise twists. But - now - the art of narrative is being fundamentally changed by new technologies, which offer fresh ways of telling stories and different places for them to be told, redefine narrative genres, and allow audiences unprecedented opportunities to inter-act with and even co-author the content. In this, the first part of a new three part series, Mark Lawson speaks with some of the leading figures in British TV - including showrunner Jed Mercurio (Line of Duty), producer Nicola Shindler (Red Productions) writer Paula Milne (The Politician's Wife, Angels), Charlotte Moore (BBC Director of Content) - to examine how the stories being told on television in the digital age have adapted to the advent of streaming services, binge-watching and catch-up TV. Mark also visits a cinema in Macclesfield to watch the live broadcast of 'Follies'- staged simultaneously in the West End. He talks with Kwame Kwei-Armah, soon to begin as the Young Vic's Artistic Director, about how the technology involved has brought top-level theatre to a whole new audience and redefined the idea of live spectatorship. Presenter: Mark Lawson Producer: Geoff Bird.

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 have survived some 64 million years - outliving far flashier animals like sabre tooth tigers. The secret to the sloth's success is their slothful nature and their suite of energy-saving adaptations. In fact slothfulness is such a successful strategy, that there are examples all over the animal kingdom, including, surprisingly, worker ants. Recent studies in humans have shown the many health benefits of adopting a slower pace of life. Sleep itself is universal amongst the animal kingdom. All animals do it, but why remains a mystery. What is clear though, is that unleashing your inner couch potato is no bad thing, be you sloth or human. Lucy discovers the genius behind the sloths laid back attitude and fights the corner for laziness. Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

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 dark lullabies partly hark back to a pre-Christian Christmas when people worshipped the Norse gods. As Iceland opens up to global influences after centuries of isolation Andri travels from farmstead to lava field and reflects on these traditions: whether the elves still crash your house to throw a Christmas party or the cows still talk on New Year's Eve; and what happens when you have to spend Christmas alone, locked inside Ikea? Featuring the Graduale Nobile Choir conducted by Árni Heiðar Karlsson Partially recorded in Binaural Stereo. Listen on headphones for the best effect. Additional sound design by Phil Channell Producer Neil McCarthy.

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 another war came. Would survivors of mass aerial bombardment hold up psychically, or would they collapse into infantile panic? Or would they become uncontrollably aggressive? And why do humans come to be so aggressive in the first place? When the war - and the bombers - did come to Britain, it appeared that survivors were much more stoical and defiant than had been expected. But, as Daniel discovers, brave faces concealed a great deal of psychological damage. With historian Lyndsey Stonebridge, he visits the Wellcome Library to see - courtesy of the Melanie Klein Trust - the case notes of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein on her analysis of a troubled ten year old boy, 'Richard'. What do Klein's notes, and Richard's extraordinary drawings, reveal about his attitude to being bombed? Daniel examines how, with the advent of the Cold War and the distinct possibility that bombs and missiles could destroy civilisation, technocrats trying to plan for the end of the world coped with staring into the abyss. Finally, Daniel shows how a radical new turn in aerial bombardment opens up this field anew. Nuclear weapons can destroy the planet; but what does it do to the mind to live under the threat of 'surgical' attack by unmanned drones? With: Derek Gregory, Peter Hennessy, Dagmar Herzog, Richard Overy, Lyndsey Stonebridge Producer: Phil Tinline.

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 sleep eating. So why does it happen? Sleepwalking usually occurs during deep sleep, when something triggers the brain to wake - but not completely. So the areas that control walking and other movement wake up, yet other parts, involved in awareness and rational thinking, remain asleep. What's confusing is that sleepwalkers look awake - their eyes are open - but they're really not awake. They're not really asleep either. The brain is awake and asleep at the same time. We have known this happens in some animals, who can sleep with half of their brain at a time. But recently, we have learnt that similar things can happen in the human brain. In the first of a three-part series, neurologist, Dr Guy Leschziner, talks to patients he's been treating at his sleep clinic at Guy's and St Thomas' hospitals in London. They include Jackie who began sleepwalking as a child and continued her strange night-time behaviour as an adult, riding her motorbike whilst sleeping. We hear from James whose night terrors have become so violent his wife has begged him to get help; from Alex who rescues people from floods in his sleep. And we talk to Tom, whose recent diagnosis of sexsomnia has had a significant impact on his life. These remarkable sleepwalking experiences help us to understand the complex workings of the human brain. Presenter: Dr Guy Leschziner Producer: Sally Abrahams.

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 embedded in two of the VRU's programmes, from watching the scheme's participants working in food trucks in the west end of Glasgow to joining the cast at the Royal Military Tattoo in Edinburgh. After hours, and with his powerful personal connection to their lives, Byron has extraordinarily candid conversations with the young men involved in the scheme about fear, insecurity, redemption, love, hope and the real reasons for spiralling violence. But what sacrifices will be required for them to make new lives, free from chaos and violence? Producer: Giles Edwards.

"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 improve working class representation in the arts. Kit knows that - as a writer from a working class background - the success of her debut novel is a rare occurrence. Born to a Caribbean bus driver father and an Irish mother (a cleaner, foster carer and auxiliary nurse), Kit grew up in Birmingham and left school at 15 with no qualifications. She became a secretary with the Crown Prosecution Service and went on to have a career in social services and criminal law. In this feature she explores an issue that is deeply personal to her. She looks back at her own life and trajectory, and takes the listener on a journey around the country to find out what the barriers really are to working class representation in British literature today. "There is a difference between working class stories and working class writers. Real equality is when working class writers can write about anything they like - an alien invasion, a nineteenth century courtesan, a medieval war. All we need is the space, the time to do it - oh yes, and some way to pay the bills!" Kit talks to a range of writers, agents and publishers about what the barriers are for writers from working class backgrounds, including Tim Lott, Andrew McMillan, Gena-mour Barrett, CEO of Penguin Random House UK Tom Weldon, Julia Bell, Julia Kingsford, Ben Gwalchmai, Nathan Connolly and Stephen Morrison-Burke (Birmingham poet laureate and the first recipient of the Kit de Waal scholarship). Produced by Mair Bosworth.

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 of social media (to say nothing of the radio feature itself), it's the edit - the cut, the splice; montage and juxtaposition - that has ushered us into the present. To some, it's the stuff of life itself: chimps, for example, share 99% of our DNA; what matters is the sequencing, the edit. There's a year zero to this story of the edit. From the moment we get up in the morning until we close our eyes at night, the visual reality we perceive is a continuous stream of apparently linked images. That's the way we experienced the world for millennia. Then suddenly, just over a century ago, human beings were confronted with something else: edited film. But this isn't an exercise in cinema history. It's about our present culture. A culture in which the invisible mediating hand of the editor is ever-present. A culture of the 'creative commons' in which we can pull anything out of context and re-edit it (a gif, an internet meme, a mash-up, a parody of a political speech) and make the edit itself become an art form. Cutting, splicing, sampling -- it's all part of the way the world functions now. This is just the beginning. With Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us, Margie Borschke, Walter Murch and Will Self. Producer: Martin Williams.

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. Steve also reveals to Rhianna Dhillon more of the stories he discovered on his way from St Petersburg to Khabarovsk.

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-right. Born in France in 1905 to an English mother and Greek-Italian father, Savitri Devi moved to India in the 1930s, took a Hindu name, and married a prominent Brahmin. She believed that India's caste system had preserved the purity of the so-called Aryans, and that Hinduism was a living survival of the pagan religion destroyed in Europe by Judeo-Christianity. In her saffron-edged sari and large swastika earrings, she traveled the country promoting Hindutva, the Hindu nationalist ideology espoused by India's ruling party today. Devastated by the fall of the Third Reich at the end of the Second World War, she entered occupied Germany to distribute Nazi propaganda; convinced that Hitler was an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, she spent the rest of her life preparing for his eventual return. Maria Margaronis travels to India to meet Savitri Devi's nephews and former neighbours and explore the origins of her bizarre theories. Drawing on never-before-broadcast interviews with Savitri Devi herself and conversations with historians and activists, she asks what we can learn from this eccentric figure about today's extreme right movements, their strategies and their appeal. Produced by Shabnam Grewal Illustration inspired by photograph Courtesy of the Savitri Devi Archive.

"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, complaining all the way about the late running of the service. "It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?" In the Trainspotter's Guide to Dracula, Miles Jupp uses Bram Stoker's novel as it has never been used before, as a train timetable, following its references to plot a route across Europe by rail to Dracula's castle in Transylvania. Will Miles be able to reach Dracula's castle more quickly than Harker did, or will his journey be dogged by discontinued services, closed lines and delays? Produced by David Stenhouse. Readings by David Jackson Young.

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 racial division far out of line with mainstream thought. Fights that once took place between the two groups online are now spilling out onto the streets of places like Berkeley, California and Portland, Oregon - liberal enclaves where far-right activists have held rallies and which have been turned into scenes of violence, and even murder. Mike Wendling has travelled to America's west coast to talk to underground antifa organisers and find out what they want - and what they're prepared to do to achieve their aims. Producer: Anisa Subedar.

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 have nothing to hide, do you really have nothing to fear? In Who's Looking At You , novelist and occasional futurist Nick Harkaway argues surveillance has reached a new pitch of penetration and sophistication and we need to talk about it before it's too late. This is our brave new world: data from pacemakers are used in criminal prosecutions as evidence, the former head of the CIA admits 'we kill people based on meta-data,' and scientists celebrate pulling a clear image of a face directly from a monkey's brain. Where does it end, and what does it mean? Surveillance used to end at our front door, now not even the brain is beyond the prying eyes of an information-hungry world. The application of big data brings many benefits and has the potential to make us wealthier, keep us healthier and ensure we are safer - but only if we the citizens are in control. The programme uses rich archive to illustrate how the 'watchers' have adapted to technology that has super-charged the opportunity to snoop. It examines the arguments of those who claim the right to keep their secrets while demanding that we the people give up more and more of ours. Transparency for the masses? Or simple necessity in a chaotic technological future? What happens to us, to our choices under the all-seeing eye? One thing is certain: if we don't make choices about surveillance, they will be made for us.

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, are both. What is clear in all these cases is just how particular and powerful the relationship can be, and in this highly personal programme Lauren Laverne heads home to team up with her own dad, Les, to talk about their relationship and how it matches up with some of these cultural imaginings. Among anecdotes about growing up in Sunderland and later on Les playing roadie to Lauren's gigs with the likes of the Ramones, we also hear from artists who in one way or another are engaging with the dad/daughter relationship now, including Helen MacDonald, Glyn Maxwell and The Unthanks. Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Geoff Bird.

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 the jokes and cartoons shared by their parents and grandparents. Viv will investigate the birth of the 'anekdot' and trace the development of dark humour through the purges. She will look at how dissident humour in the late 1950s influenced comedy in London and New York, and meet contemporary comedians to gain an understanding of the shape and sound of the comedy circuit in Russia today. Producer: Georgia Catt

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 time on the road than he does at home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a city in the desert, with Route 66 running through its heart. In another life Will Beeley was a musician - a singer and songwriter - an anxious romantic at the end of the 1960s and a smooth-voiced folkie ten years later. He played gig after gig, made records and, for a while at least, hoped for the big time. But now, like a different road taken, a different stop along the way, he spends his life behind the wheel of a hulking truck, sharing the driving with his wife, as the highway and the days blur by. It's a unique vantage point. And as America spools past outside, framed by the huge windscreen, does he - like all of us now and then - think of times gone by, of unfinished business, of what might have been? Or is his attention fixed ahead on the road as it rolls towards him, flowing beneath his wheels? Producer: Martin Williams.

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 Thames. Even Lynne is slightly mystified when she was asked who was her muse that, as a person mostly famous for writing a book on punctuation, she replied; Joni Mitchell. Lynne explores why a series of albums from Ladies of the Canyon to Heijra taking in Blue, Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer lawns' has wrought such influence over so many. For her aficionados Joni Mitchell is more than a song writer. Lynne observes that for some the attachment goes beyond the personal; its a complete identification with the struggles of dealing with high emotion and how to cope. In the programme she speaks to the poet and playwright Liz Lochhead, the author Linda Grant, Elbow's front man Guy Garvey, her latest biographer the Syracuse University academic David Yaffe and Gina Foster the singer with the UK act Joni's Soul, which she insists is not a tribute but a celebration act. Lynne contends that despite at the time being overshadowed in favour of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon and others Joni Mitchell will come to be regarded as the greatest exponent of the art of singer-song writer from that era and concludes that what makes her a muse can be found less in the brilliant lyrical summations of eternal questions like love, loss and freedom but more in her absolute commitment never to compromise her art - to remain true, above all else, to her own muse.

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 follows his own obsession with the miracle of miniature art. Knocking on the tiny doors of creators from street artist Slinkachu, whose mesmerising cityscapes are created, photographed and abandoned in the street, to the collection of antique miniature portraits in Sotheby's where expert Mark Griffith Jones delicately reveals the hidden treasures that span from over 500 years of art history. The 21st century has experienced a revival of the small in art Desiree De Leon has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers for her Instagram account of small doodles, whilst the 'the chewing gum man' Ben Wilson, has gathered a loyal following for his hidden gems scattered about the London streets. Every morning Ben gets up and starts creating tiny tiles on which his innermost feelings are expressed - and then he leaves them on the Underground for people to find. Then there is the barely visible - Willard Wigan MBE - the poster-boy of microscopic art, a dyslexia sufferer who has found relief in the creation of tiny art works. Recognised globally, his sculptures, which are small enough to fit on the head of a pin, sell for six-figure sums. "I work between my heartbeats. I have one-and-a-half seconds to actually move. And at the same time I have to watch I don't inhale my own work." Then there is the nearly invisible - Jonty Hurwitz - who sculpts with Nano-technology, and sometimes loses sight of it in the process. "When I found the sculpture it was one of the most moving moments of my life, you see all these grotesque pieces of dust as the microscope is moving around and suddenly there's a woman, dancing" What is the enduring appeal of the miniature in art, and where has this revival come from? To discover where it hides, why it appeals, and how the artists' work on such delicate objects, Dann plays with scale, sound and voices to bring a closer, more microscopic focus on the art world. Presenter: Lance Dann is an associate member and former sound designer of The Wooster Group, a writer and director of a range of radio dramas including podcast "Blood Culture", commissioned by The Welcome Trust, and won a Prix Marulic for his production of Moby Dick for BBC Radio 4. Producer: Sara Jane Hall iPlayer photograph: Slinkachu.

