A corporate high-flyer ended up living in a forest after a spiral of debt, shame and secrecy.

After avoiding a mounting debt to his landlord, Australian Mic Whitty’s life started to crumble. Instead of facing his responsibilities, he tried to gamble and steal money to better his fortunes. As his mental health deteriorated, wracked by guilt and shame, he was determined to pay everyone back. Then he disappeared from his old life and ended up homeless, living in a forest. Through a stroke of luck, a kind librarian, and a 100-year-old war diary with a bullet hole in it, Mic would emerge from the woods with a new purpose and a shot at redemption.

This programme contains references to suicide.

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar

Lives Less Ordinary is a podcast from the BBC World Service that brings you the most incredible true stories from around the world. Each episode a guest shares their most dramatic, moving, personal story. Listen for unbelievable twists, mysteries uncovered, and inspiring journeys - spanning the entire human experience. Step into someone else’s life and expect the unexpected.

Robin Green is an American writer who has been dizzyingly successful, but she describes herself as a 'clueless girl'. At times, she didn't even realise she could actually write. In the early 1970s when Robin was in her 20s, she had an interview with Rolling Stone magazine's creator and editor Jann Wenner. She initially thought it was for a secretarial role, but instead, he hired her as a writer - and the only woman on the editorial masthead. What followed were Robin's raucous, wild, rock 'n' roll years. She interviewed the likes of David Cassidy, Dennis Hopper and Bobby Kennedy Jr, who she recalls sleeping with on his dorm-room water-bed. After failing to produce a story on him, her time at Rolling Stone ended and Robin began to question her future. It was then that she met the love of her life, an aspiring writer called Mitch. But their relationship fell apart and she spent a decade going from one thing to another.

Nearing 40, Robin had an epiphany while watching daytime television and her career as a writer took a dramatic turn. She picked up her pen, and with Mitch, they began writing for the TV show Northern Exposure. They became extraordinarily successful writing partners, winning multiple Emmys, including for their work on The Sopranos - where, once again, Robin was the only woman in the room for most of her time there. When Robin was almost 60, Mitch proposed and now married, they created their own hit show - Blue Bloods.

Robin has written a memoir, The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone.

Presenter: Asya Fouks

Lives Less Ordinary is a podcast from the BBC World Service that brings you the most incredible true stories from around the world. Each episode a guest shares their most dramatic, moving, personal story. Listen for unbelievable twists, mysteries uncovered, and inspiring journeys - spanning the entire human experience. Step into someone else’s life and expect the unexpected.

Artist Kubra Khademi was so enraged by the constant sexual harassment faced by women in Afghanistan that she created a bespoke suit of armour, forged out of metal with exaggerated breasts and buttocks. The idea came from an experience she had many years earlier, as a little girl, walking along a street and encountering a male stranger who would sexually assault her - at the time she wished she was wearing "iron underwear" to protect her. In March 2015 Kubra wore her custom-made armour and decided to walk down Kabul’s busiest street. The reaction to her performance was life-changing - she received death threats and was forced to flee her home.

Kubra’s now living in France where she's a successful artist, recognised for her work celebrating the female body.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen

Lives Less Ordinary is a podcast from the BBC World Service that brings you the most incredible true stories from around the world. Each episode a guest shares their most dramatic, moving, personal story. Listen for unbelievable twists, mysteries uncovered, and inspiring journeys - spanning the entire human experience. Step into someone else’s life and expect the unexpected.

After being kidnapped, a promise to return to his mother helped Antonio Salazar-Hobson through his darkest hours.

Antonio Salazar-Hobson was four years old when he was kidnapped from his Mexican migrant worker family in Arizona by the white couple who lived next door. From Phoenix, he was taken more than 300 miles away to California, where he grew up suffering terrible abuse. Throughout his ordeal, he replayed the memories he had of his family over and again - especially of his beloved mother Petra - and swore to himself that one day he would make it back to her. As a teenager, he sought out other Mexican-American families to hold on to his roots, and threw himself into left-wing activism on behalf of workers like his family back home. There, he met renowned labour union leader Cesar Chavez who encouraged him to study and become a lawyer; it was an encounter which would change the course of his life. After going to college, and finally escaping his abductors, he began to track down the family he'd been stolen from so many years before.

This programme contains references to child sexual abuse and suicide.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen

Lives Less Ordinary is a podcast from the BBC World Service that brings you the most incredible true stories from around the world. Each episode a guest shares their most dramatic, moving, personal story. Listen for unbelievable twists, mysteries uncovered, and inspiring journeys - spanning the entire human experience. Step into someone else’s life and expect the unexpected.

While visiting friends in Uruguay, British teacher Tom Michell saw a penguin covered in oil and tar on a beach. Tom cleaned the bird as best he could and then tried to release it. The penguin refused to return to the wild, it just followed Tom around. So he took it home, smuggling the animal across the border into Argentina where he lived and worked at a boarding school. The penguin became a part of his life, and the school's life - with a remarkable influence on everyone who came into contact with it.

Later Tom entertained his children, friends and family with tales of the penguin. He put those stories into a bestselling book, The Penguin Lessons, now the subject of a film starring British comedian Steve Coogan.

