The Documentary Podcast

The town of Ii in northern Finland is a green trailblazer. It has managed to stop burning fossil fuels and will have reduced carbon emissions by 80% by 2020; that is 30 years ahead of the EU target. It is also aiming to be the world’s first zero-waste town. It is happening because of the collective effort of the community. Erika Benke discovers how everyone is involved; from local businessmen to the mayor and from schoolchildren to their parents and grandparents.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the leading liberal Judge on the US Supreme Court. At 86 she has spent many decades fighting for women’s rights, including equal pay and access to abortion. A pioneer, this is a rare interview with a living legend. Razia Iqbal presents this special programme from New York as she receives the $1m Berggruen Prize for philosophy and culture.

This is the true story of how Star Wars Episode IV-A New Hope got made. A film that, as plain old Star Wars, transformed cinema to become part of a pop culture phenomenon known across the world. As Episode IX arrives in our cinemas, wrapping up the destinies of the original trilogy characters and much more, we travel back a long, long time ago to the often agonising, challenging and ground breaking creation of the first film.

New figures released in the UK have revealed at least 4,000 young people are currently caught up in what are known as "county lines" – meeting orders for heroin and cocaine via mobile phone "deal lines". They are transporting drugs from cities to rural and coastal towns, and carrying weapons too – knives, hammers and acid. Many find themselves selling drugs in a strange town, trapped, too scared to leave. Increasingly, when police raid the "traphouses" where the drugs are held, they are finding girls. For Assignment, Jane Deith hears the stories of young women caught in a world of sexual violence and drug running.

Reporter: Jane Deith

(Photo: Young woman by a window. Credit: Cindy Goff/Getty Images)

Thirty years after Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed on Christmas day, Tessa Dunlop looks back at the violent birth of post-Communist Romania and asks if it has shaken off the legacy of decades of ruthless totalitarianism.

Jane and Patricia fled their home in the middle of the night. Days before they had narrowly escaped an arson attack. It’s illegal to be gay in Barbados. You can be sent to prison for life. Now they needed out. A few months before they had reached out to an organisation in Canada, the Rainbow Railroad which helps move gay people, persecuted for their sexuality, to safety. After the arson attack Jane and Patricia contacted them again - “Please help us now”. In Canada, the team leapt into action. In collaboration with CBC’s The Doc Project, presenter Acey Rowe picks up the story as the women pack to board a flight to an uncertain future.

Judy Garland's last concerts at London's the Talk of The Town in 1969 is the subject of a new feature film. Weaving together newly restored archive recordings and eye-witness accounts, we separate the woman from the myth, examine her exceptional talent, exploitation and troubled relationship with Hollywood.

Life in Lebanon is a daily battle to beat the power cuts caused by the country's chronic electricity shortage. If you live in a block of flats, you have to time when you go in and out to avoid getting trapped in the lift. Food goes bad because fridges don't work, families must often choose between air-conditioning and watching TV, and those on life-support machines live in constant fear of a switch-off. But if it's hell for citizens, it's heaven for operators of illegal private generators who profit by filling the gap left by the failures of the national grid. Some are former warlords who led militias in Lebanon's civil war. They're given an unofficial licence to operate, often in return for favours to the authorities in Lebanon's chaotic and often corrupt sectarian system.

Now a huge protest movement is demanding change in Lebanon - and a constant power supply is one of the demonstrators' main demands. They want to break the power of the "fuel mafia" that imports diesel for the generators and has close links to the country's leading politicians. For them, the fight for light is a fight against corruption. But can Lebanon's feeble state ever manage to turn all the lights on?

Reporter: Tim Whewell

(Image: Protesters block the main entrance of the Lebanese electricity company headquarters in Beirut. Credit: European Photopress Agency)

Gordon Corera becomes the first journalist allowed to record inside GCHQ's listening station at Bude on Britain’s south-west coast. The station has spied on global communications satellites for decades, sucking in signals from space. He takes us from the Cold War, when GCHQ was quietly eavesdropping on the front lines in Berlin, to the current digital era. And Gordon finds out how, following the revelations of Edward Snowden, the agency has been forced out into the open.

Hossein Sharif is an Iranian boy, about to marry Hee Sue, a South Korean girl. As the families begin to meet, Sharif discovers all the criss-crossing roads that the couple's home countries have travelled. In the last 50 years, South Korea and Iran have switched places in the world table of economic prosperity. South Korea has risen while Iran has fallen behind. Hossein and Hee Sue's families begin to discover a parallel universe, a world of “might have beens” and divergent paths.