Illuminated

A moment in the cinema, watching a horror film, made Daniel Kraemer look at his condition - epilepsy - in a new way.

Why has epilepsy consistently been painted by society as being a supernatural power? When you hear from the people who have seizures - across the huge range of types of the condition - a fascinating yet uncomfortable answer emerges.

Presenter and Producer: Daniel Kraemer

Lois Pryce has a mystery growing in her garden.

On the banks of the River Thames stands an enormous old apple tree, producing fruit unlike any she has seen before. For years, Lois has wondered what it is. So she sends off a handful of clues - apples, leaves and a twig - to the experts at the National Fruit Collection.

The answer comes back - Annie Elizabeth.

It sounds more like a person than an apple. So who was Annie Elizabeth, and why did someone give her name to a tree?

Lois sets off on the trail, entering the eccentric world of Britain’s apple detectives. Her search leads from thousands of trees in the orchards of Kent to a house in Leicestershire with a remarkable survivor in its garden. Along the way there are Victorian records to decipher, an unlikely marriage, a missing baptism, a child who seems to vanish from the records - and one tantalising name that keeps leading Lois deeper into the past.

Eventually, armed with a map and one last lead, Lois finds herself on her hands and knees in an overgrown churchyard, tearing ivy from a gravestone that has been hidden for decades.

What emerges is a Victorian family mystery of love, respectability, scandal, grief and an extraordinary living connection between a little girl born more than 160 years ago and the apple tree still growing in Lois’s garden today.

Blending present-day detective work with specially created Victorian drama, The Mysterious Case of Annie Elizabeth asks how a name can survive long after almost everything else has been forgotten.

Writer & Presenter: Lois Pryce

A 2 Degrees West production for BBC Radio 4

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 cemented the Cold War, confirming the USSR’s dominance over Eastern Europe and the limitations of NATO. Many thousands were killed.

As we approach the 70th anniversary, Nathalie Olah, whose own grandfather was one of 200,000 people to flee Hungary as the working-class uprising was violently suppressed by Soviet tanks, visits Budapest in search of its traces.

The Parliament building is still marked with bullet holes. On the facade of the Magyar Radio building, once occupied by students, she finds a sculpture commemorating four of those killed. After decades of suppression, the uprising is now highly symbolic and used in recent years to serve different political agendas.

Nathalie speaks with younger people touched in different ways by ’56. Kornélia Deres is a poet whose family stood on different sides of the conflict, and whose work is informed by intergenerational trauma. Noémi Varga is a filmmaker who observes the memory culture of ’56 and its uses in public discourse. Elemer Balazs is a musician who performed Liszt's Funérailles (composed after the crushing of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution) at the inauguration of the new Prime Minister, Peter Magyar, ushering in what many wish to believe is a new era of hope.

Presented by Nathalie Olah

In 1916, struggling across the mountains of South Georgia after the loss of the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton sensed that his party of three had become four. T.S. Eliot carried the idea into The Waste Land with "Who is the third who walks always beside you?", also a reference to the biblical tale of the Road to Emmaus where a mysterious unseen companion accompanies two disciples. The Third Man has shadowed explorers ever since - the belief, at the far edge of exhaustion, fear or grief, that someone unseen has come to walk alongside.

Poet Kathleen Jamie has written a new narrative poem in which that presence speaks, and sets it among people who have met it: Stephen Venables, descending alone from the summit of Everest; Peter Hillary, on the long haul to the South Pole; and Chamonix mountain guide Jean-Franck Charlet who remembers a glacier he had to cross alone, roped to an unknown companion.

In a deer hide in the Scottish hills, mountaineer Sandy Allan recalls the white rabbit in a red waistcoat that kept him company on Nanga Parbat, and Liz Duff, the first Scottish woman on Everest, describes the day in 1985 when she and two others watched a figure carry a load along Everest's North-East Ridge. The climbers at the next camp saw no one arrive.

Is it the mind protecting itself, or something else? Between the voices, the wind and the ice, Kathleen Jamie listens for who is there.

With thanks to Globule Radio Chamonix for recording Jean-Franck.

Presenter: Kathleen Jamie

For much of their lives, Micki, Esther, Nicola and Colin were devoted members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Nigerian Deeper Life Bible Church and Mormonism, respectively. Each recounts the moments when certainty began to unravel.

In raw and honest detail, their stories explore the difficult line between deep religious devotion and unhealthy control. Along the way, for each of them, the balance tipped. Eventually, the effort of holding on became harder than letting go.

With thanks to Faith to Faithless, a Humanists UK service guided by people with lived experience of leaving controlling religious environments.

Young Polish field-recordist Izabela Dłużyk travels to the Amazonian rainforest of Peru. Izabela, blind from birth, is a self-taught recordist with a wonderful ears for sound and limitless passion for the natural world. She is ‘rather shy and modest’ by her own account, but indefatigable in her adventurous pursuit of lovely recordings, leaving her recorders running night and day. She knows around 300 creature sounds by heart and in Peru she meets Red Howler Monkeys, Scarlet Macaws, Cobalt winged parakeets and many others. But what do these names and animals mean to someone who 'cannot imagine' colour or any other visual mapping? Izabela in Peru leads sighted listeners to a deeper understanding of blindness, especially the innate blindness that has shaped her inner world. Join Izabela as she climbs fearlessly up a 40 metre scaffolding rig to record above the tree canopy. 'I cannot understand height emotionally or intellectually,' Izabela says 'I cannot touch it with my hands or feet...what is 40 metres?'