Lots of people wear wigs, and go to great lengths to keep them secret - but why? Perhaps it's because the hair on top of our heads means so much to us. It's a crucial part of our identity, the person we see when we look in the mirror, so what happens when it's not there? It's a question Brian Kernohan has asked himself. Yes, his hair's thinning a bit on top, but it's his secret - until his hairdresser points it out. Brian wouldn't dare suggest a wig - even though he's always wondered if he could try one? Brian investigates the secret world of wigs with the help of alopecia sufferer Geraldine, who runs a secret wig shop which ensures discretion for all her customers. He explores the stigma attached to wig wearing, and finds out how tastes have changed since the 17thcentury when Louis XIV put wigs at the cutting edge of fashion. He meets cancer patients who have learnt to "embrace your inner bald", as 16-year-old Sophie puts it, the wig shop owner who surprises customers by wearing her own stock, and meets the opera singer who loves to wear wigs on stage. But still, Brian is nervous when he is fitted for a wig, and is even more terrified when he has to wear it in public. What if someone realises he's wearing a secret wig - and why does he care so much? Producer: Freya McClements.

With more than 30 million presentations being given around the world every day, PowerPoint has become the single most ubiquitous tool for presenting ideas. Yet it's the software many of us love to hate - vilified for simplifying the complex and complicating the simple. 30 years on from its commercial launch, Ian Sansom asks, 'What's the real point of PowerPoint?' as he embarks on what surely must be a world first - a PowerPoint presentation for the radio. How do I move this on to the next slide? There we are. Thanks. Armed only with an auto-content wizard, some zippy graphics and a hefty set of bullet points, Ian ventures forth to assess the true impact of this revolution in communication. He speaks with the software's pioneers, meets some of its notable detractors and asks how PowerPoint has influenced corporate life and spilled out into some improbable areas of our culture. As he discovers how science-fiction is helping to inform the next generation of presentation technology, Ian asks if PowerPoint has empowered the individual - or if our boardrooms, lecture halls and even our spiritual affairs are to be forever condemned to the fate that has come to be known as 'Death By PowerPoint.' What do I do now? Press escape? No, I want to bring it back to the start. F6 I think. Where's the remote thingy..? Producer: Conor Garrett.

After the violence directed at black people in Nottingham and Notting Hill in the 1950s, and the naked racism expressed in Smethwick during the 1964 general election, a group of pioneering West Indians came up with a simple and defiant riposte: Carnival. In Queens of Chapeltown, Colin Grant goes behind the scenes of Carnival to its Leeds West Indian HQ in Chapeltown - amidst the glue guns, sequins and feathers - to capture that moment of extraordinary transformation, 50 years on: the birth of a tradition which, for one weekend in August, would wash away the bad taste of anti immigrant sentiment with a burst of colour and flash of exuberance that would forever change Britain. Grant travels to Leeds to talk with the pioneers and celebrate the endurance and growth of Carnival. Produced and presented by Colin Grant.

Marking the 20th anniversary of her untimely death, Archive on 4 presents a unique and moving portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales - her life documented in reverse chronology. Diana, Princess of Wales was arguably the most famous - and most photographed - woman in the world. Her life has been exhaustively discussed and disassembled in the media both before and since her untimely death on 31st August 1997. As the anniversary of that tragic event approaches, is there anything truly new for us to learn about her remarkable, turbulent, and short life - and how the way we reacted to it changed our society? Drawing from hundreds of hours of footage, Archive on 4 presents a unique, unmediated portrait of the Princess - starting with the sombre events of her funeral and taking the listener on a journey backwards through her life and times: from the remarkable public outpouring of grief that followed her passing; the almost unbearable press intrusion into her private world in her last months; her new life as a single woman; her divorce, her married life and the public jubilation surrounding the Royal Wedding of 1981; right back to the announcement of the 19 year-old Diana's engagement to Prince Charles. Unpresented and unmediated, the programme offers a unique audio montage of the events of, and reaction to, one of the most extraordinary lives of the 20th century. Featuring contributions from the archives from Piers Morgan, Andrew Neill, Jennie Bond, Richard Kay - as well as several of Diana's closest friends, and members of the British public. Produced by Steven Rajam and James Roberts for BBC Radio 4 Contributors: Andrew Neill Arthur Edwards Barbara Daly Bea Campbell David Emanuel David Starkey Denis Lawson Eammon McCabe Earl Spencer Elizabeth Emanuel Glenn Harvey James Naughtie James Reynolds James Whitaker Jennie Bond Jeremy Paxman John Humphrys Ken Lennox Martin Bashir Michael Shea Patrick Jephson Penny Juror Piers Morgan Rosie Boycott Tim Graham Tom Cruise Tony McGrath Archive: All Things Considered, BBC Radio Wales Archive on 4 - A History of the Stiff Upper Lip, BBC Radio 4 A Royal Recovery, BBC Radio 4 BBC News Special - Diana: 10 Years On, BBC News 24 Capturing the Royals: The Story of Royal Photography, BBC2 Decisive Moments: A Rough Road, BBC2 Diana: The People's Princess, BBC1 Great Britons: Diana, BBC2 Heart of the Matter, BBC1 Fifty Years with the Firm: Prog 5: Doom & Gloom, BBC Radio 4 Mediumwave, BBC Radio 4 Memories of Diana, BBC1 Modern Times: The Shrine, BBC4 Newsnight, BBC1 Panorama, BBC1 Proms, BBC1 The Princess's People: A View from the Crowd, BBC2 The Reunion: The Wedding of Charles & Diana, BBC Radio 4 The Today Programme, BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed: Remembering Diana, BBC Radio 4 Top of the Pops, BBC1 Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4.

Suicide is the number one killer of men under-50 in England and Wales. A 'zero suicide' approach to prevention first devised in Detroit is now changing attitudes to care in the UK. Merseyside is leading the way. Radio 4 gains exclusive access to a healthcare authority being transformed from the inside-out in a bid to treat suicide as a preventable condition and to bring lives lost down to 0% by 2020.

Grayson Perry goes backwards in the archive in search of the moment the avant-garde died. It's a century since Marcel Duchamp submitted his artwork called Fountain to an exhibition staged by the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Fountain was a urinal -- not a painting of a urinal or a sculpture, just a urinal, bought from a Manhattan hardware store and signed R.Mutt. The Society of Independent Artists rejected Duchamp's provocation and the original object was lost. Nowadays Duchamp's urinal is canonised as the fountainhead of conceptual art and the high water (closet) mark of the avant garde. Replicas of the Fountain grace museums around the world - emblems of the avant-garde spirit of experimentation and confrontation. Somewhere in the intervening years though, something changed - contemporary art lost its ability to shock and critique. We're still hopelessly drawn to the idea of art that's 'cutting edge', 'ground-breaking', 'revolutionary'. But is that possible at this point -- haven't we seen it all before? Maybe the death knell was sounded when the Saatchi Gallery opened on the South Bank? Or with the advent of protest and radical chic in the 1960s? Maybe it was when the CIA funded the abstract expressionists? Or when the post-war art market began to reign supreme? Or when the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors in 1927? Or maybe it was all a matter of style the very moment Duchamp's Fountain was conceived? Featuring Brian Eno, Kenneth Goldsmith, Nnenna Okore, Cornelia Parker, and Sarah Thornton. Producer: Martin Williams.

Bill Drummond is many things. As well as an artist, a writer and former pop-star - he's the owner of an old curfew tower in Northern Ireland which he runs as an artists' residency. Last year some poets from Belfast's Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry stayed there and Bill published their collected work in a little black book called The Curfew Tower is Many Things. Except for a poem the award-winning Belfast poet Stephen Sexton wrote. Apparently that one went missing. So Bill has left two pages blank in the book for Stephen to fill in with poetry as they drive through all of Ireland's 32 counties in 5 days in a white Ford Transit hire-van, giving out copies as they go. But what exactly is driving Bill Drummond? Producer Conor Garrett is there to find out. As they cross the Irish border and over each county boundary, Conor is becoming increasingly concerned he may not have a good enough story for his radio programme. It's a problem further complicated by the fact Bill won't talk about his chart-topping '90s pop band who once famously set fire to a very large pile of their own cash. Then, when a narrative arc does eventually develop, Conor can't be sure how authentic it is. And what's all this stuff about eels? Producer: Conor Garrett.

It's time to travel down the rabbit hole of truth as American satirist Joe Queenan explores a murky world of fake news, prejudice and alternative facts. "Recent politics have shown that the truth is no fun," he explains. "It's like a vegetable your mother makes you eat. Yes it may be nourishing, but it tastes terrible." With archive contributions from Donald Trump, Doris Lessing, Jeremy Corbyn, Peter Mandelson and Theresa May; plus new interviews with Mark Borkowski, Edith Hall and Julian Baggini, author of a Short History of Truth. This is Joe Queenan's follow up to previous editions on Blame, Shame, Irony and Anger. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.

The sound of music flying through the air, carried on the tails of pigeons. "I knew it was a noise maker, but it was the only thing in the museum that I had no idea what it might sound like. Because it works in a way no other instrument does. No other instrument physically moves around you in space, flying overhead, and that seemed like magic". Inspired by the Chinese pigeon whistles in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Nathaniel Robin Mann decided he wanted to revive the ancient art of pigeon whistling, a tradition possibly thuosands of years old, in which tiny flutes are attached to pigeons in flight. His experience with birds, however, was limited and he needed a bird expert. "None of the pigeon racers wanted to get involved in a music project. Then someone said, 'Well, there's this guy in Nottingham who has a loft made of an old hutch that he straps to the back of his scooter. They call him Pigeon Pete.'" Enter Pete Petravicius, Nottinghamshire ex-miner and steeplejack. A life-long passion for pigeons makes him the perfect trainer to teach the birds how to fly with their unusual musical attachments. We follow Nathan and Pigeon Pete as their friendship, and their understanding of the pigeon whistles grow. From the gloomth of the Pitt Rivers Museum, to the creation of a modern day 3D-printed whistle for Pete's pigeons. Finally, we hear a pigeon's flight described in sound across the sky, creating a haunting, undulating chord cloud, accompanied by Nathan's hypnotic voice, singing songs he has discovered about pigeon culture. Producer: Sara Jane Hall About the presenters: Nathaniel Mann is a composer, singer and performer. As Sound & Music's Embedded Composer in Residence at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Oxford Contemporary Music, he discovered the world of Pigeon Whistles, and started to explore their potential, supported by PRSF, a foundation helping new musicians make new work. His eclectic projects chart diverse worlds of sound and culture, from bronze foundries and popcorn, to donkeys and Trafalgar Square - each has found a voice through Mann's work. Pete Petravicius is unique in that he is the only man in the UK who trains his birds to return to a mobile pigeon loft. The birds can thus travel across the country, flying in formation and returning to their small motor home/coop. He's also an ex-miner and terrific raconteur who loves his Birmingham Rollers. The Pigeons are cared for in strict accordance to guidelines and regulations laid out by the DEFRA & the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AHVLA). The use of Pigeon Whistles has been deemed as not causing stress or harm to the birds by independent animal welfare advisors and Pigeon Fancing experts. 3D Pigeon Whistles modeled and printed by Joe Banner at Printrite, Nottinghamshire. About the music : The Pigeon Bell Words/Music: Mann - after poems by Mei Yaochen (1002-1060) & Zhang Xian (990-1078) - as translated by Wang Shixiang The Pigeon Words: Trad. Music: Mann Adapted from 19th Century Broadside Ballad "The Pigeon" Found in Bodleian Library's collections Shelfmark: Harding B 21(14) The Pigeon Chase After 'Uke Uke' - Fox Chase - as sung by Dee Hicks of the Cumberland Plateau Words: Mann / Music: Trad.

What is life like for nuns and monks today? With a lack of new blood coming into the traditional monasteries and convents, Bishop Martin Shaw supports some of these aging communities in their painful final days as they are forced to leave their homes. His role as an official visitor, is also to receive the vows of any new nuns and monks joining religious orders, and to hear the concerns and complaints from each community. Sister Giovanna, Sister Clare and Brother Samuel, who are all from different religious communities, recount what life is like for them today. They also share their experiences of dedication over the years - from that first day in the chapel and hearing Gregorian Chant to outside keeping bees and pigs in the orchard, from teaching young children in inner cities to supporting the bereaved in hospitals. We get a glimpse of life in this unique and rarefied world of devotion and commitment, and hear how these communities have changed over the decades. Bishop Shaw has also witnessed these changes, but although monastic life as it has traditionally been lived is unlikely to survive, there are signs of new religious life beginning to emerge within the Church. Produced by Luke Whitlock.

999 was the first emergency telephone number in the world when it was launched on June 30th, 1937. Within the first week, more than a thousand calls were made to the service with one burglar arrested less than five minutes after a member of the public had dialled 999. Impressive stuff. But there were teething problems... In the early days, only those wealthy enough to own a telephone could hope to avail of the service. Exchange room operators complained of stress caused by the raucous buzzers which alerted them to 999 calls. Advancing technology connected with the system began to alter the relationship between public and police. Almost unbelievably in hindsight, the 999 service wasn't made fully available across the nation until 1976. Exactly 80 years after it was introduced, Ian Sansom dials up the remarkable story of our three digit emergency number. Between rare archive, real life-or-death emergencies and interviews with call handlers on the front line, Ian takes a personal look at the evolution of 999 and asks what the future holds for this pioneering British institution. Producer: Conor Garrett.

Actor Michael Sheen explores the history of Port Talbot's Plaza Cinema. A beautiful art-deco building , first opening in 1940, the Plaza was the heart of cinema entertainment for the people of Port Talbot for decades - a place where Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins watched everyone from George Formby to Bogart and Cagney and where, growing up in Port Talbot in the 1970s and 80s, Michael Sheen had his early encounters with the film industry in which he would thrive. But as well as charting the onward march of the multiplex which lead to the Plaza's eventual demise, and talking to the last projectionist and cinema manager who fought so hard to make it viable, Michael Sheen explores the importance of places like the Plaza to towns and communities all over the UK. Is it possible to turn it around, find a new use or even see crowds return to the elegant interior, or is the Plaza now only a monument to a past life , rich in nostalgia but which can no longer provide what a modern community needs ? Michael also hears from two other Plaza goers and children of Port Talbot - Rob Brydon and the Opera Singer Rebecca Evans. Producers: Joanne Cayford and Tom Alban Photographs: Copyright John Crerar.

