Lives Less Ordinary

By BBC World Service

Personal Journals Society & Culture

What's Lives Less Ordinary about?

Have you ever locked eyes with a stranger and wondered, "What’s their story?" Step into someone else’s life and expect the unexpected. Extraordinary stories from around the world.

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The Godmother of Beirut's n...

09.24.2023

Under the boot of the Syrian army, Nicole Moudaber brought raves to Lebanon. After sampling the delights of dance music whilst studying abroad in the nineties, Nicole made it her goal to bring this new sound to a divided and ...

Lives Less Ordinary episodes:

09.24.2023 The Godmother of Beirut's nightlife Under the boot of the Syrian army, Nicole Moudaber brought raves to Lebanon. After sampling the delights of dance music whilst studying abroad in the nineties, Nicole made it her goal to bring this new sound to a divided and ...
09.17.2023 Dancing in the womb A mother, a son, and the discovery of a shared dream. Latifa Khamessi and her son Mohamed Toukabri from Tunisia were inseparable until aged 15 when he left for Europe to study dance. It was gut-wrenching to be apart, but ...
09.10.2023 The invisible child who now shines at Eurovision, part 2 From the page to the stage: William turns childhood fantasies into reality. In London, William Lee Adams is feeling disillusioned with his job, when a Romanian singer on a horse appears on his computer screen and he's inspired to start ...
09.03.2023 The invisible child who now shines at Eurovision, part 1 A bond between brothers, a coming-out story, and an international song contest. William Lee Adams is one of the leading voices covering the Eurovision Song Contest, criss-crossing the continent to interview stars and live-stream shows. But as a child growing ...
08.27.2023 Miracle on the ocean floor Harrison Okene spent three days trapped in an air pocket in a sunken ship. Harrison was the ship's cook, and he'd been in the bathroom when the tugboat he worked on had suddenly capsized in bad weather. The vessel sank ...
08.20.2023 Indiana Jones: The kids who remade a blockbuster In 1982, two Mississippi boys recreated a $22m film, shot-for-shot, on their pocket money. Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala were aged 10 and 11. Their mission would take them seven years to complete, and it would push their friendship to ...
08.13.2023 The woman who fell from the sky, part 2 How a jump changed daring parachutist Tony Osornio's life forever. Tony was Mexico's best precision skydiver and the first woman to join her country's army. She says she "belonged to the skies", and became a member of an elite team ...
08.06.2023 The woman who fell from the sky, part 1 Tony Osornio would go to dangerous extremes to keep skydiving. She was born into a conservative family, and decided to marry the first man who asked in order to escape the restrictions of home. Her husband was a Mexican military ...
07.30.2023 Bradford 12: The Asian youth who took on the racists, part 2 By 1981, Pakistani-born immigrant Tariq Mehmood had endured years of violent racism in Britain. When he heard that gangs of white skinheads – with a history of attacking Asians – were coming to his home in Bradford, Tariq and his ...
07.23.2023 Bradford 12: The Asian youth who took on the racists, part 1 As a Pakistani immigrant teenager in 1970s Britain, Tariq Mehmood endured homelessness and years of violent racism. He found shelter and wisdom in a library, and the strength to stand up to the racists. He co-founded the Asian Youth Movement, ...
07.16.2023 I save chimpanzees and they've saved me Stany Nyandwi's rescued chimpanzees helped him through war and loneliness. As a young boy Stany made money selling sugarcane and worked as a 'houseboy' for families in Burundi's capital city Bujumbura. But later, a job with rescued chimpanzees became about ...
07.09.2023 Who is this kneeling man? My search for the truth about my father and Martin Luther King’s assassination. Leta McCollough Seletzky grew up knowing that her father was the ‘kneeling man’, photographed tending to the head wound of Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr just ...
07.02.2023 How I survived a pirate hijack Marine engineer Chirag Bahri was trapped for eight gruelling months on a chemical tanker. Chirag loved his job working in the engine rooms of huge commercial ships. But in May 2010, while sailing through the Gulf of Aden, a group ...
06.25.2023 Love, war, and the cutting room floor Mariam and Mohammed are Yemeni filmmakers who turned the lens on their own relationship. Mariam Al-Dhubhani and Mohammed Al-Jaberi's love story started in friendship, and it didn't take long before they fell for each other. Not even living in different ...
06.18.2023 He was almost a mass shooter – an act of kindness stopped him Aaron Stark now works to raise awareness around why mass attacks happen. Aaron had a chaotic and violent childhood, and by the time he was a teenager he was homeless, angry and traumatised. At his lowest point, he began to ...
