Days Like These

Days Like These is back with a new season. 

There’s chaos when thirty monkeys escape from a Sydney zoo.

Melting snow on a mountainside unearths a long-buried secret.  

A misfit kid tries to dance her way to fame.  

And one woman is forced to choose between politics and pot.  

Starting June 1 more true stories from across Australia about the day when everything changed. 

13 11 14 is one of the most recognisable phone numbers in the country. It connects callers to Lifeline’s free crisis support at any time of the night or day, and for some, it’s a call that saves their life.

In this bonus episode, we go behind the scenes to meet the volunteers who answer calls from strangers going through the darkest times of their lives.

***Warning: this episode talks about suicide***

Penny married John in the 80s. She always believed marriage was forever, and she felt comfortable in her role of wife and mother. 

Then one day, 30 years into her marriage, she receives a message that shatters her reality.

It sets Penny off on a journey to confront the lies and deception that litter her love life.

Aidan Jones is a stand up comedian. Jokes and stories are his stock in trade. But the defining story of his life happened before he was born: when his mum was in her 20s, she returned home from an extended trip around South America only to realise that she'd just fallen pregnant to her Colombian boyfriend. Aidan was the result. It's a series of events that would take almost thirty years for Aidan to untangle, until he finally comes face to face with his real dad.

Think about where you are stored in your brain. Your sense of self and identity, who you are basically. What if your brain decided it wanted to shut a few things down?

That's what happened to ABC broadcaster Karen Tighe. As an experience sports journalist she's covered the world's biggest events with a career's worth of memories and experiences to reference.

But after Karen contracted encephalitis in 2020, her brain shut off part of those memories and tried to contain her sense of self.

Alyce Nelligan is used to being a trailblazer.  

Born with minicore myopathy, a rare muscle disease, she was the first kid at her primary school in a wheelchair, and the first person with a physical disability to graduate from her high school in Toowoomba, Queensland.  

She’s also used to being told what she is and isn’t capable of achieving.  But Alyce, hasn’t met a barrier she hasn’t been able to smash through.  Until now.  

A shock pregnancy discovery turns into the fight of her life – will her doctors, and her body, allow her have this baby? 

Out of nowhere, the lightning bolt struck both of them. A last minute visit to the beach becomes a bigger ordeal than anyone could have imagined, enough to change the course of their lives.

But that’s not exactly how publishers Kevin and Hannah see things. Especially when they keep getting asked about that day over and over again. 

Sporting heroes can seem so far away, out of reach like sporting gods. Only in our dreams could we play with such deities. David Jack's had an idol like that, George Best.

A Manchester United legend, footballing genius and style icon who was known as the fifth Beatle. Like a lot of kids in Manchester, David was brought up on a diet of football and David's dream was to play with Best.

We follow David's story of chance, skill and luck that saw him achieve his dream more than once, just not in the way he imagined.

Barb grew up in a large Irish Catholic family headed by her father Dave, an eccentric and devout man.  

Barb’s childhood is steeped in her father's faith like the power of saintly examples, repenting for your sins and messages passed to the world through apparitions of Mary, Our Lady. 

As a young adult, Barb forms her own opinion and walks away from the Church and everything her father believes.

That is until Dave cooks up a plan to bring peace to Northern Ireland through prayer, and Barb finds herself, and her faith, thrown right into the middle of it.

It's 2011. Australia is in its tenth year of the War on Terror. Reports of hate crimes are on the rise. And 20-something Nazeem Hussain is a tax specialist.

Before he was selling out shows and touring stand-up internationally, Nazeem Hussain wore a suit and clocked in at 9am for his day job.

At evenings and weekends, he was also media spokesperson for the Islamic Council of Victoria.

And one morning, he gets a phone call that sets him on a path worthy of a spy drama.