Aleks Krotoski takes her seat at the table to explore the amazing world of fictional food made real. Food is not a new force in fiction, but increasingly fictional food is finding its way onto the table. And fan communities from the new breed of modern cultural canon aren't just nibbling on Laura Esquivel's devastating quail in rose petal sauce from Like Water for Chocolate, but also tucking in to fried squirrel and raccoon from The Hunger Games, Sansa's lemon cakes from Game of Thrones, or downing a frothy glass of butterbeer from Harry Potter. Now Aleks gathers together three people who know a lot about fictional food to discuss its appeal for fans, authors and food creators alike. Together, they will make, and eat, a meal of food from fiction, and discuss some of the interesting questions it raises. Joanne Harris is author of several novels where food is almost a character in its own right - most famously Chocolat, which was turned into a film of the same name; she also co-created a cookbook, The Little Book of Chocolat, for the many fans desperate to make the concoctions they had read about in her novels. Sam Bompas is co-founder of creative food studio Bompas & Parr, who recently helped create Dinner At The Twits, inspired by Roald Dahl's book. And Kate Young brings together her passion for food and literature in her blog The Little Library Café, where she creates recipes for food found in fiction, and many of them will be included in her first cookbook, The Little Library Cookbook. The programme also includes music played on the flavour conductor - a working cocktail organ, conceived by Sam Bompas for Johnnie Walker. The music is composed by Simon Little. Producer: Giles Edwards.

Laura Barton explores the little known story of a pioneering group of women who unknowingly challenged conventional notions of femininity and their working roles. The Pit Brow Lasses worked within the collieries of 19th century Wigan, Lancashire. Their unique re-appropriation of men's 'breeches' worn underneath hitched up skirts was originally adopted as a functional response to working within mines. These early adopters of trousers reached a similar degrees of notoriety that street-style stars do today. When Women Wore the Trousers explores the history of trousers in the workplace and in fashion and discusses the impact that this every day garment had on society. Women were liberated by their work in the munitions factories and on the land during both World Wars but there was a fear that these 'new men' would continue donning trousers and become too independent. Coco Chanel famously appropriated sailors tops and trousers to create work-wear in its most elevated form and the fashion for utilitarian clothing continues to thrive today as discussed by fashion designers Faye and Erica Toogood. What do modern working women wear in the work place in the 21st Century? Chef Angela Harnett wears a uniform of a white shift and baggy trousers in her restaurant kitchen but it is a look that could be seen as fashionable in a different context. With readings from the actor Maxine Peake, a discussion with Pit Brow Lass, Rita Culshaw about her choice of clothing in the pits and interviews with fashion curators Amy de la Haye and Fiona McKay and Wigan historian Alan Davies, we discover how women have worn trousers as a means of empowerment and the enduring appeal of work-wear in contemporary fashion. Producer: Belinda Naylor.

The story of how one woman offered refuge to leading intellectuals fleeing from the Nazis, helping transform the cultural and intellectual landscape of Britain and the United States. Shortly after Hitler came to power, an organisation was set up in Britain to help academics who were being thrown out of their jobs in Nazi Germany. It was called the Academic Assistance Council. The council's assistant secretary, Esther Simpson, became its dynamic force. She called all the refugees she assisted her 'children'. Sixteen of them ended up as Nobel Prize winners. Many would later admit that they owed their lives to her. David Edmonds tells the unknown story of Esther Simpson and the brilliant minds she saved. Producer Mark Savage. (Photo credit: The Lotte Meitner-Graf Archive).

Just two centuries ago, no one had a clue where the borders of the USA actually were. Hemmed in by the Atlantic, the Appalachian mountains and Canada to the north, early Americans could only dream of the massive territory Donald Trump and his government control today. So why is the border with Mexico where it runs today? For that matter what fixed Canadian border? The answer to both questions is war. Misha Glenny and producer Miles Warde travel across Texas and into Mexico to find out what defined the USA in the south. This is fringeland where multiple cultures collide. Local response to the President's wall proposal is not what you'd expect. With contributions from Andres Resendez, Kate Betts of the Bullock State Museum in Austin and Clive Webb on the history of the line in the south; plus Margaret MacMillan, Kathleen Burk and Alan Taylor on the numerous wars that shaped the frontier in the north.

Is it fair to find your own kidney donor on the internet? UK patients who need new organs are using social media to advertise their plight and appeal directly for a Good Samaritan who's willing to share their spare kidney with a stranger. As Lesley Curwen discovers, the development of such appeals on social media has caused consternation among some in the transplant community. They fear a competition to attract donors amounts to an unsavoury beauty contest, in which only the most plugged-in and tech-savvy can participate. But for Nicola Pietrzyk from Leicester, turning to social media and Facebook was a no-brainer. Her 11 year old son, Matthew had been spending 12 hours a day on dialysis, waiting for years for a possible donor from the NHS list. She's convinced that if she hadn't launched A Million Likes for a Kidney for Matthew, a kind-hearted stranger would never have offered her son a new kidney, potentially saving his life. The campaign prompted several prospective donors who weren't a match for Matthew to go on to donate to others and Alison Thornhill tells Lesley Curwen why she went on to do just that. But the likelihood that individuals, motivated by a particular story on social media, will in fact be a match for their intended recipient is slim, and Lesley hears from transplant teams frustrated that NHS resources are sucked up by high profile campaigns that attract many volunteers, all of whom need to be tested, most of whom won't turn out to be a possible match for the recipient. Dr Adnan Sharif, consultant nephrologist at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital, was closely involved with several high profile media campaigns and he admits that he and his team were at times completely overwhelmed by the demands that multiple volunteers, each offering to donate a kidney to a named individual, placed on the unit. While he acknowledges that such social media campaigns are legal and after the guidelines were changed, were accepted by the transplant community, he admits to mixed feelings about the outcome. He and his team are delighted for the individual who has a new kidney, but uncomfortable about diverting resources from patients who are waiting for an organ through the traditional routes, from deceased donors or through the NHS Living Donor Scheme where altruistic donors place their trust in the transplant authorities to pick the best match for the kidney they've donated. So the transplant community in the UK has come to terms with social media campaigns for organs from strangers, even though there's a clear preference for the NHS altruistic donor scheme. But Lesley discovers another internet innovation: websites that allow kidney patients to advertise for a prospective donor, have been frozen out as clinical teams have voted with their feet and refused to deal with them. An American website, matchingdonors.com, launched in the UK in 2012 and sent policy makers and clinicians in the organ transplant field into multiple huddles. The final ruling was that websites like this could operate as long as no fees were paid (matchingdonors.com didn't charge UK kidney patients a fee but they do charge $595 to USA patients for a lifetime membership). Over 100 UK patients and over 300 UK donors were registered at the site. But as Lesley finds out, in five years, not one transplant has happened through this website. Patients told her their transplant teams simply refused to deal with it, and the former chair of the ethics committee of the British Transplantation Society, Professor Vassilios Papalois, argues that clinicians have autonomy and if they're not comfortable with the idea of a matching organ website, they're under no obligation to proceed. He finds the idea of a matching website ethically objectionable, he tells Lesley, and he wouldn't personally sanction it either.

Frances Stonor-Saunders explores how the young Donald Trump stormed into Manhattan from the outer boroughs in the late 1970s and headed straight for New York's most outrageous nightclub. He didn't dance, didn't drink, and didn't take drugs. So what was he doing in the cocaine-fuelled hothouse of the Disco revolution? And what was the link to Roy Cohn, infamous attack dog of the McCarthy era, go-to Attorney for the Mob and the man Trump was happy to call his mentor? Producer: Fiona Leach Research: Serena Tarling.

Zora Neale Hurston. You might not recognise her name. She was an African American novelist and folklorist, a queen of the Harlem Renaissance and a contemporary of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. But when she died in 1960 she was living on welfare and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her name was even misspelt on her death certificate. Scotland's National poet Jackie Kay tells the story of how Zora became part of America's literary canon. Alice Walker wrote in her collection of essays 'In Search of Our Mother's Gardens': "We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone." And that's what Alice did: travelling to Florida in search of Zora's grave where she laid down a gravestone declaring Zora "A Genius of the South". That was in 1973. Now Zora is claimed by many of America's leading novelists including Maya Angelou, Zadie Smith and Toni Morrison, as their literary foremother. Eighty years since the publication of her greatest work 'Their Eyes Were Watching God', Jackie Kay tells Zora's story. Interviews include author Alice Walker, the poet Sonia Sanchez, The Guardian's Editor at Large Gary Younge and Zora's biographer Valerie Boyd. Readings by Solange Knowles. Photo: Carl Van Vechten Producer: Caitlin Smith.

For centuries musicians have defied gender boundaries to create some of the most evocative and provocative art and music. Journalist and culture critic Laura Snapes joins the dots of a fascinating musical history that encompasses musical icons such as Ma Rainey, Little Richard, Lou Reed, the Pet Shop Boys, Grace Jones and Madonna, and looks at how today's musicians use music and performance to express who their own gender and sexuality. In recent years the issue of gender and identity has been a hot topic in the musical landscape and beyond. From niche publications to tabloids and political debate, issues surrounding gender identity and how it influences both personal and social life have been widely publicised. Amid the deeply complex personal world of gender identity and the often ruthlessly myopic world of the music industry, a new generation of artists are using music for fearless expressions of their gender and sexuality that break beyond the archetypes set by their forebears. Rock Transition speaks with artists such as garage maverick Ezra Furman, Canadian pop stars Tegan and Sara, musician and author CN Lester, and musician and activist Ryan Cassata to understand why music offers an exciting platform to express and explore gender identity and sexuality - and asks how these artists can resist being marginalised and commodified by an industry keen to capitalise on a hot topic.

If you ask the author, Nathan Filer, when he first came into contact with mental illness, he'll tell you it was in 1999 when he first became a psychiatric nurse. But, like many of us, he'd actually met it much earlier : through film, drama and the news. Like many of us, his understanding had been shaped by how the media chose to portray it. But he quickly realised how very different real life was to fiction and the reports. Now he asks what does that difference do to us - both as a society and to us as individuals, when many of us have experienced mental health disorders in our every day lives, either personally or to close family and friends. How does story-telling in the 21st century influence public understanding and our sympathy or condemnation for those experiencing mental health disorders? Times are changing. As Alastair Campbell says, in the 80s, if you'd suggested to the newsroom a piece on depression, it just wasn't on the agenda. But although mental health is becoming more common as a storyline or story, many myths still prevail about violence, treatment, diagnosis, recovery. Looking back through archive, Nathan Filer tells the story of the way we've framed mental health and illness across all media over the last few decades, and he talks to those with knowledge to explore its effect. Featuring Alastair Campbell; Professor Graham Thornicroft of Kings College London; Jenni Regan, senior editorial advisor at Mind; Dr Sarah Carr; Erica Crompton; and author Ramsey Campbell, among others. The producer is Polly Weston. For information and support on the subjects discussed in this programme visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1NGvFrTqWChr03LrYlw2Hkk/information-and-support-mental-health.

As we dream of sending humans to Mars, the psychological problems of a mission loom large. As part of Radio 4's Mars season. Claudia Hammond investigates the mind-set behind the desire of those of us who want to colonise the red planet. What does it take to survive the confines of a 9 month journey and the enclosed pod-like environments that mission leaders envisage will be the housing needed to occupy this inhospitable planet? Claudia meets the wannabe Martian explorers who've been sampling similar long term simulations here on earth and the psychologists who've overseen the design, selection and planning for future communities in space. Producer Adrian Washbourne.

Emily Dicks visits St Petersburg to trace her grandfather's teenage memories of the excitement and fear of the 1917 Revolutions - as preserved on a never-previously-revealed tape. This extraordinary recording - kept in family archives - describes the lives of ordinary people caught up in the political turmoil between the two Russian Revolutions of 1917. Henry Dicks was the son of an Estonian-based Englishman, sent to school in Petrograd during the First World War. He recorded his memories in an interview with his son in 1967. The tape covers the period immediately after Rasputin's death and the fall of the Tsar, all the way through to the Bolshevik attack on the Provisional Government's Winter Palace in October 1917, which Henry saw first-hand. Henry remembers the joy after the Tsar's fall when "the whole population seemed to be in the streets", servants became "much cheekier" and his schoolmasters shed their uniforms. But then the Bolsheviks strengthened their power and Henry describes the unnerving feeling in metropolitan Petrograd that they were "getting away with it". One October morning when, as he remembers, "the air was thick with foreboding", Henry watched the attack of the Winter Palace. Once the Bolsheviks had seized power, Henry describes "a kind of terror beginning" and he eventually fled via Finland, where he was marooned in a hotel amid a civil war... With: Helen Rappaport, Stephen Lovell Producer: Phil Tinline.

A picture of the Caribbean, as seen by a new generation of writers and poets. Elisha Efua Bartels talks to Trinidadian writers Sharon Millar, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, and Andre Bagoo about the sense of place in their work. For Sharon Millar, author of the short story collection 'The Whale House', the landscape and colour of Trinidad is always the anchor, and she often explores the cultural interaction and foot traffic between the island and Venezuela, only 7 miles away. Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw delves under the surface of Trinidadian society in her novel 'Mrs B', set during the 1990 coup in Port of Spain and inspired by Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary'. In Andre Bagoo's poetry, locations in the city become symbolic of the state of the nation, both in their beauty and disgrace. Elisha looks at the ways in which these writers capture Trinidadian landscapes and cityscapes in their work, and how they address what lies beneath. Featuring readings from: Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw - 'Mrs B', Peepal Tree Press Sharon Millar - 'The Whale House', Peepal Tree Press Andre Bagoo - 'Burn', Shearsman Books Elisha Efua Bartels - 'Woman is Boss' from 'Trinidad Noir' - Akashic Books Sonia Farmer - 'The Best Estimation in the World'.

Radioactive waste can remain dangerous to humans for 100,000 years. Nations with nuclear power are building underground storage facilities to permanently house it, but how might they mark these sites for future generations? The nuclear industry is turning to artists for creative solutions. How might artists create a warning that will still be understood and heeded so far into the future? Radioactive Art meets artists whose work deals with issues around nuclear legacy, and visits the nuclear agency in France that has sought their input. Presented by Gordon Young and Produced by Beatrice Pickup. With contributions from: Jean-Noël Dumont - Memory Division at ANDRA, the French nuclear agency Stéfane Perraud - Visual Artist and creator of the 'Blue Zone' Aram Kebabdjian - Writer and creator of the 'Blue Zone' Mari Keto - Art jeweller and creator of 'Inheritance' Erich Berger - Artist and creator of 'Inheritance' Ele Carpenter - Curator of the Nuclear Culture Project funded by the Arts Catalyst and curator of the 'Perpetual Uncertainty' exhibition at the Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden Richard Edmondson - Operations Manager at Sellafield Ltd Tim Hunkin - Cartoonist and Engineer, owner of Novelty Automation in London.