06.11.2023 Teenage dreams on the Indian Ocean At the age of 13 Laura Dekker fought for her right to sail solo around the world. Laura comes from a family of sailing enthusiasts, and her father taught her the ropes early. By 11 years old she was sailing ...
06.04.2023 'Don't anger the monster', part 2 Rowena Chiu was kept silent for 20 years by former film boss Harvey Weinstein. Rowena thought that speaking up about her alleged sexual assault by Weinstein would end up with him in court. But instead she was pressured into signing ...
05.28.2023 'Don't anger the monster', part 1 Rowena Chiu on surviving the Hollywood sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. Rowena was just 24 when she became an assistant to Weinstein at his film company. She knew he was a difficult boss, but nothing prepared her for what happened one ...
05.21.2023 Sugar sandwiches and smarts: a poor kid's fairytale ending Raised by addicts, Dr Katriona O'Sullivan defied the odds to become a university lecturer. Her parents were addicted to heroin, she was neglected and not fed. But for the care she received from two influential teachers and the occasional stroke ...
05.14.2023 Lola the bare-knuckle drag queen Martial arts kept him out of jail, but drag artistry made him whole. Diego Garijo was bullied for his femininity as a child, so as he grew up he toughened up his image. He was in trouble with the law, ...
05.07.2023 I was there the night Emmett Till was taken Wheeler Parker is Emmett Till's cousin and the last surviving witness to his abduction. Emmett's brutal murder in Mississippi in 1955 sparked a wave of protest in America. The 14-year-old African American was lynched for whistling at a white woman, ...
04.30.2023 Tanzania’s hip-hop politician Joseph Mbilinyi pioneered Swahili rap and then turned to politics, but ended up in jail. In the 1990s he'd become one of Tanzania's biggest stars under the stage name Sugu. He'd released albums, toured the country and abroad, and helped ...
04.23.2023 'Brother. do. you. love. me.' The SMS that changed our lives Brothers Manni and Reuben Coe, and the text that prompted a lockdown rescue mission. Manni was living in Spain when he received this troubling text from his younger brother Reuben. Reuben has Down's syndrome, and had become isolated and non-verbal ...
04.16.2023 'Prison Break' and my escape from Manus Island Tricks from a hit TV show held the key to Jaivet Ealom’s audacious dash for freedom. As a student in his native Myanmar, Jaivet Ealom became obsessed with the hit US TV show Prison Break. He watched it on a ...
04.09.2023 The spy who wanted to bring down apartheid: Part 2 ANC spy Sue Dobson infiltrated the South African government. Then her cover was blown. After training, Sue had got a job within the government's propaganda unit, and she was feeding back good intelligence to her ANC handlers. Then she got ...
04.02.2023 The spy who wanted to bring down apartheid, part 1 Sue Dobson was a white South African who risked her life as an ANC secret agent Sue was a student when she was first recruited as a spy for the African National Congress liberation movement in the 1980s, and she ...
03.26.2023 Bringing the Muppets to Moscow Natasha Lance Rogoff’s daunting task of making Sesame Street in post-Soviet Russia. In the early 90s, American journalist Natasha Lance Rogoff was covering the collapse of the Soviet Union – until the Muppets came calling, and she was tasked with ...
03.24.2023 Introducing: Love, Janessa All episodes of our catfishing podcast are now available. You meet someone online. It turns out many others think they have fallen for the same person. It’s the story of the scammers and the unwitting face of a digital con. ...
03.20.2023 My life in seven swimming pools Amjed Tantesh is determined to teach kids in Gaza to swim no matter how many pools he has to build. Finding freedom in the water as a child, Amjed wanted to train the next generation of Gazans for Olympic swimming ...
03.13.2023 The Ukrainian opera singer nearly silenced by a bullet Sergiy Ivanchuk dreamed of stardom, before he was shot in the chest by Russian soldiers. He was a volunteer helping refugees escape Eastern Ukraine during the early days of the 2022 invasion, when his car was attacked. He was hit ...
03.06.2023 I didn’t know I was part of an experiment When Greenlander Helene Thiesen was just seven, two Danish men came to take her away. In 1951, Greenland native Helene Thiesen was just seven years old when two Danish men knocked at the family home. That moment would shape the ...
02.27.2023 Eyes on the prize: Pakistan’s first trans film star Rejected by family and society, trans actor Alina Khan was forced to spend time on the streets of her native Lahore as a child. Through dance, she found an escape and a living, but also encountered prejudice. Facing down loneliness, ...
