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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Knight Fights Giant Snail

06.02.2020

Walking fish, knights fighting snails, murderous rabbits, mischievous monkeys, The images in the margins of many medieval manuscripts, both holy and secular, can be saintly and beautiful - but also playful, crude, demonic and downright bizarre. What are the beliefs, ...

Seriously… episodes:

06.02.2020 Knight Fights Giant Snail Walking fish, knights fighting snails, murderous rabbits, mischievous monkeys, The images in the margins of many medieval manuscripts, both holy and secular, can be saintly and beautiful - but also playful, crude, demonic and downright bizarre. What are the beliefs, ...
05.29.2020 Butch Being 'butch' has always meant being invisible, for good or ill. To be a 'masculine' presenting lesbian has often been a way of evading the male gaze, but it has also meant being off the radar of a culture that's ...
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 ...
05.22.2020 Art of Now: The Gospel of Grime Contemporary black music has always had a boundary pushing relationship with black church traditions. From gospel singers like Kirk Franklin, to grime artists like Stormzy; who brought the house down at Glastonbury 2019 with an emotional rendition of his song ...
05.19.2020 The Pebble In Your Pocket Why do people love pebbles? What is it about their appearance, texture, sounds, history and folklore that inspires us? BBC Radio 4 invites you on a lyrical pebble pilgrimage, shaped by the sounds of scrunching shingle and wild waves. ‘The ...
05.15.2020 Happy Little Trees "You absolutely have to have dark in order to have light." This sentiment from television art instructor Bob Ross is perhaps more resonant than ever at the present time. Former army sergeant Bob Ross shot to fame in the 1980s ...
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 ...
05.08.2020 Five Knots Timandra Harkness ties together five stories that begin with a knot to discover how knots have played a role in human history, technology, culture and mathematics She visits the The Museum of Knots and Sailors’ Ropework – a shed in ...
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 ...
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 ...

Older episodes

Seriously…

What's Seriously… about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Seriously… episodes:

Knight Fights Giant Snail

Butch

The Global Ventilator Race

Art of Now: The Gospel of Grime

The Pebble In Your Pocket

Happy Little Trees

Art of Now: Raw Meat

Five Knots

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

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

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