Mark Steel loves Hip Hop in foreign languages. Even though he can't understand a word; he loves the energy and attitude. In this programme he hopes to persuade you that far from the violent, misogynistic 'anti-music' it is sometimes thought to be by its critics Hip Hop is where it is at for young people all over the world today.The simple combination of a beat and words has proved itself endlessly adaptable and it has taken root in cultures from Iceland to Iran from Tanzania to Taiwan. When pop and rock burst upon the world in the 50's it was the voice of rebellion but became so closely aligned with English that for decades young people around had little choice but to look to people who sang in an alien tongue if they wanted to join the party - lacking the confidence or means to compete with the soft power of Anglo American musicians. Hip Hop and the internet has changed that; The big American record companies are no longer gate keepers to music that they once were and the simplicity of 'rapping' in a vernacular has proved a powerful combination that's given birth to vibrant hip hop scenes in most countries in the world. In this programme we visit Iceland and then hear from artists from Africa, Asia and Latin America where Hip Hop has become the dominant form of music through which young people talk among themselves about the big and small issues in their lives.

A true story of death, sex and elite politics in China.

Does what makes the heart beat faster really make the world go round? Oh yes. Welcome to a new history of lust presented by the American satirist Joe Queenan. From Helen and Paris of Troy to Bill and Monica via Rasputin, Edwina Currie and John Major, this is a tale of life as a bunga bunga bacchanal. With contributions from historian Suzannah Lipscomb, classicist Edith Hall, plus Agnes Poirier, Joan Bakewell (of course), Caitlin Moran and Richard Herring on Rasputin; a specially composed new poem on lust from Elvis McGonagall; and music from Prince, T Rex, Bessie Smith and Cole Porter. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal," said Winston Churchill. The American satirist Joe Queenan thinks he might be wrong. In this archive hour follow up to his previous programmes on Blame, Shame, Anger and Irony, Queenan rails against the very idea of failure. His sharpest attack is reserved for the supposed romance of defeat. From Braveheart in Scotland via the heretic Cathars in France to the pretend soldiers in Virginia still re-enacting the American Civil War, Queenan explores whether there may be something noble about losing a war. "I'm in the south, at one of the many re-enactment battles of the American civil war that go on every year. Thousands have turned up to re-fight a war they lost. We don't do this in the north - it would be odd, and divisive, perhaps even inflammatory. But the memories of a conflict that took place over 150 years down here - they don't go away." This is the first of two archive programmes from Joe Queenan, with A Brief History of Lust coming next week. Failure features archive contributions from classics professor Edith Hall; historian Geoffrey Regan; writer Armando Iannucci; former political correspondent and Strictly star John Sergeant; plus music from Laura Marling, Viv Albertine of the Slits and rock and roll's greatest failure, John Otway. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.

The writer Nicholas Royle is a passionate supporter of libraries and a devoted bibliophile. As a young man his passion for books was so strong, in fact, that some of the books he borrowed from libraries didn't manage to find their way back to their homes on the library shelves. Now, over three decades on, Nicholas is finally doing the right thing and returning the books to the places he first encountered them - Manchester, Paris and London - hoping to avoid any hefty fines in his attempt to straighten his accounts. Along the way he considers his evolving relationship with both books and libraries, meeting other writers such as Vahni Capildeo and Polar Bear to hear about books they have neglected to return because they loved them so much; he also speaks with others who would never dream of failing to take their books back, such as AL Kennedy. Nicholas also meets a successful journalist who went to the same school as him and was one of the last to borrow the novel before Nicholas himself took it on extended leave. Producer: Geoff Bird.

Just outside the Paraguayan capital city of Asuncion lies the town of Cateura. It's an impoverished settlement ranged along the banks of a stinking, polluted river, in the shadow of a giant landfill site. Many of its inhabitants scratch a living by reclaiming objects from the endless ocean of garbage to sell. Recycling of a kind. But for the last ten years the residents of Cateura have been part of a recycling project of a much sweeter sort. La Orquesta de Instrumentos Reciclados de Cateura -- the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura -- use materials from the landfill site to create musical instruments. An oil drum for a cello, a pipe for a flute, a tin can for a guitar. They've toured the world and recorded with the likes of Metallica. As the Orchestra leader Favio Chávez says, "The world sends us garbage. We send back music." The BBC's South America Correspondent Wyre Davies visits Cateura, meets Favio Chávez and other members of the Recycled Orchestra and learns how trash, and lives, are being transformed by music. Readings by: John Norton James Murphy-Johns Lila Smith Yahlini Smith Producer: Martin Williams For more information about the Recycled Orchestra: http://www.recycledorchestracateura.com/ The Recycled Orchestra have been the subject of a recent documentary film: http://www.landfillharmonicmovie.com/ And an illustrated children's book: http://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Adas-Violin/Susan-Hood/9781481430951.

Frank Swain can hear Wi-Fi. Diagnosed with early deafness aged 25, Frank decided to turn his misfortune to his advantage by modifying his hearing aids to create a new sense. He documented the start of his journey three years ago on Radio 4 in 'Hack My Hearing'. Since then, Frank has worked with sound artist Daniel Jones to detect and sonify Wi-Fi connections around him. He joins a community around the world who are extending their experience beyond human limitations. In 'Meet the Cyborgs' Frank sets out to meet other people who are hacking their bodies. Neil Harbisson and Moon Rebus run The Cyborg Foundation in Barcelona, which welcomes like-minded body hackers from around the world. Their goal is not just to use or wear technology, but to re-engineer their bodies. Frank meets the creators of Cyborg Nest, a company promising to make anyone a cyborg. They have recently launched their first product - The North Sense - a computer chip anchored to body piercings in the chest, which vibrates when it faces north. "I'm a 51 year old bald guy, with no tattoos or piercings" says co-founder Scott Cohen. "This was never a place I thought I'd end up in. Everyone's talking about machine learning, but what we're trying to do is make our brains smarter." Of course, the marriage of technology and biology is commonplace in medicine, from pacemakers to IUDs. But now 'citizen hackers' are modifying their medical equipment to add new functions. Dana Lewis from Seattle has created her own 'artificial pancreas' to help manage her Type 1 diabetes and released the code online. But should limits be placed on self-experimentation? And will cybernetic implants eventually become as ubiquitous as smart phones? Features music composed for The North Sense by Andy Dragazis. Presenter: Frank Swain Producer: Michelle Martin.

Radio 4 explores why the music genre of Grime has blown up in the UK in the last few years by following Wales' Astroid Boys on their recent UK tour. Once just the sound of the London underground, Grime's popularity has spread all over the country and is now the biggest youth culture since Punk. Cardiff's Astroid Boys are set to become Grime's next big thing - they've just signed a record deal with Sony imprint Music For Nations and their track Dusted has been picked up by wrestling giants WWE as their new anthem. The band and their fans tell us in their own words how this very British music scene has influenced their lives and given them a much needed voice.

Singer-songwriter and composer Laura Mvula meets jazz musicians Jason Yarde and Laura Jurd, and music broadcaster journalist Kevin Le Gendre, to discuss her musical inspiration, the visionary American jazz musician Miles Davis. 'He has always been and will always remain one of the greatest inspirations of my musical life. To me he was and is an icon, a pioneer, the unique innovator. He never held himself back - maybe that's what first attracted me to him and his sound'. Picking up on these opening remarks, and in the company of three contributors with contrasting perspectives on the man and his music, Mvula and her guests consider the impact and legacy of Miles Davis, a unique musician who repeatedly reinvented himself musically, and single-handedly shape-shifted the language of jazz, for nearly half a century. With glimpses of music from Miles Davis's vast discography, the programme paints a unique and personal portrait of one of the 20th century's greatest musical creators and iconclasts. Laura Mvula is one of the most exciting music talents to emerge in Britain in recent years. Growing up in Birmingham's Kings Heath to parents from Jamaica and St Kitts, Mvula cut her musical teeth singing in and directing local church and gospel choirs, and performing with soul group Judyshouse, before going on to Birmingham Conservatoire to study composition with, among others, composer Joe Cutler. After working as a music supply teacher in Birmingham schools, she sent demo recordings of her songs to record labels; the result has been spectacular international success that ranges from touring the world with her band, to composing for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Laura Mvula cites Miles Davis as one of her greatest influences - first urged by her father to watch documentaries about him, then given albums by a relative, her initial puzzlement grew into unbounded admiration for a black musician who refused utterly to be bounded by musical style or social position. His appetite for musical innovation and experiment, his dismissal of the idea of musical mistakes, his vision for successful creative collaboration - all of these characteristics and more combined to create a template for the sort of musician Laura Mvula has aspired to become. In this documentary feature, Laura sounds out her thoughts in the company of three guests, all of whom are equally great admirers of Miles Davis, but who approach him from different perspectives. Mvula's guests are: Kevin Le Gendre is a journalist and broadcaster with a special interest in black music. Deputy editor of Echoes, he contributes to a wide range of publications that include Jazzwise, MusicWeek, Vibrations and The Independent On Sunday and also appears as a commentator and critic on radio programmes such as BBC Radio 3's Jazz On 3 and BBC Radio 4's Front Row. Laura Jurd is a British award-winning trumpet player, composer and bandleader and BBC New Generation Jazz Artist for 2015-2017. Highly active throughout the UK scene, Laura has developed a formidable reputation as one of the most creative young musicians to emerge from the UK in recent years. In 2015 Laura received the Parliamentary Jazz Award for 'Instrumentalist of the Year' and in the past has been shortlisted for a BASCA British Composer Award, received the Dankworth Prize for Jazz Composition and the Worshipful Company of Musician's Young Jazz Musician of the Year award. Her band Dinosaur is one of the most vital and creative new ensembles in the UK today, and in September 2016, the band's debut album 'Together, As One' was released on Edition Records. Jason Yarde is a saxophonist, composer, arranger, producer, and musical director who writes music across various styles including jazz, classical, hip-hop, fusion, free improvisation, broken beats, R&B, reggae, soul, song writing and for a variety of media: his BBC Proms compositional debut 'Rhythm and Other Fascinations' won the first ever BASCA award for 'Contemporary Jazz Composition' in 2010. Yarde began playing alto and soprano saxophones with the Jazz Warriors while a teenager, and went on to MD this landmark orchestra. He is a longtime sideman of Louis Moholo, and has appeared in the big bands of Sam Rivers, Hermeto Pascoal, McCoy Tyner, Manu Dibango, Roy Ayers, and Andrew Hill. Producer: Lyndon Jones for Music Department, BBC Wales.

BBC coverage of Hull City of Culture will be extensive across 2017. At its very start, the award-winning poet Sean O'Brien reflects upon why his native city, its waterscape and landscape, have inspired poets past and present. The programme features a specially commissioned new poem from Sean - a three-part memory-piece, which is also a love-song for Hull, its surroundings and their metaphorical resonance: ........The great void Where the land loses track of itself, And the water comes sidling past at the roadside Awaiting the signal to flood, is a kind of belief Where there is no belief, is the great consolation Of knowing that nothing will follow but weather and tides, Yet also that when the world ends There must be a Humber pilot keeping watch As the great ships are passing silently away Through the estuary's mouth and the saw-toothed marriage Of river and sea, and out past the fort at Bull Island And over the edge, and away............. Sean also celebrates the work of poets who have made the city their home: Andrew Marvell, a line from whose 17th Century poem, To His Coy Mistress, gives this programme its title; Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith and others. He brings in an eclectic range of music, including his personal favourite, Dirty Water, by local band The Fabulous Ducks. He hears from the Hull-based geographer Chris Skinner, and poet Sarah Stutt. Starting with memories of digging holes in the garden of the house where he grew up, via flood-cellars, culverts and drains, the smaller river Hull and the great estuarine river Humber itself, this highly-textured programme culminates with Sean at the top of the disused lighthouse at Spurn Point, gazing out into the North Sea. Producer Beaty Rubens.

This hospital based youth violence work is taking place in the four London major trauma centres and Producer Sue Mitchell was given exclusive access to follow what happens. The charity, Redthread, now has teams in each of the trauma centres and their youth workers will be alongside victims from the point that they walk, or are stretchered, in. They're away from their communities and alienated from peers and this surreal period - 'the teachable moment,' as it's known - is seen as being an effective time because the young person is vulnerable, shocked and forced to confront assumptions of invincibility. Becky Calnan is a Redthread team leader at one of the London trauma centres and allows listeners to follow her work with nineteen year old Liam. He's been attacked on the street and turns up at Accident and Emergency with blood soaking into his coat and trousers. He tells her that he's been punched, kicked and stamped on as he was making his way to court for a scheduled appointment. She knows him already: just months earlier he was stabbed in his legs in a planned attack. Becky's been working with Liam ever since. His latest injuries don't surprise her: "He doesn't eat properly; he doesn't sleep as he's out at night, and he's paranoid because of how he's living: this all feeds into making these incidents much more likely to happen." Liam tells listeners about his life of court appearances, street violence and lack of ambition. He traces the start of his problems back to 2010, when he moved to a new area of London with his Mum and sisters. He knows he could make something of himself if he puts his mind to it, but there's too much daily pressure for him to even try: "I don't know what can happen next. There are young youth running around with big knives and my Mum and Nan are scared. I'm not scared. I spat blood on them when they attacked me." But Liam's bravado cracks slightly as he acknowledges the work that Becky's doing: "She's helped me, I do appreciate that. If there are things I need to get off my chest she listens and she doesn't judge me. I don't have anyone else like that to talk to." For Redthread the work is aimed at interrupting the cycle of violence which all too often sees the victim become the perpetrator. Liam describes being stabbed, jumped on and other attacks with a calm that would be more normally placed describing a shopping trip, say, not repeated street violence. He thinks he will end up dead unless he can change, but it's a hard task. Alongside Liam, Becky is helping others admitted every day. There's George, stabbed as he sat in his car, there are two victims who have yet to regain consciousness and a youngster who appears to have been paralysed in an attack. His long hospital stay provides a good opportunity to both tackle any possible acts of retribution and to begin considering the changes as he adapts to a very different life. Redthread's hospital programme launched in 2006 and the idea has been in play in America for longer. There is an international network of hospital based intervention programmes and the idea is gaining ground, with Nottingham and Basildon being the latest areas for this approach. In London alone there were more than 1,236 victims of knife crime under the age of 25 in the year ending April 2016 according to the Metropolitan Police. The workers are called as ambulances are en route and will be there from the start, getting alongside the young person and helping them navigate the hospital system. They're trying to build the kind of relationships which many of these young people won't have had in their communities and the organisation also offer gang exit work and mental health support. Dr Emer Sutherland, consultant clinical lead for the Emergency Department at King's College Hospital, said: "We set up the scheme at King's because we wanted to do more than just patch young people up and send them on their way. Hospitals have a unique opportunity to help try and stop the victim-perpetrator cycle. This is why talking to young people, at this key moment in their lives can help steer them away from the world of gang violence many find themselves in." Once they're in hospital they have a very private space for very private conversations: "Pain in some ways is a great mind opener. "It's so powerful to the medical team, we can remember before we had Red Thread, we would see some of these young people who come in with trivial injuries and then come back with more severe injuries. We see youth violence as like any other disease, so we might see them on their way to school when they've been mugged or beaten up, then what could happen is they could join a gang to try and make them safe, even though the exact opposite is the case, then we see them going from stabbed in arms or legs to being quite viciously targeted and very vicious attacks - we find those very worrying.

