This week Dr Sam Willis talks with bestselling writer and award winning broadcaster Charlie Connelly about the fascinating history of the English Channel. Is it a bulwark against invasion, a conduit for exchange, a challenge to be conquered? It is all those and so much more: The Channel is many different things to many different people, and in our new age of Brexit it remains as important as it ever has been. It is still the busiest shipping lane in the world and hosts more than 30 million passenger crossings each year. Charlie entertains us with an extraordinary mix of characters: geniuses, cheats, dreamers, charlatans, visionaries, eccentrics and naked balloonists, whose stories have all made the English Channel the cultural icon it is today.

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