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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A Sense of Direction

02.25.2020

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 ...

Seriously… episodes:

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 ...
02.21.2020 A Mathematician's Guide to Beauty What does a mathematician really mean when they describe something as beautiful? Is it the same type of beauty we perceive in art or music or landscapes - and is it something that the average member of the public can ...
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' ...
02.14.2020 Cyrano for Hire It's hard to think of a more intimate, personal form of communication than the love letter. We seal them with our kisses, salt them with our tears, are present in every inky smudge. So it's a truth universally acknowledged that ...
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 ...
02.04.2020 The Purity Spiral Journalist Gavin Haynes heads into the eye of two seemingly unlikely moral storms. He discovers bitter rows over diversity and racism within the world of Young Adult literature and Instagram knitting. You might think online knitting and teen fiction would ...
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 ...
11.08.2019 Welcome Money Between the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the policy's hastily enforced end on 29 December 1989, East German citizens claimed an estimated four billion Deutschmarks in so-called ‘Begrüßungsgeld’ or ‘welcome money’ from the West German ...
11.05.2019 Into the Manosphere Young men are facing a crisis of masculinity. To deal with it, they have options - the manosphere, a mainly online world where the challenges facing 21st century men are exclusively the fault of women, or the anti-manosphere. Philip Tanzer ...
10.29.2019 The Hand Detectives “At the end of the day, with DNA, we have difficulty in the forensic arena of separating identical twins, we can do it with a hand no problem at all.” - Professor Dame Sue Black In 2006 the Metropolitan Police ...
10.25.2019 Middlesbrough, Money and Me Steph McGovern returns to her home town of Middlesbrough to ask why we aren’t better equipped to deal with the practical maths that we need to work out phone contracts, energy tariffs and any number of other challenges thrown at ...
10.18.2019 Make Me a Programme Can a robot host a radio show? Georgia Lewis-Anderson is a conversation designer for voice technology, writing answers to the more human questions that people ask voice assistants like 'what's your favourite food', 'will you marry me' or 'what's the ...
10.15.2019 Russell Kane's Right to Buy The comedian Russell Kane traces his success back to the day his Dad bought his council house in Enfield in the 80s. Now, in 2019, he wrestles with the impact of the Thatcher policy which allowed that to happen – ...
10.11.2019 The Corrections: The Carbonara Case The Corrections re-visits four news stories which left the public with an incomplete picture of what really happened. In August 2017, The Times published a piece with the headline ‘Christian child forced into Muslim foster care’. The story was front-page ...
10.08.2019 Shappi Khorsandi Gets Organised Shappi Khorsandi’s life is disorganised. A single mother of two and a stand-up comedian and writer, Shappi is busy. She doesn’t know what money is coming into or out of her account, her love of charity shopping is getting out ...
10.04.2019 Generation Z and the Art of Self-Maintenance Generation Z is self-taught. No-one any older really gets that. The children born around the turn of the millennium came into a digital world and had to find out for themselves how to navigate it. Sure, we all live it ...
09.27.2019 The Ballad of the Fix The story of Scotland's deadly drug crisis narrated by the voice of the narcotic itself. Scotland has the highest rate of reported drug deaths in the European Union. There has been a rapid rise of cheap, imported synthetic drugs - ...
09.20.2019 The Sound Odyssey: Loyle Carner in Guyana Gemma Cairney brings together artists from two different countries to combine their talents to make a new piece of music. In this episode Gemma invites 24-year-old London rapper Loyle Carner to Guyana, South America to join flautist and composer Keith ...
09.17.2019 Going to the Gay Bar LGBTQ+ venues are closing across the UK. Research from the UCL Urban Laboratory indicates that, since 2006, the number of venues in London has fallen from 125 to 53 - with some still at risk of closure. Conversely, there's been ...
09.06.2019 Art of Now: The World in Their Hands We hear from one of the world’s last remaining globemakers and reflect on the globe’s cultural and symbolic currency. While Google Earth may give us intricate detail of every inch of land, there’s nothing like clutching a globe to properly ...
08.27.2019 What’s Eating Rotherham Why do you keep going back to the fridge after dinner? Fruit and vegetables, a balanced diet, low salt, low sugar and moderate exercise seem to be the silver bullets loaded into a revolver that has only ever fired blanks ...
08.23.2019 The Courage of Ambivalence In an age of certainty, of assertions without facts, and sometimes assertions with facts, Mark O’Connell makes the case for a different virtue – ambivalence. Six years on from his thought-provoking, witty and charming Four Thought, he returns to make ...
08.13.2019 Can Facebook Survive? David Baker, contributing editor of Wired, explores the challenges Facebook must meet and overcome in order to survive after a disastrous period which has seen the reputation and the business model of the social media giant questioned like never before. ...