John Toal meets former death-row inmates Sunny Jacobs and Peter Pringle at the retreat they have set up in rural Ireland to offer restorative treatment to other victims of wrongful conviction in order to help them back to a normal life. Peter Pringle was sentenced to be hanged in Ireland in 1980. Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs was sentenced to the electric chair in the United States in 1976. Sunny was accused of killing two police officers at a highway service area in Florida. Peter was accused of killing two police officers in rural Ireland during a botched bank robbery. Both had their sentences commuted to life and were later exonerated of their crimes. Peter and Sunny spent over 15 years each in prison for crimes they didn't commit. After their release, life in the outside world was tough. They struggled to re-integrate into society. Practical things like crossing roads, opening doors or even being touched joined a long list of everyday challenges. Neither could escape the feeling that they had re-joined a society that had moved on without them. In 1998 Peter heard Sunny give a talk about her death-row experience. Traumatised by her story and shocked by how similar their experiences were, Peter offered to drive Sunny to her next speaking engagement and their relationship grew from there. Now married, Peter and Sunny run the Sunny Centre in rural Connemara, a retreat for people from around the world who have been wrongfully convicted and who are trying to retrace a path back into normal life. For this programme, John Toal travels to the depths of the Irish countryside to hear Sunny and Peter's story. He hears how a combination of yoga, meditation, healthy food and the freedom to share their experiences with people who have been through similar trauma can assist those exonerated of dreadful crimes on their path back to normality ...and whether or not an exoneree can ever truly feel free again. Producer: Jennifer Goggin.

Poet Mab Jones explores the concept of 'Hiraeth' in the poetry of Wales and further afield Hiraeth, a central theme of Welsh language poetry and song, is a feeling of something lost, a long time ago, whether national identity or a once-important language. It has deep roots - some link it to the loss of self-determination in 1282. It has no equivalent in English, often translating as 'homesickness', but incorporating an aspect of impossibility: the pining for a home, a person, even a national history that may never have actually existed. To feel hiraeth is to experience a deep sense of incompleteness. Longing and absence has infused Welsh songs and poetry for centuries, so perhaps in the national temperament there's a perpetual tension between staying and leaving, a yearning for something better, a grief for something left behind. But there are equivalents in other languages - in Portuguese, 'saudade' is an impossible longing for the unattainable, so there are occurrences of the sentiment across a wide cultural spectrum. But if the English don't have a word for it, does that mean they don't feel it, or that they don't need it? For some, like Mab's former Professor at Swansea, M Wynn Thomas, 'hiraeth' can function as a default nostalgia button, and a dangerous tendency to believe things were better in the past. It's an experience characteristic of the powerless, the dispossessed; it's the signature tune of loss, but is this hopeless and persistent longing holding this small nation back? Mab Jones is a poet and performer both humorous and deeply serious. She stands outside the Welsh language tradition, claims she doesn't feel hiraeth (not for Wales anyway - possibly for Japan), and for Radio 4 questions and pokes at the concept, visiting the National Eisteddfod for the first time in an attempt to put her finger on exactly what it is. Exploring the concept through poetry that expresses it, from the poets Menna Elfyn and Ifor ap Glyn she hears poems and songs that deal with aspects of Welsh history that might explain the continued existence of the word in Welsh - forced removals from much loved homes through industrialisation and military eviction. And she talks to writers who live between two worlds and struggle with a sense of belonging: Pamela Petro, an American writer who fell in love with the landscape of Wales in her twenties, and Eric Charles Ngalle, a Cameroonian poet and refugee, who made a life in Wales while unable to turn his mind to his original home, and the trauma that made him leave his family aged 17.

In the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, travelling in the United States was fraught with difficulties if you were black. At best it was inconvenient, as white-owned businesses refused to serve African American motorists, repair their cars or offer them hotel accommodation. At worst, travel could be life-threatening if you walked into the wrong bar in the wrong town. That's why in 1936 Victor H Green, a Harlem postal worker, published the first edition of The Green Book. The guide listed hotels, restaurants, bars and service stations which would serve African Americans and was an attempt, in Victor Green's words, "to give the Negro traveller information that will keep from him running into difficulties and embarrassments". 'Embarrassments' seems rather a tame word for the outright hostility and physical danger which many black travellers experienced in segregation-era America. The Green Book became a catalogue of refuge and tolerance in a hostile and intolerant world. Alvin Hall hits the highway, Green Book in hand, to document a little-known aspect of racial segregation: the challenges - for mid-20th century America's new black middle class - of travelling in their own country. Alvin's journey starts in Tallahassee, Florida, where he was born and raised, takes him through Alabama and Tennessee and concludes in Ferguson, Missouri. The guide ceased publication soon after the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. But, as Alvin discovers in Ferguson, many African Americans still feel far from safe as they drive. Alvin asks whether the Green Book ceased publication too soon. Interviewees: Carolyn Bailey-Champion, Dr. Charles Champion, Leah Dickerman, Jerome Gray, Prof. Allyson Hobbs, Ryan Jones, Maira Liriano, Ron McCoy, Robert Moman, Dr. Gwen Patton, Calvin Ramsey, Tiffany Shawn, Rev. Henry Steele, Bryan Stevenson and Rev. Starsky Wilson Producer: Jeremy Grange Archive audio courtesy of PBS, CBS and CNN Photos: Jonathan Calm.

Bobby Friction has started to realise that his day-to-day online activities are not only being monitored but in some senses manipulated. How often he interacts with specific friends, pages or sites sculpts and filters everything and everyone he comes into contact with online. Since the Brexit vote and the US election these bubbles have become a really big issue - with talk of fake news, post-truth politics and online communities increasingly divided. When, like Bobby, you decide you've had enough of living in a social media bubble, what can you do to change things? Is it possible for an ordinary person a user of social media to beat the system or is it only technology nerds who can do it? And really - is there any benefit to breaking out of the bubble? The Producer is Perminder Khatkar.

The domestic challenge facing Britain's biggest secret intelligence service. What's stopping members of the ethnic minorities from playing a key part in Britain's spy network: discrimination, loyalty or simple old-fashioned prejudice? DJ Nihal Arthanayake, Five Live and Asian Network presenter, gets rare access to GCHQ, the government's secret communication headquarters in Cheltenham Spa. He talks to staff from the black, Asian and ethnic minorities and hears from members of those communities outside about their attitude to the intelligence-gathering organisation. A report leaked to the Sunday Times six years ago suggested that black and Asian intelligence officers were concerned about there being a racist culture. If GCHQ's workforce was truly representative of Britain's ethnic makeup, then 12 per cent would be black, Asian or from other ethnic minorities, but it's not even a quarter of that. Can the organisation change? Produced by Mark Savage.

Is boredom under threat? There are more TV channels than we can count, Smartphones keep us engaged around the clock, and the constant white noise of social media coerces us to always 'interact'. In fact, there is so much to stimulate our everyday lives in this digital age that we need never be bored ever again. So do we still need to be bored? And what would we miss if we did eliminate boredom completely from our lives? The happily bored Phill Jupitus takes a creative look at our attitude to this misunderstood emotion. He will examine what boredom is, and how it has influenced our leisure time, our workplaces, our creativity and our evolution. Phill will examine its impact on comedy, art, music, and television, taking us from punk to prison, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Sherlock Holmes, from Danish sex clubs to London's 'Boring Conference'. This will be a lively look at the simple, very real and essential emotion of boredom, and a stout defence of the right to sometimes just sit down and do nothing. Interviews include - the Reverend Richard Coles, the writer Natalie Haynes, the artist George Shaw, the comedy writer & producer Robert Popper, the psychologist Peter Toohey, the punk musician Gaye Black (formerly of The Adverts), the psychologist Sandi Mann, the BBC newsreader Simon McCoy, Dr Teresa Belton and the social media entrepreneur Jodie Cook.

Legendary country singer-songwriter Steve Earle unveils the secrets of composing a great song. Every year he runs a four-day intensive training session in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. Journalist and aspiring songwriter Hugh Levinson joined around 100 other would-be balladeers to see what they can learn both from Steve and his fellow teacher, Shawn Colvin. Listen in to stories of dreaming, methadone, guns, jail, death and betrayal. All the good stuff. Producer: Smita Patel.

Can a Shaman cure writer's block? David Greig goes on a very personal quest in an attempt to find out. David Greig is one of our most respected and successful playwrights. He's also the Artistic Director of the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. But he is suffering from writer's block; he is 'exhausted, like a mined out mine'. He's tried many a cure, without success, and now he wants to visit a Shaman to see if there is a solution to be found somewhere in the spirit world. As quests go, it's slightly odd, sometimes light-hearted but serious in parts... Producer: Karen Gregor.

In 2008 Chloe Hadjimatheou was covering Barack Obama's first election campaign when she came across a 15 year old black boy in a Mississippi trailer park. Back then the young Tobias was full of potential and had big dreams of becoming a policeman. 8 years later, Chloe goes in search of him to find what became of him. Did Tobias ever fulfil his wishes and has he prospered in Obama's America? Produced and presented by Chloe Hadjimatheou Editor: Penny Murphy.

'Like talking on the phone but a thousand times more thrilling,' voice recording booths invite you to 'hear yourself as others hear you' by entering a weird machine to cut a record. Once a technological novelty, these recordings leave a unique legacy and a wonderful world of audio peculiarities, which serve as a vital reminder for how we communicate today. Once a staple of seaside resorts and arcades, famously used in the films Brighton Rock and Badlands, they returned to prominence when Jack White restored a booth, on which Neil Young recorded his 2014 album. While the discs speak for themselves, the booths ask questions about us and how we choose to present ourselves to the world. Janine H. Jones crosses the Atlantic, to meet the people who have restored these booths, to find out what's the value of putting our money where our mouth is and speaking out loud. Recording personally and for posterity, why are people in their droves returning to make a permanent record, instead of the infinitely editable yet intangible digital recordings offered by the technology in our pocket? Presenter: Janine H. Jones Producer: Hannah Loy Contributors: Bill Bollman (Record booth restorer) Alisha Edmonson (Songbyrd Cafe) Will Prentice (British Library) Digby Fairweather (jazz musician) Ben Blackwell (Third Man Records) With special thanks to The British Library & The Imperial War Museum for access to their collection of discs. With special thanks to Jason Spellman, Ben Soundhog and Mike Hale for donating their discs to the project. With special thanks to Cai Strachan for digitising the donated discs and donating the first disc that sparked the whole idea.

Winner of this year's prestigious BBC/RGS dream journey award is Nina Plapp who sets off from the Isle of Wight with her cello 'Cuthbert' en route to India via Transylvania in a search for the roots of gypsy music. Nina is a cellist from a large musical family and the energy and rhythms of gypsy music have always mesmerized her. Cuthbert, now 167 years old, has played in many an orchestra and was most recently under the guardianship of Nina's great aunt Bebe. After a family send-off, Nina and Cuthbert head east on an adventure into the rich musical landscape of the gypsies. They first visit a family in Romania where she immerses herself in the wild rhythms and melodies of the Roma in rural Transylvania. Then they continue to India to seek out the original gypsies. On their way they join a chorus on the train through the desert, get locked inside a cupboard with singing girls in a Rajasthani village and play with the gypsy musicians at a wedding. If you'd like to apply for next years Journey of a Lifetime Award and make a feature fore Radio 4 about your adventure you have until 2nd November. Look for Journey of a Lifetime on the Royal Geographical Society website. www.rgs.org/journeyofalifetime Producer Neil McCarthy.

On 1st August 2016, Texas became the first big American state to allow students aged over 21 to carry concealed handguns on campus. Ian Peddie explores the impact of the new law. This change is seen by many as a litmus test and, despite a few smaller states already having similar laws, where Texas goes America often follows. As with all American gun debates the issue is divisive, with many seeing this moment as pivotal in framing the nation's political and cultural relationship with weapons. Most educators in Texas oppose the legislation, Texas Senate Bill 11 (SB11). They fear an impact on teaching, where contentious topics such as religion and philosophy may now be avoided. But after notorious shootings at Virginia Tech, Columbine and the University of Texas, some students welcome the ability to defend themselves. British born Assistant Professor Ian Peddie has lived and worked in the USA for over 25 years. SB11 will change the context under which he lives and works and it's in that knowledge that he explores the impact of the new campus carry laws. We follow Ian into class at Sul Ross State University for the first day of the new law's introduction. On campus Ian meets students, faculty, and the police to gauge the mood of these new times. Later, Ian hears from protestors for and against the new law at the huge University of Texas in Austin. In a noisy atmosphere, the arguments are good natured but passionate. Throughout the programme Ian examines the fears, claims and discussions being held across universities, the state, and the nation. It will be illegal for lecturers to ask students if they are carrying weapons but it remains to be seen how that 'knowing but not knowing' might affect the class. A Like It Is Media production for BBC Radio 4.

