Seriously…

By BBC Radio 4

What's Seriously… about?

A rich selection of documentaries aimed at relentlessly curious minds, introduced by Rhianna Dhillon.

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Blood Lands: Common Purpose...

09.14.2020

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 ...

Seriously… episodes:

09.14.2020 Blood Lands: Common Purpose – Episode 5 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 ...
09.14.2020 Blood Lands: Betrayal – Episode 4 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 ...
09.14.2020 Blood Lands: Shaking the Tree – Episode 3 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 ...
09.14.2020 Blood Lands: Say Nothing – Episode 2 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? ...
09.14.2020 Blood Lands: Blood on the Wall – Episode 1 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 ...
09.11.2020 Broad Spectrum 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 ...
09.08.2020 Pause the Plié Dancer Tatum Swithenbank is on a journey to explore where her creativity might lie after being diagnosed with a life changing genetic condition. What does an artist do when they can no longer perform in their chosen medium? Can an ...
09.04.2020 Universities in Crisis 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 ...
09.01.2020 Anatomy of Guilt What is guilt - is it a legal verdict, a state of mind or a moral idea? Why do we feel guilty? And is there such a thing as collective guilt, by which a whole community or even country may ...
08.28.2020 The Empty Cases On 7th June 2020, protestors in Bristol rewrote the city’s history by pulling down a statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston, and dumping it in the harbour. The damaged statue has since been retrieved and there are plans to ...
08.26.2020 Code-Switching 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 ...
08.21.2020 A Sense of Quietness From the Lights Out series - Documentary adventures that encourage you to take a closer listen. This Prix Europa award-winning episode follows a line of connection through four women across two referendums to explore the unexpected consequences of talking about ...
08.14.2020 Led by the Science 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 ...
08.11.2020 Taking on Trump 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 ...
08.07.2020 Fothermather 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 ...
08.04.2020 The Homeless Hotel 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 ...
07.29.2020 How They Made Us Doubt Everything: 1. Big Oil's Big Crisis 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 ...
07.21.2020 A Deadly Trade 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 ...
07.10.2020 Summer with Greta 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 ...
07.07.2020 Your Call Is Important to Us 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 ...
06.30.2020 On the Menu 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 ...
06.19.2020 The New Tech Cold War 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 ...
06.12.2020 Life, Uncertainty and VAR 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 ...
06.05.2020 The Wellness Phenomenon 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, ...
05.26.2020 The Global Ventilator Race 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 ...
05.12.2020 Art of Now: Raw Meat 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 ...
05.05.2020 The Virus Hunters 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 ...
04.24.2020 How to Cure Viral Misinformation 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 ...
04.21.2020 The Phoney War 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 ...
04.10.2020 The Art of Raising a Child 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 ...
04.03.2020 The Science of Dad 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 ...
04.01.2020 The Californian Century: A Twist of Fate 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 ...
03.31.2020 The Ugly Truth 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 ...
03.25.2020 Preview: Girl Taken - Episode 1 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 ...
03.10.2020 Class Talk 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 ...
03.03.2020 Lift Going Up 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 ...
02.25.2020 A Sense of Direction 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 ...
02.18.2020 The Inside Story of Election 19 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' ...
02.11.2020 My Name Is... Immie "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 ...
02.07.2020 Code Red 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 ...
01.31.2020 Art of Now: Filth 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 ...
01.28.2020 The Remarkable Resistance of Lilo 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, ...
01.21.2020 The People's Pyramid 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 ...
01.17.2020 The Last Exposure 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 ...
01.14.2020 The Diagnosis 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 ...
01.03.2020 A Small Matter of Hope 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 ...
12.17.2019 A Guide to Disagreeing Better 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 ...
11.22.2019 Hurting 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 ...
11.15.2019 Art of Now: Playing Well - Frightened Rabbit 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, ...
11.12.2019 The 21st Century Curriculum 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 ...

Older episodes

Seriously…

What's Seriously… about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Seriously… episodes:

Blood Lands: Common Purpose – Episode 5

Blood Lands: Betrayal – Episode 4

Blood Lands: Shaking the Tree – Episode 3

Blood Lands: Say Nothing – Episode 2

Blood Lands: Blood on the Wall – Episode 1

Broad Spectrum

Pause the Plié

Universities in Crisis

Anatomy of Guilt

The Empty Cases

Code-Switching

A Sense of Quietness

Led by the Science

Taking on Trump

Fothermather

The Homeless Hotel

How They Made Us Doubt Everything: 1. Big Oil's Big Crisis

A Deadly Trade

Summer with Greta

Your Call Is Important to Us

On the Menu

The New Tech Cold War

Life, Uncertainty and VAR

The Wellness Phenomenon

The Global Ventilator Race

Art of Now: Raw Meat

The Virus Hunters

How to Cure Viral Misinformation

The Phoney War

The Art of Raising a Child

The Science of Dad

The Californian Century: A Twist of Fate

The Ugly Truth

Preview: Girl Taken - Episode 1

Class Talk

Lift Going Up

A Sense of Direction

The Inside Story of Election 19

My Name Is... Immie

Code Red

Art of Now: Filth

The Remarkable Resistance of Lilo

The People's Pyramid

The Last Exposure

The Diagnosis

A Small Matter of Hope

A Guide to Disagreeing Better

Hurting

Art of Now: Playing Well - Frightened Rabbit

The 21st Century Curriculum

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