The Documentary Podcast

Every day Mary Ann Sieghart blanks friends and colleagues in the street - some people think she is the rudest woman they know. She has prosopagnosia, more commonly known as face blindness. Sufferers have problems perceiving or remembering faces. It is thought around one in 50 of us has the condition - the chances are you or someone you know will have it - but many people do not even realise they have it. Stephen Fry and former UK Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt are two of the well known people who have the condition and here they share how they've found ways of coping with it to get by in their careers. In extreme cases, some sufferers do not recognise family members or even their own reflection. Concerns are rising that it could lead to issues in security, justice and misdiagnoses. Psychologists and psychiatrists are trying to learn more about the condition and its effects, calling for it to be recognised formally and screened for in schools and in jobs. Mary Ann has long dreamed of a solution. Could technology or even hormonal treatments help improve her ability? Or, will the best solution simply be to make people more aware?

Space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock visits Nigeria, her father's birthplace, and asks why African nations are apparently so keen to journey into the future as a space-going continent. Do space programmes restore a continent’s pride or are just vanity projects of the elite?

After three US presidential debates which have attracted some of the biggest viewing audiences in modern American political memory, what have we learned from these televised clashes? In one of the most bitter and polarised presidential campaigns, how much have Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton actually revealed about themselves, their policies and what they could bring to the White House?

A group of war veterans who stormed a police station in Armenia call themselves the Daredevils of Sassoun, inspired by an 8th century poem, but are they heroes or terrorists?

What would it be like to walk the streets of 17th Century Kyoto? Cathy FitzGerald explores a sumptuous pair of Japanese screens that depict the historic city in incredible detail. Temples, shrines, castles, shops and homes - the image is crammed with tiny scenes.

Space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock visits Nigeria, the birthplace of her father, to look at why African nations are apparently so keen to journey into the future as a space-going continent. She explores the passionate desire among some to fly against the continent’s impoverished stereotype and join the space race.

Singer and broadcaster Mônica Vasconcelos is slowly losing her sight. Originally from Brazil, she now lives in London, a busy city she finds harder and harder to negotiate safely. As her vision gradually fades, she goes in search of people who may show her new possibilities – new ways of being. They are, among others; her brother, who lives with the same eye condition, and who expertly masters the use of a white cane to navigate the city; her godson, Tiago, who takes her hand in the warm waves on the beaches of Brazil, and - in one of the last interviews he gave before his death - the writer and thinker Dr Oliver Sacks.

Oliver Sacks was a neurologist who changed the way many people think about so called 'disabilities', and who Monica met in his New York flat. To her surprise, they found themselves discussing ways of approaching the onset of blindness not only with insight, but also with humour - especially at one magical moment when Sacks shared his own collection of canes with her. The canes, he explained, were acquired to help him get around the city, as his own sight fades. Swimming, he tells Monica, is the one place he feels free and in his own skin - try and find your own version of swimming he advises her.

(Photo: Mônica Vasconcelos. Credit: Aro Ribeiro)

It is now a year since the German Chancellor Angela Merkel threw Germany’s borders open to thousands of stranded Syrian refugees. We follow five of them and for most it has been a year of uncertainty, a year of unending bureaucratic hurdles, and a year of struggle with German grammar.

The story of Cheran – a Mexican town that chased out the cartels, and the police and politicians who collaborated with them.

The final programme in the series brings together five of the speakers from the road trip