Lives Less Ordinary is a podcast from the BBC World Service that brings you the most incredible true stories from around the world. Step into someone else’s life and expect the unexpected. 

Lives Less Ordinary is brought to you by the team behind Outlook, the home of true life storytelling on BBC World Service radio for nearly 60 years.

Presenter: Asya Fouks

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In Judith Obina Okumu's imagination, Joseph Kony was a monster. As leader of the Lord's Resistance Army he'd fought a decades-long war against the government of Yoweri Museveni – displacing and destroying hundreds of thousands of lives across Northern Uganda in the process. But one day, a visit from a stranger would challenge Judith to face her fears. In her role as assistant private secretary to President Museveni, Judith was introduced to Joseph Kony's mother, Nora Anek. After three years of gaining her trust, Judith asked Nora if she would go to meet her son at his forest hideout and persuade him to engage with peace talks. What Judith didn't know was that the President wanted her to go too. She was convinced it was the last journey she'd ever make. But after 14 days of talks, Judith and Nora helped broker peace in Northern Uganda.

Lives Less Ordinary is a weekly podcast from the BBC World Service that seeks out the most incredible true stories from around the world. Step into someone else’s life and expect the unexpected. 

Lives Less Ordinary is brought to you by the team behind Outlook, the home of human storytelling on the BBC World Service for nearly 60 years.

Got a story to tell? Send an email to [email protected] or message us via WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Presenter: Jo Fidgen

Opal Lee is now affectionately known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth. She led the campaign for the 19th June, the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas were finally told that they were free, to be declared a national holiday. As President Biden signed the bill into law, Opal stood beside him. She had very personal reasons for wanting all Americans to think about freedom and the damage that racism can do.

In 1939 on the 19th of June, just days after she and her family had moved into a predominantly white neighbourhood in Fort Worth, Texas, their house was destroyed by a white mob. Opal was just 12. The family never spoke about the event again.

Opal went on to work as a teacher and counsellor in school, and then set up a food bank and later a farm to help those struggling to feed their families. She also organised local events to mark Juneteenth in Texas. In 2016, when she was 89, Opal came up with the idea to walk to Washington to ask the President to declare the day a national holiday. The campaign, and their petition, grew slowly at first and then a seismic event, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, galvanised people and created a new sense of urgency to bring about change. Now armed with a petition complete with 1.5 million signatures, Opal's campaign was successful.

Opal Lee is now 98, she’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and she’s been given the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the nation’s highest civilian honour.

Archive used from CBS News

Presenter: Jo Fidgen

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

When Dr Pier Piccioni woke up after a car accident, 12 years of his life had been erased.

Dr Pierdante Piccioni is an unwilling time-traveller. Twelve years of his life were completely wiped from his memory after he suffered brain damage in a car crash in 2013. When he woke up in the hospital the next day, he thought it was 2001 and could not recognise his wife or his now adult sons.

Reeling from the shock, and no longer able to practise medicine, Pier tries to find the man he had been. Searching through thousands of emails he discovers that he had a dark side.

This is the amazing true story of a man out of time, who, unable to retrieve his past, endeavours to find love and a future in a strange new world.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

(Photo: Dr Pierdante Piccioni. Credit: Sylvain Lefevre/ Getty)

Alexandra Morton-Hayward unlocks the secrets of the human brain but her own betrays her.

Every night Ally Morton-Hayward has a headache so painful it wakes her up. She says it makes her feel like a werewolf. But by day she's unlocking the secrets of other human brains. Ally was at university when she started feeling a shocking and extraordinary pain in her head - 'cluster headaches' - which became so debilitating she had to drop out. While the rest of her friends were finishing their degrees, Alexandra decided to do something different – she got a job as an undertaker. It was at the mortuary that Ally held her first human brain and observed its delicate texture. When she began reading about ancient human brains that had been found intact around the world, she was amazed – how could something usually so delicate survive for thousands of years? Today she's leading the effort from Oxford University to understand how this is possible, whilst her own brain pushes her to become a master of pain and resilience.

Presenter: Asya Fouks

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Remembering the former president of Uruguay: José 'Pepe' Mujica. He started life as a flower farmer on the outskirts of Montevideo. As a young man he became politically active, part of the left-wing guerilla group the Tupamaros, who were bent on revolution through armed struggle that involved bank heists and kidnappings. With the authorities on his tail Pepe was eventually captured, he was shot six times and later staged what became a record-breaking prison escape. When he was captured and imprisoned again, he was held for 13 years in horrendous conditions but he says the pain and loneliness of that time was when he learned the most about life. A year after the military regime stepped down, Pepe was released and joined formal politics and in 2010 he was voted in as president of Uruguay. He shunned the presidential palace and car for his crumbling farmhouse and old VW Beetle and brought in laws legalising gay marriage and abortion. He had his critics but when he died earlier this month, thousands of people lined the streets to pay their respects. We spoke to Pepe alongside his wife Lucia Topolansky in 2023 and they talked about how their love had changed over their decades together.

Presenter: Andrea Kennedy

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784