The Documentary Podcast: Archive 2010

Jamaica has a reputation for producing world class athletes. Athletes are nurtured from a young age: boys and girls as young as six enter competitions and train intensively throughout their school years to compete in fiercely contested national athletics championships. Most of these children come from poor socio-economic backgrounds and their knowledge of the risks of drug taking - whether for medicinal or performance enhancement - is limited. There's a debate now in Jamaica about how early young children should be introduced to the world of anti-doping and even whether it's time to start testing children as young as ten years old. Nina Robinson reports for Assignment.

The Listening Post is a new series that invites close, unhurried listening to the stories of individuals and the histories they carry with them. In Part Two listen to the touching story of Belfast-born Philip McTaggart, a man who lives in the shadow of his son's suicide.

China's social tensions may threaten the growth upon which much of the rest of the world now relies.

What personal stories can a bridge reveal? When the he Oresund Bridge-Tunnel opened between Denmark and Sweden, it forged a connection between two countries with a difficult past. How can Swedes from Scania and Danes from Zealand attempt to forge a new unified identity?

Why are so few captured pirates brought to trial? Each year hundreds of ships are attacked by pirate gangs, many off the coast of Somalia. An international Combined Task Force now patrols the region and its ships regularly witness boarding raids and seize pirates, yet most are just released or returned to the Somali shore - probably to participate in further attacks. For Assignment, Simon Cox investigates the highly-charged political, social and legal issues which enable pirates to operate with relative impunity.

Mary Thida Lun works is a civil servant. She has had postings in Sudan and Iraq. A seemingly ordinary girl, she is Oxford-educated and is dating a cavalry officer. However she has her own story to tell - a family story from the killing fields of Cambodia.

Part Two of this series looks outwards at the potentially world-shaking clash of cultures between non-democratic state-planned China and the American-centred world of democracy and free market ideology.

The song Wimoweh, or The Lion Sleeps Tonight has been exposed to a mass audience with its inclusion in the musical The Lion King.

Michael Robinson examines the political, economic and cultural mechanisms of China's growing global influence - and how its rise to superpower status is being accelerated by the world recession.

Ben E King says of his song Stand By Me "It tends to fall in place for someone who needs it." What are the other factors that come into play for a song to endure across boundaries and generations?