Izabela first delighted BBC audiences with ‘Izabela in the Forest’ in 2023 when she guided us around the ancient forest of Białowieża in her native Poland.

Producer Monica Whitlock

Radio 4 is marking the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry in Britain with a day of programmes on the Norman Conquest and its lasting legacy today.

George Parker, political editor of the Financial Times, was first captivated by the tapestry as a young boy when he was taken to see it on a family holiday to Normandy. He went on to discover why the tapestry is first and foremost a deeply political object.

Tracing an extraordinary history over nearly 1000 years, George singles out the moments which show the power of a 70-metre-long piece of embroidered cloth with its stories of war, ambition and betrayal.

Why do some see it as an 11th century war ‘dossier’, justifying the Norman conquest of Britain and the building of a new nation?

Why did Napoleon have it brought to the Louvre as he plotted a new invasion across the Channel?

Why were the Nazis obsessed with the fine details of the tapestry - and how were they thrillingly stopped in their quest to claim it at the climax of the Second World War?

And how has a piece quintessentially associated with Anglo-French conflict come to symbolise the reverse – a new ‘entente amicale’ in the post-Brexit era?

George talks to historical experts and key players from politics and diplomacy. Guests include former prime minister Theresa May, George Osborne, Chris Bryant, French culture minister Catherine Pégard, Philippe Bélaval, Peter Ricketts, Professor Shirley Ann Brown and Dr Dave Musgrove.

With thanks to the City of Sheffield Festival Band.

Producer: Leela Padmanabhan

Footsteps on a metal walkway. The jangle of keys and the resonant clang of thick steel doors slamming.

The clamour of voices raised in conversation, or argument, or laughter… their echoes ricocheting off brick and concrete.

TVs and radios, all tuned to different stations, fighting it out with each other, overlapping and blurring into a muddle of sound.

Prison is a swirling soundscape. A cacophony of disparate elements bouncing off the walls, assaulting your ears - and your mind. And each sound has a meaning, a resonance, both to prisoners and prison officers.

Nowadays Ric Renton is a playwright and screenwriter. But two decades ago that soundscape was part of his life... day and night. In his late teens he served time, first in a Young Offenders’ Institution and later in HMP Durham. And in the 20 years since he left, he’s often thought back to the sound of those places.

In this Illuminated he considers the significance of sound in prison - its impact on prisoners in an environment where they can’t escape it, the rhythms of its rise and fall across the day, and the way sound gives you clues about the prevailing mood... whether everybody’s relaxed or whether there’s tension in the air.

Ex-prisoners Valentine, Will, Yasmine and Nassri reflect on the barrage of noise they encountered in prison and the impossibility of escaping from it.

Valentine recalls sounds echoing and bouncing off the walls. And wrapped up in the cacophony was pain and trauma - and truth too. It seemed to patrol the prison corridors, even in the relative quiet of the night when inmates were banged up in their cells. Ric Renton remembers, at HMP Durham in the depths of the night, the warders’ shout when they discovered that a prisoner had taken their own life: the sudden, chilling cry of “One off!”

And former prison officer Alex South recalls how she and her colleagues could read the mood of the wing just by listening. If the shouting had diminished and everything was quieter, if people were murmuring and watchful, then there was probably trouble brewing.

The programme is soundtracked by recordings made on location in prison - the sounds as prison officers kit up at the beginning of their shift, the cacophony which explodes onto the wing at morning unlocking, the alarms, the gates, the keys, the prison officers’ radios, the procession and accumulation of sounds which mark the passing of another day inside.

Noise, bodies and minds - bouncing off the walls.

With thanks to the Prison Radio Association, Synergy Theatre Company and HMP Berwyn for their assistance in the making of this programme.

Presenter: Ric Renton

An Overcoat Media production for BBC Radio 4

You might know Birmingham's Bullring as one of the UK's premiere shopping destinations, or somewhere to pass through on your way to visit Birmingham's famous Christmas Market. But at the heart of the Bullring is a special church – one of only three churches in the world to have 16 bells. And bells have been rung on this site for almost 500 years.

The bellringers of Birmingham are arguably the best in the world at change ringing. They are preparing to compete at the annual National 12-Bell Striking Contest at York Minster - and they are the team to beat. Will they add to their formidable winning record, or will the York team have enough home advantage to beat them?

Special thanks to all those taking part:

Sound recordist; Mike Rucinski

Growing up in rural Derry, author Séamas O’Reilly and his siblings never needed to go to Blockbuster. Instead, they were enraptured by their father’s archive of hundreds of films recorded off the television.

With their snippets of old-timey adverts and local telly, the tapes contain a tantalising glimpse of Northern Ireland in the late 1980s, as well as an array of truly memorable double bills. Where else could you find Pride and Prejudice back-to-back with Commando? Or Strictly Ballroom straight into Highlander?

An indifferent filmgoer, Séamas’s dad was an unlikely cinephile. Arguably, it was the cataloguing that mattered more, meticulously ordering the entries, both alphabetically and chronologically, for his children to browse. It’s only recently, however, that Séamas has begun to understand what lay behind this bewilderingly specific collection.

In this edition of Illuminated, Séamas tries to unravel the mystery of his father’s Grand North Atlantic Home Video Archive, all while trying to understand why so many of us, when faced with tragedy, have a compulsion to record.

Producer: Ant Adeane