The writer Olivia Laing presents an imaginative portrait of Arthur Russell. Arthur Russell was a cellist, a composer, a songwriter and a disco auteur. He was active in the New York downtown scene of the 1970s and was a frequent collaborator with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass. Although extremely prolific, his inability to finish projects is often cited as part of the reason that very little of his music was released during his lifetime. When Arthur Russell died in 1992 his Village Voice obituary read, "Arthur's songs were so personal that it seems as though he simply vanished into his music." Featuring: Mustafa Ahmed, Joyce Bowden, Steven Hall and Tom Lee Producer: Martin Williams

Exploring characters from literature, stage and screen, actor Toby Jones celebrates the mercurial world of the villain. There are the characters we love, and then there are the characters we love to hate. Some of the most memorable ones in drama and fiction are villains and our relationship with them can be deeper than the characters we're supposed to be rooting for. In this programme we tell the tale of this love - hate relationship with the baddie and discover that the villain is more than just a foil for the hero - they are a reflection of us all. Introducing the story in six chapters from his secret lair actor Toby Jones delves into a the vaults of villainy; from the hideous countenances to deranged governesses, from the dark side to the cads and femme fatales the programme brings into the spotlight a collection of evil doers and assesses whether they deserve sympathy, condemnation or anti-hero status. We live in the age of the anti-hero; characters which proliferate popular culture that are no longer simply goodies and baddies. They are cherished in critically acclaimed American dramas: Breaking Bad has Walter White and The Sopranos has the eponymous Tony. The anti-hero is a complex character. They can commit truly appalling, villainous acts - but we're encouraged to see the reasons behind those actions, to sympathise with them, to understand what makes them do what they do and to hope for redemption. As the Walter White's and Tony Soprano's emerge, this programme reconsiders classic villainy and analyses whether the increasingly popular anti-hero is threatening to unseat the villain and resign them to pantomime and comic book stories as serious drama abandons real baddies. As Toby Jones explores the wicked worlds of our favourite villains their nefarious natures are assessed by Shakespearean scholars Paul Edmondson and Carol Rutter, an academic specialising in Victorian fiction Professor John Sutherland, Comedy and film history Glenn Mitchell and actors Emily Raymond, Michael Roberts and Jonathan Rigby Produced by Stephen Garner With readings by Michael Roberts and Jessica Treen.

Keeners were the women of rural Ireland who were traditionally paid to cry, wail and sing over the bodies of the dead at funerals and wakes. Their role was to help channel the grief of the bereaved and they had an elevated, almost mythical status among their communities. The custom of keening had all but vanished by the 1950's as people began to view it as primitive, old-fashioned and uncivilised. Now, broadcaster Marie-Louise Muir sets out to ask what's been lost with the passing of the keeners. She travels to Inis Mor, a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, where one of Ireland's last professional keeners - Brigid Mullin - was recorded by the song collector and archivist Sidney Robertson Cowell in the 1950's. Brigid's crackling, eerie evocation of sorrow echoes down the years to capture a tradition in its dying days - a ghostly remnant of another world. Dr Deirdre Ni Chonghaile is a native of Inis Mor and thinks modern funerals have taken on an almost Victorian dignity in a society that in general has become far less tolerant of extravagant displays of grief. Deirdre believes it was this very extravagance that helped lead to keening's demise. Its emphasis on the body and human mortality was in direct conflict with the notion of a Christian afterlife and the influential role of the keening women may even have been regarded as a threat to the patriarchy of the Church. As the story of the keeners blends with the waves and winds of Ireland's west coast, Marie-Louise reflects on the passing of this once rich tradition. Producer: Conor McKay. Recordings: Bridget Mullin with Sidney Robertson Cowell, keen performance and conversation. Smithsonian Folkways, Ralph Rinzler Archives. Neil O'Boyle, keen demonstration on fiddle. Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin Eithne Ni Uilleachan, 'Grief' from the album Bilingua (Gael Linn) The Gloaming 'The Pilgrim's Song' from the album '2' (Real World) Milk Carton Kids 'Wish You Were Here' (Anti/Epitaph) Brian Eno 'The Ship' (Warp)

It's part of contemporary life we experience but are ashamed to discuss. But Nihal Arthanayake wants to talk it: about the things that are left unsaid. The empty chair next to a person from an ethnic minority on a packed bus or train. That anxious glance, or downright hostile gaze. Nihal hears from people from around Britain about how the threat of terrorist attacks is making us all frightened of each other's shadows; charting the emotional landscape of Britain at a time of heightened anxiety and distrust. Olaoluwa Opebiyi was removed from a plane by armed police after a fellow passenger reported him to cabin crew for acting suspiciously. Karan Chadda shaved off his hipster beard when people started avoiding him. Tomiwa Folounso tells us that she feels guilty for being wary of young Asian men, when she too has experienced prejudice in the past. How do manage these fears? Some of the people we spoke with in this programme have asked to remain anonymous, but we'll hear from Steve Reicher, a Professor of Social Psychology at St Andrews University and Les Back, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. We join writer Iain Sinclair as he takes Nihal on a walk through history around the City of London. Nihal also speaks with Robin Goodwin from Warwick University who has been measuring people's responses to terrorist attacks, from 9/11 right up until the November attacks in Paris in 2015. Is terrorism changing the way we relate to each other? Producer: Caitlin Smith.

'Stalking' - repeated, unwanted contact or intrusive behaviour from another person which causes fear or distress - affects huge numbers of people. The public perception is that only celebrities are the victims of stalkers, but over the course of their lives twenty per cent of women in Britain will have been stalked. It is often, though, difficult to confirm stalking and to take action against its perpetrators. Stalkers range from the socially inadequate to delusional and psychotic; but they are all singularly and pathologically persistent. Dr Raj Persaud explores the present situation and asks what more can be done. He hears from psychiatrists, psychologists, the police and victims of stalking. Some have been stalked for over 40 years. Raj Persaud also examines how to stop stalkers and prevent them from reoffending.

Cambridge Classics professor, Mary Beard, tells the intriguing story of the history of exams and asks what are exams really for. In her quest for an answer, she scales the rooftops of King's College, Cambridge, grills a well-known comedian in Latin and discovers Charles Darwin was a terrible student more interested in finding beetles than doing his exams. Mary delves into the world of exams past and present in the company of comedian Richard Herring, roof-walker and academic, Katherine Rundell, fellow Classicist Simon Goldhill and others. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

With the help of his granddaughter Sophie, Roald Dahl tells his own remarkable story in the style of one of his much-loved books. Illustrated with newly discovered archive recordings and songs and music exclusively recorded by the cast and musicians in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Matilda The Musical at the Cambridge Theatre in London, this Archive on 4 marks the centenary of the writer dubbed 'the best storyteller in the world'. The programme contains excerpts from interviews with Roald Dahl on NRK, Op Reis with Ivo Niehe, Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley, Parkinson, Wogan, Saturday Matters With Sue Lawley, Pebble Mill at One, Saturday Superstore, Whicker's World, Start The Week, Bookmark, The World of Books, Meridian, The Friday Serial, The Many Lives of Roald Dahl, A Dose of Dahl's Magic Medicine, Treasure Islands, PM & BBC News. Producer: Dixi Stewart. Music recorded by cast and musicians inthe Royal Shakespeare Company's Matilda The Musical.

Football is the Welsh national sport. Yes, you read that right. Comedian and writer Elis James gives a polemical appraisal of football's role in constructing modern Welsh identity. (1/2) The story of football in Wales tells a richer, geographically-wider, more socially-inclusive national story than rugby, the country's much vaunted "national sport". The Welsh football story has long embraced crosspollination from ethnic communities, the influx and growth of industries other than coal and steel, and the myriad geographical, social and linguistic divisions that crisscross Wales. In 2016, more Welsh people watch football and follow their local team than rugby; six times as many Welsh women play football than its oval-balled cousin. But no-one's listening. Across Offa's Dyke and within the Welsh media, we're being sold a myth. Rugby articulates a set of comfy, uninterrogated clichés about a fabled Welsh national psyche (Poetry! Coal mines! Celts! Oppressed by the English!) that's ossified. Only in the story of Welsh football - virtually ignored by British sporting media - does one find laid bare the difficult, rich tapestry of Wales today. As the Welsh national football team embarks on its first major tournament for nearly sixty years, Elis James examines why sport plays such a key role - within Wales and to all of us - in constructing different kinds of national, ethnic and personal identities. What are the difficulties and myths that are generated when a sport is elevated to "national" status? And for small nations like Wales taking confidence from the patriotism their national teams generate - how much does a national sport help them stand on their own two feet - and how much does it distract from the hard questions of what it means to be a nation? In the first episode, Elis James explores the extent to which football has played second-fiddle to rugby in Wales. How much does the constant veneration of a mythologised national sport - and football's failure to break through into the popular imagination - hold Wales back from being a forward-looking, modern nation? With contributions from Martin Johnes, Sarah Dunant, Laura McAllister, Dai Smith and Simon Kuper. Producer: Steven Rajam.

A plumber eating a mushroom, and a spiny mammal jumping on a golden ring - you'd be forgiven for thinking these actions would make pretty indistinct or ambiguous sounds. But comedian, writer and musician Isy Suttie discovers why - thanks to Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog - they're some of the most evocative sounds of the 1980s and 90s. Along with these sounds, the plinky plonky music of early video games buried itself inside a generation of ears growing up among Commodores, Ataris, Segas and Nintendos. Loosely referred to as "chiptune", many musicians and producers now use the jagged, electronic textures in their songs, going to great lengths to deliberately limit their audio palette for the sake of authenticity; some even rip apart old computers and consoles to build instruments faithful to the original sounds. Its ubiquity in film and TV scores is another testament to its efficiency in evoking that era. Isy traces the evolution of chiptune from early electronic music, looking at how composers like Hirokazu Tanaka and Koji Kondo created the catchy and unmistakeable themes of Tetris and Super Mario Brothers. She meets current chiptune artists, including the band whose instruments are joysticks and game controllers, and uses their advice to write her own digital classic. But can she convince the organisers of a die-hard gaming event to use it as their theme tune, and survive silicon scrutiny? Produced by Benn Cordrey.

Moss Side Gym Stories - Part 1: Moss Side is a small neighbourhood just outside of Manchester's city centre. In the 19th century Elizabeth Gaskell, inspired by the area, made her literary debut with the novel Mary Barton. She described Moss Side as a place of rural charm where Victorian workers and their families came to talk, play and relax. By the later part of the 20th century, the green fields that Gaskell knew had been replaced by housing estates, and Moss Side's reputation for riots, gangs and guns had spread nationwide. Growing up in Moss Side, Manchester's award winning poet Mike Garry, saw another side. Among its terraced rows Mike discovered a place where he could hear an echo of the qualities that caused Gaskell to put pen to paper - the Moss Side Leisure Centre. In the first of a two part programme Mike returns to the leisure centre to perform his epic poem, Men's Morning, an ode to the Friday morning male patrons of the centre. He spends time with the men who use the gym today to discover what, if anything has changed since he wrote the poem 20 years ago. In the next programme Jackie Kay, acclaimed poet and Scotland's new Makar, writes her own poem inspired by time spent at the leisure centre, this time focusing on the women who use it. Part 2: Jackie Kay, acclaimed writer and Scotland's new Makar, writes a poem, commissioned by the BBC and inspired by the women who use Manchester's Moss Side Leisure Centre. Close to the Centre are streets named in honour of one of the city's most famous residents, Elizabeth Gaskell, who moved to Manchester in the 1830s and knew these streets, as fields. In her debut novel, Mary Barton, Gaskell described this area as a place of serene rural beauty, where Manchester's families would come to walk, talk, rest and rejuvenate. By the later part of the 20th century, the green fields had been replaced by housing estates. Moss Side's reputation for riots, gangs and guns spread nationwide but its ability to inspire writers remained intact, and a peaceful oasis - otherwise known as the Moss Side Leisure Centre - could still be found. In the first of these two programmes, the poet Mike Garry returned to the Moss Side Leisure Centre to perform his epic poem, Men's Morning, inspired by the Centre and the men who used it. In this programme, Jackie Kay premieres her 21st century response - Moss Side Mirrors - an ode to the women who, like their 19th century antecedents immortalised by Elizabeth Gaskell, have found in this neighbourhood a place to escape from the pressures of daily life - to breathe deeply, unwind, and renew themselves. Produced in Salford by Claire Press and Ekene Akalawu.

At Coney Island amusement park between 1903 and 1943 there was an extraordinary exhibit: tiny, premature babies. 'Dr. Martin Couney's infant incubator' facility was staffed by nurses in starched white uniforms and if you paid a quarter, you could see the babies in their incubators. Journalist Claire Prentice has been following the story and tracked down some of those babies, now in their 70s, 80s and 90s, who were put on show. She discovers how Dr. Couney brought the incubator to prominence in the USA through World's Fairs and amusement parks, and explores how a man who was shunned by the medical establishment changed attitudes to premature babies and saved countless lives. Producer Mark Rickards.

Does documentary ever really tell the truth? BAFTA award winning filmmaker Molly Dineen examines the concept of truth and the creation of narrative in documentary film making. Robert Flaherty's 'Nanook of the North' is considered the first documentary ever made, and much of it was specially set up for the cameras. We think that modern 'Scripted Reality' is a new phenomenon, but does it have its roots in the earliest days of documentary? We look at the making of a documentary, from idea, to casting, filming and editing to find out how documentary makers craft their story. Molly Dineen looks at nearly 100 years of documentary making from the archives, as well as looking back on her own career. Her first film 'Home from the Hill' followed retired Solider Hilary Hook returning to England after a career in Kenya, and she has also filmed the London Zoo in crisis, in her BAFTA award winning series 'The Ark', modern celebrity in her portrait of ex-Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, and a Prime Minister in waiting in the 1997 Party Political Broadcast for the Labour Party. Molly's observational style sees her immersing herself in the worlds she shoots, but we also take a look at modern 'Fly on the Wall' programming, speaking to TV producer Jonathan Stadlen about his series 'GP's: Behind Closed Doors'. There's more factual programming around now than ever; but is this a good thing? Are the schedules clogged with cheap programming that sacrifices the truth for style, using fast cutting, music and voice over rather than allowing people to speak for themselves? We also hear from Kim Loginotto, whose films examine the lives of women worldwide, Radio Producer Simon Elmes and TV Critic AA Gill. Presenter: Molly Dineen Producer: Jessica Treen.

Zoologist and broadcaster Lucy Cooke explores the science behind our seeming obsession with all things adorable. There has been an explosion in interest in cuteness, particularly online, with an ever growing number of websites dedicated to pandas, kittens, puppies and of course babies. If you are feeling a bit down in the dumps, what better way to brighten your day then looking at some cute baby animal frolicking about. But what is it that makes these creatures so darn attractive to us and can you be addicted to cute? Lucy investigates the latest scientific research looking at just what makes babies cute, and what looking at them does to our brain, with some surprising results. She visits London Zoo to visit her number one cute creature of choice, the sloth, to find out why sloths hit the top of the cute charts, but the Chinese giant salamander definitely doesn't, and why in terms of conservation, that matters.

