The Documentary Podcast

Over the last seven years as many as a million people in Syria lived under siege, 400,000 of them in Eastern Ghouta alone. Some were trapped for more than four years of bombardment, sniping and near starvation. The walls that stopped them fleeing also prevented many of their stories leaking to the outside world. They could not leave and journalists, along with aid workers and human rights groups, could not get in. Over recent years, Mike Thomson has been using internet links and social media to get inside these isolated and often forgotten places. He has garnered compelling and moving interviews with residents in some of the hardest to reach places. We hear from long besieged Daraya, Eastern Ghouta, and IS surrounded Yarmouk to Eastern Aleppo, Madaya, Homs and Raqqa. With great fortitude and bravery many people told Mike their stories as bombs shook the walls around them. The result is extraordinary picture of everyday life in some of the most frightening and devastated places on earth. Yet amid the grim accounts of death, loss and destruction are inspiring examples of resilience, courage and hope. Most of these besieged areas have now been overrun and evacuated, but this programme ensures that what they went through will not be forgotten.

Some people just love to be naked in public. Dr Keon West travels far and wide to speak to those who enjoy taking their clothes off to find out why they do it, and what the benefits – and disadvantages – might be. His work showed that those of us who are naked in public are more likely to be happier not just with our bodies, but also with our lives more generally.

When someone in Jamaica emigrates to the UK, it is said they have 'gone to foreign'. Over the past 70 years several hundred thousand Jamaicans have done this, following in the footsteps of the so-called 'Windrush generation' who first arrived in Britain in the late 1940s. But the spirit of adventure and optimism those early pioneers bought with them has changed over the years and a recent political scandal now finds some of them unwanted and rejected by Britain. Following changes to immigration law and failing to comply with citizenship requirements, they have been designated illegal immigrants. On returning from holiday in the Caribbean, some of the children of the Windrush generation (now in their 50s and 60s) have been refused entry back to Britain, and others have been deported from Britain back to the Caribbean. For Crossing Continents, Colin Grant travels to Jamaica to meet two men who, despite having lived in the UK for decades, working and paying taxes, find themselves in limbo, trapped and unable to return to the place they call home. What happens when you are stranded in a place you were never really familiar with, an island which you have little memory of, and may not have returned to for half a century? Grant hears of their endeavour to return to the UK and how they have struggled to keep up hope in the face of a very painful and public rejection.

Colin Grant reporting and producing.

(Image: West Indian mother keeps the rain off her child with an umbrella, as they depart the Spanish passenger vessel Montserrat at Southampton docks Oct 1961 / Credit: Press Association)

Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein is perhaps the most influential American musician of all time. A champion of cultural inclusivity, he tore down musical barriers to declare the symphony hall open to all and offered the classical music world a dynamic new model of what a maestro could be. As a conductor he achieved early worldwide acclaim, as a composer his work defied genre divisions and brought him popular and critical success, notably with his most well-known work West Side Story. As an educator, he opened up the world of classical music to generations of American children through his long running series of television lectures. On the centenary of his birth, musician and broadcaster Jon Tolansky meets the people who continue to be inspired by Leonard Bernstein’s all-embracing approach to music and life.

Why does South Korea have the lowest fertility rate in the world? The average South Korean woman is expected to have 1.05 children in her life - exactly half the rate needed to maintain a population. That means a shrinking workforce paying less taxes and more elderly people who will need expensive care. South Korea's government has pumped tens of billions of pounds into dealing with the problem over the past decade, but the fertility rate is still going down. In this whodunnit, Simon Maybin finds out who's not doing it - and why.

Catherine Carr travels to the South Korean city of Seoul and invites passers-by to stop for a moment and answer one question - Where are you going? She meets a Korean-American who regrets her decision to move to Seoul – a place her parents call ‘Hell City’ - to a wannabe author with a dark past. And she talks to a political refugee stuck in a passport-less limbo, and a couple in love, who simply cannot live together.

The Liverpool and Egypt footballer Mo Salah became a phenomenon last season; breaking records and winning almost every award going in the English Premier League. In his adopted city of Liverpool, football fans of different faith, nationality and club allegiance describe how Salah has broken down the boundaries that divide them. Reporter Nick Garnett travels from the back-streets surrounding Liverpool’s stadium at Anfield to the Pyramids of Egypt to uncover how Salah’s exploits off the pitch may even eclipse his achievements on it.

In January, Aurelia Brouwers – a 29 year old Dutch woman, with a history of severe mental illness – lay down on her bed to die. She had been declared eligible for euthanasia a month earlier - Dutch law permits the ending of a life where there is, ‘unbearable suffering’ without hope of relief. Aurelia’s death provoked an outpouring on social media, and widespread discussion within the Netherlands… What if a death wish is part of someone’s illness? And does someone with serious mental health challenges have the capacity to make a decision about their own demise? These are questions now being debated in the Netherlands as a result of Aurelia’s death. Crossing Continents features recordings of Aurelia made in the two weeks before she died, hears from some of the friends closest to her, and explores the complex terrain of euthanasia for people with psychiatric problems in Holland.

An interrupted journey is like a portal into somebody else’s life. In this programme, Catherine Carr invites strangers to pause on their way from A to B and asks them one simple question: ‘Where Are You Going?’ In the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, Catherine meets the feminist teenagers who dream of equality and a jet-setting seven-year-old who is already worried about college. She meets a depressed new mother struggling to cope, and a teenager praying for good exam grades.

The conviction of a prominent expert in Norway's troubled child protection system - for downloading images of child sex abuse - has put the organisation under scrutiny once again. In April this year a child psychiatrist was convicted of downloading thousands of the images on his computer. Up until his arrest he played a key role in decisions about whether children should be separated from their parents for their own good. But there has been no public discussion in Norway about the implications of his conviction, no outrage in the newspapers, no plans to review cases he was involved in - even though the country's child protection agency, Barnevernet, has been much criticised in recent years for removing children from their families without justification. In April 2016 Tim Whewell reported on the story for Crossing Continents after Barnevernet attracted an international storm of protest over its child protection policies. Tim now returns to Norway to report on this extraordinary twist in the story and to find out why child protection in one of the world's wealthiest countries appears to be in crisis. Produced and Reported by Tim Whewell.