08.09.2019 Power of Deceit Lucy Cooke sets out to discover why honesty is almost certainly not the best policy, be you chicken, chimp or human being. It turns out that underhand behaviour is rife throughout the animal kingdom, and can be a winning evolutionary ...
08.06.2019 Hannah Walker Is a Highly Sensitive Person Hannah Jane Walker argues that sensitivity is overlooked, dismissed and under-utilised, and argues that our society would be much better off if we embraced it instead. Two years ago, Hannah gave a Four Thought talk about sensitivity, and received hundreds ...
07.30.2019 The Upside of Anxiety Anxiety has become one of the defining characteristics of our modern age, with millions of us suffering from its various damaging effects. It comes in many shapes and sizes - status anxiety, social anxiety, and more recently Brexit and Eco-anxiety. ...
07.26.2019 From College to Clink What happens when top graduates work behind bars as prison officers? Lucy Ash meets young people who have forsaken lucrative careers in the City or elsewhere, for what many see as one of the world’s worst jobs. They’re part of ...
06.28.2019 America's Child Brides A tense debate is taking place in states across America. At what age should someone be allowed to marry? Currently in 48 out of 50 states a child can marry, usually with parental consent or a judge's discretion. In 17 ...
06.11.2019 A History of Hate - Bosnia: The Weaponisation of History Hate seems to be everywhere - whether it’s white supremacists marching on the streets of America, jihadists slaughtering Christians in Sri Lanka or the massacre of Muslims in New Zealand. In this five part series, BBC journalist Allan Little unpicks ...
06.07.2019 What's in a Game? While the video games industry is big business, it's also breaking new ground in the arts. We're at a cultural tipping point for the industry. For the past decade the process of producing and distributing games has become easier so ...
05.20.2019 Rewinder Radio 1 Breakfast Show host Greg James digs into the BBC's archives, taking some of the week's news stories as a starting point for a trip into the past. Greg, who describes himself as a "proud radio nerd", is let ...
05.17.2019 The Prototype We assume the instruments we know and love today will be around forever. What if they're not? What new forms and ideas could take their place? Hannah Catherine Jones takes you into the world of the prototype, meeting instrument inventors ...
04.30.2019 The Fast and the Curious Tom Heap sets off on a guilt trip road trip to find out why people like him won't give up the things they know are destroying the planet. Tom loves his powerful car. Despite a pretty thorough knowledge of the ...
04.26.2019 The Bubble Social media, especially Twitter has changed the way we consume the news. Articles, commentaries and opinions are put into our news feeds by the people we choose to follow. We tend to only follow the people we agree with and ...
04.23.2019 Peach Fuzz Mona Chalabi asks why female facial hair still seems to be a source of such shame. Last year, when she sent a lighthearted tweet about hairy women, she was deluged with replies. Hundreds of women wrote to her to describe ...
04.12.2019 A Sense of Time Animal senses reveal a wealth of information that humans can't access. Birds can see in ultra violet, and some fish can 'feel' electricity. But how do different species sense time? If you've ever tried to swat flies, you'll know that ...
04.09.2019 The Monster Downstairs Life for the child of an alcoholic can be lonely, locked inside a house of secrets. A code of silence means they don't want to talk to friends, or neighbours, or even their brothers and sisters. Journalist Camilla Tominey, whose ...
04.02.2019 A Job for the Boys Women once made up 80% of the computer industry. They are now less than 20%. Mary Ann Sieghart explores the hidden and disturbing consequences of not having women at the heart of the tech. Who is the in room today ...
03.25.2019 The Puppet Master – Episode 5. Enemies Effigies, aliases, and a 'golden cage': it all comes down to this in the series finale about Vladislav Surkov, the most powerful man you’ve never heard of. Presented by Gabriel Gatehouse.
03.25.2019 The Puppet Master – Episode 4. Unravelling Is it all getting too much for the hero – or is he the villain of our series? His name is Vladislav Surkov and his enemies are circling. Gabriel Gatehouse continues the story of the most powerful man you've never ...

Older episodes

Seriously…

What's Seriously… about?

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Seriously… episodes:

A Sense of Direction

A Mathematician's Guide to Beauty

The Inside Story of Election 19

Cyrano for Hire

My Name Is... Immie

Code Red

The Purity Spiral

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

Welcome Money

Into the Manosphere

The Hand Detectives

Middlesbrough, Money and Me

Make Me a Programme

Russell Kane's Right to Buy

The Corrections: The Carbonara Case

Shappi Khorsandi Gets Organised

Generation Z and the Art of Self-Maintenance

The Ballad of the Fix

The Sound Odyssey: Loyle Carner in Guyana

Going to the Gay Bar

Art of Now: The World in Their Hands

What’s Eating Rotherham

The Courage of Ambivalence

Can Facebook Survive?

Power of Deceit

Hannah Walker Is a Highly Sensitive Person

The Upside of Anxiety

From College to Clink

America's Child Brides

A History of Hate - Bosnia: The Weaponisation of History

What's in a Game?

Rewinder

The Prototype

The Fast and the Curious

The Bubble

Peach Fuzz

A Sense of Time

The Monster Downstairs

A Job for the Boys

The Puppet Master – Episode 5. Enemies

The Puppet Master – Episode 4. Unravelling

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