The Documentary Podcast

"I have to choose between the fruit salad and the cream cake. Rationally, I know what I should do. I should choose the fruit salad. But will I?" How do our brains work in everyday life? In the third of a four-part series examining the mind’s complexities, Professor Barry Smith looks at how the brain makes decisions.

"Why do we like and dislike certain foods? The most important thing in the tasting process is not the tongue, nose or ears – it’s the brain." Barry Smith explores how the brain makes us capable of language, thinking and feeling.

Guru, boffin, eccentric and genius, Gerry Wells is obsessed with radio - tinkering with, building and repairing them. It is a fixation that has got him into trouble with the law, but ultimately radio has been his saviour.

In this two part series, the BBC takes a look at the intellectuals - or Lenin's ‘useful idiots’ - who have praised tyrants, and rewritten history. How was it that so many supposedly intelligent people were manipulated by dictators over the 20th Century into saying good things about bad regimes?

"This culture inhibits the evolution of new ideas," says Professor Guosong Liu of the deferntial culture of China. Will this deferential culture keep China behind the West in the race to create the next big thing?

Michael Robinson looks at whether the political model which has delivered China's fantastic economic growth over the last 30 years is the same model that will deliver growth over the next 30 years.

Civil servant Ger Frits and poet Frank Starik come together in their shared determination that those who die alone in Amsterdam have a respectful and personal funeral.

Peter Taylor investigates the terrorist threat from young Muslim extremists radicalised on the internet. In part two he finds out how a network of young jihadists - that stretched across three continents - were plotting together with murderous intent.

A series of recent arrests across Europe has highlighted the growing threat of match-fixing in European football. How are the games rigged? David Goldblatt investigates.

American author Joe Queenan visits Sweden, perhaps the most exciting and important centre for crime fiction over the last two decades, most recently offering up Stieg Larsson's international phenomenon, the Millennium trilogy.

The writ of Habeas Corpus prevents an individual from unlawful detention. Historically it safeguards individuals from arbitrary state imprisonment. Frances Fyfield explores this tremendously important principle we often take for granted.