02.20.2023 Becoming Blair 'the Flair': a boxer on the run, part 2 In the ring, Blair finds calm amidst the chaos of his life. Back in the US Blair Cobbs falls again on hard times; homeless in Philadelphia his boxing dream seems out of reach. But a string of lucky breaks may ...
02.13.2023 Becoming Blair 'the Flair': a boxer on the run, part 1 From Beverly Hills to hiding from the law with his dad, Blair’s seen it all. To help him get through the tough times – and there’d be quite a few of those – Blair created a separate persona. This was ...
02.06.2023 The mystery of the tartan twins A baby left in a car, another in a telephone box. It would take decades to find out why. When he was just a baby, David McBride made headline news in Northern Ireland. He had been discovered in the front ...
01.30.2023 Breaking my addiction to war Fergal Keane's work as a war correspondent was destroying him, but he couldn't stop. It was his job as a BBC journalist to help the audience make sense of the madness of war, but he knew there was another more ...
01.23.2023 The fearless former nun fighting for India's seamstresses From convent to marriage to factory floor, Thivya Rakini will stand up for herself, and you. From an early age she's fought for what's right. As a child living in Tamil Nadu, she stopped eating so her parents would send ...
01.16.2023 Learning to live with the voices in my head Debra Lampshire started hearing voices aged five. Comforting at first, they soon took control.The voices became so visceral and intense that Debra had to spend 18 years in a psychiatric hospital. Then, a chance friendship with a car mechanic gave ...
01.09.2023 Rebel gunmen in Ugandan skies Pilot Firoz Khimji witnessed his country's wars from above. Then conflict came for him. For most of his life, Uganda had been unstable, but he'd been able to train as a commercial pilot despite the violence. When qualified, Firoz took ...
01.02.2023 Coming out as India’s first gay prince Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil risked everything when he faced his parents and society He was next in line to a centuries-old royal dynasty in the Indian state of Gujarat - and grew up in the 1970s in a gilded cage. ...
12.26.2022 The secrets of a slave ship in an Alabama swamp Journalist Ben Raines went in search of a sunken ship with a dark history. A phone call out of the blue had set him on his hunt for the Clotilda, an American vessel that had illegally transported enslaved West African ...
12.19.2022 Searching for my sister, the "keeper of memories" Nakuset blocked out painful memories of being removed from her indigenous Canadian family Nakuset only goes by one name and it means "The Sun" in her indigenous Canadian culture. Born into an abusive household, her early days were difficult and ...
12.12.2022 Guns, guards, snarling dogs: a child migrant’s story Javier Zamora travelled alone from El Salvador to the US when he was just nine years old. He had been living with relatives after his parents migrated to the US, but longed to be in his mother’s arms. His parents ...
12.05.2022 The Palestinian tapes, part 2 In 2020, Mo’min Swaitat unearthed a treasure trove of lost Palestinian music in an abandoned building. Out of thousands of dusty cassettes there was one that caught his eye: a bright yellow tape, completely unmarked except for a handwritten label ...
11.28.2022 The Palestinian tapes, part 1 Mo’min Swaitat unearthed a vast trove of forgotten Palestinian music. Not only did it hold long-lost recordings of his own Bedouin family, but also a mysterious yellow cassette of protest songs set to an electro-disco beat. Mo’min became captivated by ...
11.21.2022 I hit puberty, then burned down my family home At 18 Nikki Owen set fire to the family home – and she didn’t know why. Nikki awaited trial in solitary confinement, but her father searched for answers in medical science, and started working on a ground-breaking legal defence to ...
11.14.2022 He knocked on my door and said: 'I believe you' How the friendship of a stranger helped Betsy Sailor when she needed it most. Betsy was living alone at university in the late 1970s when a man broke into her apartment and raped her at knifepoint. He was later caught, ...
11.07.2022 My father’s hidden crimes Analía’s father was accused of being a government torturer — he said it was a lie. A phone call turned Analía Kalinec’s comfortable life upside down. Her father was accused of crimes committed during the Argentine dictatorship twenty years previously, ...
10.31.2022 The child spy and her secret agent parents Sue-Ellen Doherty was trained by her parents to spy for Australia during the Cold War. For Sue-Ellen Kusher, nee Doherty, growing up in the suburbs of Brisbane was far from normal. Both her parents worked for the Australian Secret Intelligence ...
10.23.2022 A fake billionaire in North Korea, part 2 Jim is deep undercover in North Korea — but will he find proof of illegal weapons deals... He'd been sent to the isolated country by a documentary film-maker called Mads Brugger, to pose as a fake investor interested in arms. ...

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