The distinguished architectural writer Gillian Darley retraces the story of "Subtopia", one of the most significant architectural debacles of the post-war era, and considers its long shadow. Her story starts with Ian Nairn, the maverick young architectural journalist, who invented the word "Subtopia" in the mid-1950s, when the Architectural Review ran a campaign against unsightly clutter and the blurring of distinctions between town and country. Nairn drew upon a recent road journey he had made, stating that the outcome of "Subtopia" would be that "the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle; the parts in between will look like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton." He continued uncompromisingly: "The whole land surface is becoming covered by the creeping mildew that already circumscribes all of our towns. Subtopia is the annihilation of the site, the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern." Gillian Darley brings together lively original archive featuring Nairn himself, Gilbert Harding, Sir Hugh Casson, Sir John Betjeman and others, to re-trace the story. She talks on location in Southampton with the architectural photographer Gareth Gardner about his new project to re-trace and photograph once more the locations which Nairn visited. In studio, she explores the original and contemporary picture with the architect Janice Murphett, and the architectural writer, Gavin Stamp. And she wonders whether, if the short-lived and unhappy Ian Nairn were alive today, what would he feel about the British landscape? Producer: Beaty Rubens.

Google dominates internet searching across most parts of the globe. The algorithm which produces its search results is highly secret and always changing, but is crucial in influencing the information we all obtain, the viewpoints we read, the people we find out about, and the products we buy. It dominates the market because it's so effective. Rivals find it difficult to compete. But however good the algorithm, however carefully crafted to give us what Google thinks we actually want, is it really healthy for one search engine, and one company, to have so much impact? Rory Cellan-Jones explores Google's uniquely powerful role at the centre of today's information society. Producer: Martin Rosenbaum.

Writer and activist Peter McGraith married his long-term partner David in March 2014, the first gay wedding registered in the UK. Two years on he meets gay and lesbian couples and speaks with them about their relationships - why did they decide to get married? Or stay in a civil partnership? And why, for some, will marriage never be an option? Peter explores what kind of effect marriage is having on gay and lesbian couples... and how it might be affecting us as a society, for better or worse. And what does the marriage, for so long a cherished goal of equality campaigners, look like from the inside? Does it look and feel like heterosexual unions or is it, as some academics believe, re-building the institution from the ground up? Radio 4 hears personal accounts of queer marriage in post equality Britain, meeting couples, co-parents, friends and lovers along the way. Producer: Caitlin Smith

There can surely have never been so much pressure on young people to go to university and get a degree, but while for many it remains the best option for securing a decent future, many thousands of others choose to leave higher education and make their own way instead; nearly 25,000 students dropped out in the last year figures are available. Laura Snapes is a journalist who dropped out of two different universities herself, deciding she'd be better off trying to forge her path in her chosen career by doing rather than learning. In this programme she meets other drop-outs to find out what their motives were for leaving higher education behind, and whether they regret their decision. She'll hear how some feel university was never really for them, while for others the pressure of having to succeed, combined with the shadow of their mounting debts, led to mental health problems that forced them to quit. Laura also finds out from her own parents what they really felt when she broke the news that their daughter was dropping out not once but twice.

What does it take to succeed if you are born into poverty and neglect? Two people who have done just that explore whether it was down to personality, circumstances or plain luck. Why do so few people manage it? Byron Vincent, a writer and poet, and Dr Anna Woodhouse, a university lecturer and outreach worker, talk to experts to try and discover if their own triumph over lives that were blighted by abuse, drug addiction, homelessness and hunger could have been predicted. They talk to experts about the sort of traits an individual needs to overcome adversity, things like resilience, grit and will power, and discover the latest thinking on what really helps. They explore the way science is looking at the role of genes in determining character. And they look at the importance of outside forces; education, family support, mentors and the role of the Government. At the end, they discuss what they have found with former Welfare Minister and current Chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee Frank Field, to see what government can do to help lift individuals out of poverty and get them to turn their lives around. Producer: Jenny Sneesby.

Grammy Award-Winning songwriter Amy Wadge fell in love with the harmonica after winning one in a fancy dress competition (she was dressed in a bin liner!). Now she investigates the history and potential of the diatonic instrument, a European the toy which in the hands of expert players became the iconic sound of the Mississippi Delta and the Chicago Blues. Not bad for what was originally a child's toy produced then, as now, in Germany! As music historian Christoph Wagner explains, the very first example of the instrument goes back to Vienna. But millions would soon find their way to the USA, taken there by German emigres fleeing poverty. The poor person's introduction to music, the harmonica would soon find its way to around the globe, from Britain to Australia and even China. But it was in America that it scored its biggest success. And it was there that harmonica technique underwent a transformation, as Chicago -based Joe Filisko explains. Instead of exhaling air, blues players would draw air in, and bend notes to achieve the characteristic sounds of the blues. Amy tries her hand at bending, under the expert tutelage of Steve Lockwood - one of very few people to have studied the harmonica to degree level, and she speaks to one of Britain's best-known players, Paul Jones. It may be the sound of the amplified harmonica popularised the instrument in the 1950s and 1960s, but has it moved on from Chicago Blues and Beatles covers? Canadian beat-boxer Benjamin Darvill - "Son of Dave" - has explored new possibilities with the instrument, and with an original sound that's been heard in edgy TV dramas and commercials. Just going to prove that for all its limitations - 10 holes and 3 octaves - there's life yet the harmonica.

Kate Mossman tells the story of the long-overlooked female pop and rock writers of the 1960s. As a music journalist herself, when Kate entered the profession she found herself surrounded by men - men who had very definite ideas about how it should be done... writing for monthly magazines that were aimed at men and covering artist who were mainly men. The whole industry of writing about 'serious' popular music seemed to have been established in the late 1960s and the mid-1970s with the writer-characters of Rolling Stone and our own New Musical Express. But there was a time before all this - a time when the newly invented teenagers were finding their feet... and a new kind of journalism was emerging to chronicle the rapidly changing time. A journalism spearheaded by women. There was Nancy Lewis, who wrote for Fabulous and the NME; June Harris, who wrote for Disc, then went to New York and contributed to Rave (as well as marring legendary rock agent and promoter Frank Barsalona); Maureen O'Grady who began her career as a music journalist at Boyfriend and progressed onto Rave, where she also joined Dawn James. And the doyennes of them all was the Evening Standard's Maureen Cleave, to whom John Lennon claimed that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. Kate Mossman meets them and celebrates the tone of their writing that was so fascinatingly different from rock journalism as we came to know it, and yet captured all the confusion, excitement and social changes of the time. Producer: Paul Kobrak

On an August bank holiday in 2014, Shiraz Maher at the International Centre for Study of Radicalisation at Kings College London received an email sent by a disillusioned British jihadist from Syria. "We came to fight the regime and instead we are involved in gang warfare. It's not what we came for but if we go back to Britain we will go to jail. Right now we are being forced to fight - what option do we have?" The man in his twenties claimed to represent dozens of other jihadists' desperate to return to the UK but fearing long prison sentences. Gordon Corera explores the British government's response to managing returnees. In the last two years Britain has brought in temporary exclusion orders and is able to confiscate passports to prevent people preparing to travel to Syria. France has gone one step further - since the Paris attacks in November police has placed over 400 citizens under house arrest and can strip French born dual nationals of citizenship. Denmark and Germany have taken a different approach and instead try to rehabilitate rather than imprison; helping young men and women get jobs, housing and education. The Home Office estimates that around 800 British nationals have travelled to Syria since the start of the conflict and that around half of those have returned, though experts say these are conservative figures. What's the best way to deal with this growing threat, particularly when returnees are responsible for attacks such as those in Paris last November? Gordon Corera speaks with Shiraz Maher, Rashad Ali of the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, solicitor Gareth Peirce, Hanif Qadir of the Active Change Foundation and counter-terrorism officer DAC Helen Ball. We also hear from a returnee. Producer: Caitlin Smith.

A two part Seriously following actor Tim Robbins and Rajesh Mirchandani and the theatre programme the Actors' Gang in Norco prison. Part 1: The Actors' Gang Just outside of LA in the Californian desert, presenter Rajesh Mirchandani joins 'Shawshank Redemption' star Tim Robbins as he leads acting classes with the segrgated inmates from Norco prison. Rajesh witnesses the transformation of inmates, from tough gangsters into respectable men and gains a unique insight into some of America's toughest social challenges. Rajesh recorded inside the prison with Tim Robbins over a two month period, gaining unique access not only to Tim but also to the inmates. Tim visibly enjoys cult status among the inmates and quickly gains their trust. He is no stranger to prisons, having played an innocent man convicted of murder in "The Shawshank Redemption" and was nominated for a Best Director Oscar for "Dead Man Walking" - a film about a death row inmate. He formed The Actor's Gang, an acting troupe, which runs prison theatre workshop for inmates having spent time in some of LA's toughest prisons whilst researching both films. With re-offending a more likely scenario once they are out of prison, Robbins believes that more should be done whilst they are inside to help them change their ways. Robbins' Hollywood master class ranges from Shakespeare to Commedia dell' arte, a style that originated in 16th-Century Italy and involves actors in masks playing basic character types. Robbins explains that inmates learn to portray four different emotions: happiness, sadness, fear and anger. One of the inmates who Rajesh follows over the course is Mike who is serving a lengthy prison sentence. Mike says, "In the yard, gangs stick to their patch but these classes have helped to make guys see that we don't need to be violent.". Part 2: The Actors' Gang on the Outside We followed actor Tim Robbins' work with prisoners on the inside of LA's tough prison system in the acclaimed Radio 4 documentary The Actor's Gang. Three of the actors who we heard in the first documentary have now been released. In the Actor's Gang on the Outside, Rajesh Mirchandani catches up with them to hear their stories. Has taking part in the The Actor's Gang Prison Project helped them turn their lives around and has the acting course had any long term effects on helping with their rehabilitation and adapting to life outside prison? This promises to be a compellingly gritty portrait of crime, second chances and the power of drama.

2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band going "professional" - kick-starting the chaos with a performance on the bastion of psychedelia and avant-garde: Blue Peter. The legendary Neil Innes looks back at the influence and influences of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and the collision of art, humour, music, language and anarchy that permeated the band's career. Archive interviews and performances accompany new interviews with Legs Larry Smith, Rodney Slater, Vernon Dudley Bowhay Nowell, Sam Spoons, and Bob Kerr and contributions from friends and fans including Terry Gilliam, Adrian Edmondson, Kevin Eldon, Diane Morgan, Rick Wakeman and Stephen Fry.

Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) is one of Russia's great lost absurdists - a writer whose world still alarms, shocks and bewitches more than half a century after he died in prison during the siege of Leningrad. In his short, almost vignette-like writings, nothing is sacred or as it seems. His narrators dip in and out of moments, describing curious, often disturbing events before getting bored and leaving his characters to their fates. Old ladies plummet from windows, townsfolk are bludgeoned to death with cucumbers, others wander around in search of glue, sausages or nothing. By turns pointless and harrowing, they are funny. Very funny. And they are funny now. Comedian, Russophile and crumpled polymath Tim Key has been entranced by Kharms' beautiful, horrible, hilarious world for years. But is there more to Kharms than a series of curious happenings cooked up by an eccentric mind in a troublesome world? Key suspects there is. And he's prepared to delve. As he delves, he encounters Noel Fielding, Alice Nakhimovsky, Matvei Yankelevich, Peter Scotto, Tony Anemone and Daniil Kharms.

"Oh my goodness, look at that sign over there. Keep Off The Grass. Makes me wonder who put it there. Makes me wonder why I should keep off the grass. And it makes me want to go on the grass!" American satirist Joe Queenan presents A Brief History of Disobedience, the follow up to his programmes on Blame, Shame, Anger and Irony. He travels in time from the Old Testament to Tarrytown, his home in suburban New York. He aims to discover the importance of not doing what we are told. So let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. With notable contributions from the archive - Gandhi, the Suffragettes, the Greenham Common Peace protestors. Our Heroes of Disobedience include Martin Luther, Geronimo, Woody Guthrie and The Doors. Plus Matthew Parris on Margaret Thatcher, Bill Finnegan on his barbarian days as a surfer and Karen Moline on writing dirty books. And finally, helpful hints about how to be usefully disobedient in everyday life. Joe Queenan is an Emmy award winning broadcaster and writer. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.

Professor Mary Beard is a distinguished Cambridge Classical scholar with a string of highly-regarded books on Ancient Rome to her name, so it's slightly irksome to her that she is almost better known for her long grey hair. In this highly-authored documentary, Mary Beard investigates a growing reluctance to embrace grey hair. Starting in the Mayfair salon of "hair colourist to the stars", Jo Hansford, she's informed that her hair is "dreadful" and given a personal consultation by Jo herself about how and why she should colour it. In favour of choice and the fun of colouring hair, (she has always hankered after pink streaks), Mary is particularly disturbed by the pressures in society for women to conceal their age. It's not just about women, though. Mary has recently come to recognise that far more men now colour their hair, but why won't any of them talk to her about it? Eventually, fellow Cambridge Classicist, Professor Simon Goldhill, agrees to "come out" on air. In defending his use of colour and challenging Mary's own choice, he gives her a philosophical run for her money. Ultimately, Mary has to admit the paradox of making a radio programme about grey hair, so she turns to a surprise, high-profile television presenter to learn more about the pressures on women in the public sphere to colour their hair. Concluding that ageism may be the new "glass ceiling", Mary insists upon the right to be both an "enfant terrible" and also an "eminence grise". The all-grey production team consists of production coordinator Anne Smith and producer Beaty Rubens.

Lauren Laverne has long been a firm fan of Kenneth Grahame's classic children's book 'The Wind in the Willows', in particular that most sparky of characters Mr. Toad, whose desire to have everything and anything new makes him such a vibrant fore-runner of the modern consumer. Lauren sets about telling the story of the book and its creator, Kenneth Grahame, who came up with the adventures of Mole, Ratty and friends as bedtime stories for his headstrong young son Alistair - thought by many to be the model for Mr. Toad himself. Along the way Lauren will visit the school that once was home to the Grahame family, and where he turned the stories into the book we're now so familiar with. She'll also hear from the author of the 'How to Train Your Dragon' series of books, Cressida Cowell, about her own love of 'Wind in the Willows', as well as Tom Moorhouse, an Oxford University Ecologist who is writing a series of sequels to Grahame's classic tale. Featuring the composition 'Nur Musik' by Mark Simpson.

Is everyone in the world really connected by only six links? A famous experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s claimed that it took on average only six steps for a message to pass between two strangers in America. Since then the idea has become part of popular culture. But is it true? And if so, does it matter? Julia Hobsbawm investigates how social networks work, whether we should all pay more attention to our network connections, and whether governments can use social networks to promote - for instance - messages about health. Maybe, she discovers, it's not the six degrees of separation that matter, but the three degrees of influence.

Stuart Barr uncovers the colourful career of British composer and transgender pioneer, Angela Morley. In 1972, Wally Stott's transition to Angela Morley made front page news. Wally was famous. He was composer for the Goon Show and Hancock's Half Hour, and music director to stars like Frankie Vaughan and Shirley Bassey. "TV Music Man changes his sex" screamed the headlines. Where would Angela go from here? Stuart talks to Angela's friends and colleagues to discover how she made her mark in the music business, as a woman and a man. And he explores the special qualities of the music she wrote and arranged, from the famous 'Hancock' tuba theme to her work alongside John Williams on blockbusters like Star Wars and Superman.

Ethan was born blind. He's now a 10 year-old boy who collects sounds on his 51 dictaphones, composes music, and performs on stage in concerts. Until now he's been home-schooled, but last year he was offered a place at St Mary's Music School in Scotland - one of the best in the country. The problem is he struggles to get around. This is where Batman comes in. His real name is Daniel Kish and like Ethan he's blind. He's a master of echolocation. He makes clicking noises - like a bat - to build a picture of the world around him. Neuroscientists have done experiments on him and found that he's managed to activate the visual part of his brain. He's taught people all over the world to "see through sound" and he's so good at it that he goes hiking, cycling and rock-climbing. "Batman" (Daniel) comes to Scotland to spend 10 days with Ethan, to teach him echolocation and help him prepare for his new school. The documentary follows Ethan's progress as he learns from Daniel Kish. Listeners are introduced to the principles of echolocation, they follow Ethan practicing at home, on the train and at his new school. They're brought into Ethan's world, through music composed specially by Ethan, and they're with him on his birthday, on long walks in the Scottish hills, right through to his experience at school. We follow Ethan up to his final day of term to find out how he's done, and see how he copes with his biggest challenge yet: playing an accordion solo with the orchestra at the school concert. Produced and presented by Helena Merriman.

"Your breasts look fantastic in that dress." From abysmal chat-up lines like this, to love at first sight in Victoria Train Station, BBC Radio Four listeners have some incredible relationship stories. Reaction Time broadcasts them to the nation, in a programme composed entirely of smartphone contributions from the public. BBC Radio Four shouted out for stories about love on social media - gave out the reactiontime@bbc.co.uk email address and received poignant, funny and downright odd tales - which have been crafted into a half-hour of dreadful dates, poignant memories and one incredible relationship that begins with a heart attack. Contributors simply recorded their two minute stories on their phone recorders - and emailed the sound file in. The contributor Narelle Lancaster, was called back and asked to record the script over her phone - so it's 100% listeners in a programme made on phones - a new way of creating a programme, and a unique platform for the wit and inventiveness of the BBC Radio 4 audience. Presented by Narelle Lancaster Produced by Kevin Core.

The writing of Carson McCullers has perhaps never been as popular or acclaimed as that of contemporaries such as Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams, but nonetheless she remains one of the most remarkable and individual writers to come out of twentieth century America. She only wrote a few works, in large part because rheumatic fever left her paralysed in her left arm, and she was beset by ill health and alcoholism for many of her fifty years. Her writing style was enormously sensuous, filled with the heat, sounds and smells of the American south, and the characters who populated books like 'The Ballad of the Sad Cafe', 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' and 'A Member of the Wedding' were most commonly troubled misfits. Her personal life was similarly idiosyncratic - the man she married twice committed suicide having tried to get her to do the same - though it is her very particular writing style, with a strong musicality drawn from the years she spent training as a classical pianist, that has made many of her fans so vociferous in their attachment to her. Jarvis Cocker hears from a number of them, including academic Carlos Dews, author Laura Barton and musician Suzanne Vega, who has not only written and starred in three versions of a play about Carson, but often feels herself to be in conversation with her spirit. Jarvis explains his own personal devotion, explaining how Carson's ability to bypass the brain and connect straight to the heart is what makes her such an important figure to him.

Why is homosexuality still illegal in the world's so-called largest democracy? In his celebrated family memoir 'And All is Said', historian Dr Zareer Masani made no bones about his own homosexuality and the problems it posed growing up in the India of the 1950s and '60s. Much seemed to have changed in the intervening half century. But with a renewed Hindu nationalism dominant in both political and cultural life, Zareer returns to Mumbai (formerly Bombay) to find out whether growing acceptance of gay rights is being put in reverse. Attempts were made in the recent past to overthrow an old colonial law making homosexuality a crime punishable by life imprisonment. The Delhi High Court held that this section of India's criminal law was unconstitutional; but that decision was overturned by India's Supreme Court two years ago. Zareer asks Justice Shah, who gave the earlier, landmark judgement decriminalising homosexuality, whether its liberal impact can really be reversed. He talks to the various gay and lesbian groups who are active in Mumbai, and to prominent, openly gay individuals like Mr Gay India 2014. Zareer returns to Bombay's elite Anglican school where he once suffered homophobic bullying. And he spends a day with the amazing Humsafar Trust, that provides everything from HIV treatment to counselling and legal advocacy for LGBT men and women outside Bombay's affluent, liberal middle class bubble. In his youth, Zareer found it impossible to live an openly gay life in the country of his birth. This programme is his journey back home to find out whether the liberalisation he's observed during his lifetime has now been halted by the moral policing of governments and religious extremists. Producer: Tom Alban.

In 1915 women could neither vote, divorce nor work after marriage, yet in that same year the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman envisaged a revolutionary world populated entirely by women who were intelligent, resourceful and brave. Her great science fiction novel Herland tells the story of three men who crash land on an island where the men have died out; women reproduce by parthenogenesis. Until Gilman's book was published, most visions of utopia, though turning the world on its head, struggled to envisage a place where gender had changed. Fantastical machines could be imagined alongside marvellous advances in medicine and technology, but the idea of woman functioning fully in the new utopias was too much for many to imagine. In this programme the award winning science fiction writer Geoff Ryman uses Herland as a starting point to ask why it's been so had to imagine a world where gender dissolves. In the course of the programme he will write his own short story, avoiding the pitfalls that have skewered many before him. The story No Point Talking is included in the podcast. Presenter: Geoff Ryman Producer: Nicola Swords Contributors: Stephanie Saulter, author of the Evolution Trilogy; Laurie Penny, writer and journalist; Dr Sari Edelstein, The President of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society; Sarah Le Fanu, former Senior Editor at The Women's Press; Dr Caitríona Ní Dhúill, author of Sex and Imagined Spaces; Sarah Hall, author of The Carhullan Army and The Wolf Border Original music composed by Scanner.

For the past few decades music teacher and pianist Francesco Lotoro has been collecting music written in concentration camps from the Second World War. Francesco's life is entirely given over to recovering the creations of composers and performers, many of them Jewish, who died in the camps. A massive amount of music was written in camps. Classical music by established composers, but also songs, symphonies, sonatas, operas, lullabies, jazz riffs often scribbled on old sacks, toilet paper or scratched into mess tins. Francesco has discovered works by important composers as Hans Krasa, the Czech creator of the masterpiece 'Brundibar', as well as Viktor Ullmann and Gideon Klein - all killed by the Nazis in 1944, but writing music until the very end. Composer Adam Gorb is head of composition at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. Working closely with the BBC Philharmonic, Adam travels to Italy to meet Francesco and together they pick through his 8000 piece archive, much of which has never been heard before. In this special documentary, which broadcasts in the days running up to Holocaust Memorial Day, Adam Gorb returns to Britain with a piece of unfinished music written by Viktor Ullman before his death. This piece will be performed by the Philharmonic for the first time. Producer: Caitlin Smith.

What is it really like to make decisions affecting millions of people, knowing that a mistake might be pounced upon instantly and your career left in tatters? Government ministers face this challenge every day, and now under ever-rising pressures - not just 24 hour news, but also hugely influential social media and far stronger demand for more open and accountable decision-making. Elinor Goodman finds out from senior politicians, civil service leaders and their advisors how government ministers make decisions in the face of growing pressure from this instant all-pervasive information culture. How is the quality of decision-making affected when the demands for faster and more transparent policy-making become impossible to resist? As information circulates ever faster, can ministers actually keep up and make good decisions rather than succumb to the demands for swifter ones? Where once there was just a news cycle to manage, now there is a need for instant replies to all manner of questions and challenges about the detail and purpose of policies themselves - and sometimes this happens before the policy has actually been finalised. David Cameron leads a government that can only dream of the time and space afforded to his political hero Harold Macmillan, who was able to take weeks deliberating on subjects which today's PM must sometimes resolve in minutes. So, what are the pressures and processes that contribute to ministerial decision-making in the 21st century? Producer: Jonathan Brunert.

Many of us have grown up with the belief that a strong work ethic is a positive thing, and that by contrast idle hands are the devil's playthings. According to Professor Andrew Hussey, that argument makes very little sense. Starting off with a line from the Cilla Black song 'Work is a Four Letter Word' he offers a powerful counter-argument by navigating the ideas of, among others, Bertrand Russell, John Ruskin and the Situationists in France, whose graffiti slogan 'Ne Travaillez Jamais' - never work - still appears regularly on Parisian streets. Hussey argues that the corporate culture in particular, born out of mid-20th Century America and built upon ideologies of work developed during the industrial revolution and on through to the development of the assembly line, can have a hugely corrosive impact on people's lives. The programme features the voices of workers from the 1930s through to the present day, describing working life in call centres where even a trip to the toilet is timed by management. Hussey doesn't however suggest that we all take to the sofa to watch TV and eat crisps, though; instead he argues that by taking control of the work we do and the way we do it, work can actually become a positive force in our lives, once stripped of what he regards as the caustic power of modern managerialism.

How many stories are there in the world? According to William Wallace Cook, dime novelist and prolific producer of American pulp, there were precisely 1,462 and in Plotto, his "Master Book of All Plots", he anatomised them all in the service of struggling writers everywhere. Plotto, published in 1928, was nothing less than a manual of fictional devices, intended to sit on a writer's shelf between the dictionary and the thesaurus. Any writer stuck for inspiration could leaf through Plotto to discover plots like "a ventriloquist, captured by savages and threatened with death, makes an animal talk-and is given his freedom" or "a reporter, writing up an imaginary interview as fact, quotes a man as being in town on a certain day. The man, subsequently accused of a crime, establishes an alibi through an interview innocently faked by the reporter." Cook hailed his own book as "an invention which reduces literature to an exact science." But it was weird science. Nevertheless it worked for Cook, who churned out up to 50 novels a year. It also worked for Perry Mason creator Earl Stanley Gardner who borrowed liberally from Plotto. Even the young Alfred Hitchcock had a copy. And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then Cook must have been delighted by the appearance of "The Plot Robot," whose name promised much but which, rather disappointingly was a cardboard circle with a pointer attached to it. Miles Jupp investigates the Plot Device that promises to make writing easy, with the help of crime writers Val McDermid and John Harvey.

The comedian and actor Isy Suttie sets out to explore how creativity is influenced by the mysterious and medically controversial phenomenon ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). Ever since she was little, Isy has been experiencing what she and her family describe as 'head squeezing' - a euphoric, incredibly relaxing version of goose bumps that starts around the head or face and travels around the body. A few years ago she realised not everyone got this feeling, that it's got a name - ASMR, or 'brain tingles'. There are hoards of online videos designed to trigger the feeling - often involving whispering women offering to book you a golfing holiday, test your eyes, wrap your gifts or tutor you on how to fold the perfect towel. Isy watches some ASMR videos with fellow comedian Joe Lycett, who's also experienced it, as has the journalist and musician Rhodri Marsden. Zoe Fothergill and Claire Tolan are two artists who've made work inspired by ASMR videos. Isy speaks to Charlotte Luke aka The ASMR Angel who has thousands of internet followers. She meets Dr Nick Davis who's carried out research into ASMR and she heads off to Sheffield University where she's wired up to a machine which tests her responses to different videos, to try to unravel how and when ASMR occurs.

Sukhdev Sandhu travels to the epicentres of countercultural America in Woodstock and San Francisco to tell the story of a book of hippy philosophy that defined the 1960s and intimated how the internet would grow long before the web arrived. With Luc Sante, Eliot Weinberger, Kenneth Goldsmith, Ed Sanders, Lois Britton, and Fred Turner Producer: Tim Dee.

How is Russian President Vladimir Putin perceived by the people in his own country? How is his intervention in Syria shaping the public mood? In a series of reports, Steve Rosenberg investigates Putin's Russia. From December 2015.

Stephen Evans goes deep into the Milky Way to look at the phenomenon of StarCraft and reveals how, in South Korea, it is more than just a computer game and is a key part of the rapidly growing multi-billion dollar world of esports. Worth over $620 million globally, with a worldwide audience of over 135 million people, esports are now big business, and in South Korea much of this thanks to the impact of certain computer game called StarCraft. StarCraft is essentially a sci-fi, military-based real-time strategy (RTS) game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment. It was released in 1998 and in the years since has become one of the world's most popular computer game titles shifting over 11 million copies and spawning a mainstream cultural sensation in South Korea where thousands of fans pack into stadiums across the country to watch the best StarCraft players in the world battle it out for big money stakes. From the importance of PC Bangs - the ubiquitous street corner hubs for gaming fans - to the multi-million dollar world of professional StarCraft and esports Soul-based journalist and broadcaster Stephen Evans joins the dots of how this game took root in a South Korean society that embraced super fast broadband and was thirsty for a multi-scenario, multi-player and multi-layered challenge. Socially inclusive, cheap and available to everyone, since the late 1990s online gaming has taken this nation of 50 million people by storm, and StarCraft is central to this way of life. This way of life has brought dizzying successes and change, but with it the issue of addiction and related health problems the South Korean government have been forced to regulate this brave new world to tackle issues that are becoming increasingly relevant to policy makers outside of the Korean peninsular.