The Radio 3 Documentary

By BBC Radio 3

What's The Radio 3 Documentary about?

In-depth documentaries which explore a different aspect of history, science, philosophy, film, visual arts and literature. The Sunday Feature is broadcast every Sunday at 6.45pm on BBC Radio 3.

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The Radio 3 Documentary episodes:

02.07.2024
Time Canvasses - Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism
In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing music, and new ways of seeing art. It was here that the American experimental composer Morton Feldman...
06.12.2023
Tuner of the World
"For the next hour, I need your ears". It's 1974 and someone is trying to recruit you for a listening experiment on public radio in Canada. Pioneering Canadian composer and soundscape maestro, R Murray Schafer really wants you to...
06.04.2023
Supply Lines
Via ports and truck-stops, fulfilment centres and ring roads, Aidan Tulloch follows the supply chain and reimagines the journey an item goes on in the age of 24/7 delivery.
05.15.2023
New Generation Thinkers: The Perfect Balance
Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri searches for different perspectives on the idea of balance.
05.07.2023
The Pleasures and Pains of Denton Welch
Denton Welch lived the last years of his short life in Kent during the Second World War. His writing career took off in 1943 and in the same year he met his companion, Eric Oliver. His writing is mostly autobiographical...
04.23.2023
The Black Cantor
Known in Yiddish as Der Schvartze Khazn--the Black Cantor--Thomas LaRue Jones was an African American tenor who sang Jewish music in the early decades of the twentieth century. Famed for his soulful voice and perfect Yiddish pronunciation, he performed in...
03.26.2023
Sunday Feature - Shakespeare's Brum Ting
Over a century ago, in 1881, the city of Birmingham purchased a copy of Shakespeare's first folio. It was to be the crown jewel of their new Shakespeare library, the brainchild of the first librarian George Dawson. From the outset...
03.19.2023
X-Ray Vision: Rudolph Fisher in Harlem
Lindsay Johns makes the case for writer Rudolph Fisher's portraits of Black American life
03.13.2023
Heinrich Heine: The First Modern European
One day, three decades after the event, the German poet and man of letters, Heinrich Heine, stood on the site of the battle of Marengo, one of Napoleon's earliest and most important victories and had an epiphany - or he...
03.05.2023
Government Song Woman
American musician Rhiannon Giddens investigates the fascinating life and recordings of the folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell. Travelling thousands of miles all over the US in the depression era, Cowell was willing to track down songs in unlikely places,...
02.26.2023
Carol And Muriel
Carol Morley follows the trail of Britain's most prolific female director, Muriel Box. She directed 13 films in 14 years and was the first woman ever to receive the Oscar for best original screenplay, for The Seventh Veil. Yet, she...
02.12.2023
Tutu - A Portrait of Nigeria
Chibundu Onuzo tells the fascinating story of ‘Africa’s Mona Lisa’ and artist Ben Enwonwu
02.09.2023
O Sole Mio
“All Neapolitans were born to be musicians, to be singers,” says musicologist Dr Dinko Fabris, referring to the foundation myth of Naples, according to which the city was created by the siren Partenope. Song has been woven into Neapolitan life...
02.05.2023
Metal City
Metalworking has been central to the rise and success of Birmingham over hundreds of years. But how has this industry affected the culture of the city? Did the experience of working with metal and hearing the continuous clang of metal-on-metal...
01.29.2023
Rebel Sounds: Musical Resistance in Barbados
From 1627-1807, nearly 400,000 human beings were kidnapped, sold and shipped in horrific conditions across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the tiny island of Barbados. There, they were enslaved by British landowners and forced to work the sugar...
01.27.2023
Yiddish Glory
During World War II, approximately 1.6 million Soviet, Polish and Romanian Jews survived the Holocaust by escaping to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, avoiding imminent death in ghettos, firing squads and killing centres. Many of them wrote music about these...
01.15.2023
Scott Ross - Harpsichord Rebel
In 1984, an American harpsichord player called Scott Ross quit a teaching job in Canada and returned to France, the country that since he was a teenager had been his adopted home. It was the year that Frankie Goes to...
01.01.2023
Unlocking Anne
Anne Lock, a woman living in 16th-century England, wrote the first ever sonnet sequence in the English language? Impossible, thought Clare Pollard. As a celebrated playwright and poet, with much of her work focused on giving a voice to forgotten...
12.25.2022
What Walls Hold
London. Tavistock House. 1851. It shaped Charles Dickens’ life and career. Home to The Smallest Theatre in the World, Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage and an alluring French lodger called Charles Gounod, Tavistock House is reputable for having been the...
12.13.2022
Sunday Feature: Shostakovich and the Battle for Babi Yar
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was inspired by an unflinching poem about the ‘Holocaust of Bullets’ at Babi Yar in Ukraine, one of the biggest massacres of World War Two. Lucy Ash pieces together the events leading up to the controversial...
11.28.2022
Briggflatts - A Northern Poetic Odyssey
Rory Stewart travels across Cumbria and Northumbria from an ancient Quaker meeting house in Brigflatts, to a medieval tower on Newcastle city walls, in search of clues in Basil Bunting's life and work to help understand this neglected masterpiece of...
11.20.2022
The Most Contrary Region
Pulitzer prize winning poet, Paul Muldoon, is one of a large number of Northern Ireland artists who spent some of their formative years, in the 1970s and 80s, contributing to BBC Northern Ireland's schools and arts programming. Nobel...
08.05.2022
Sunday Feature: Florence Price’s Chicago and the Black Female Fellowship
The remarkable female musicians and activists who helped Florence Price's music to thrive
04.24.2022
Sunday Feature: The Ancient Algorithm
Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough delves into the history of runes, the ancient alphabet of Northern Europe. Travelling to Orkney, she learns how and why these spiky letters were used.
03.13.2022
Sunday Feature:The Emergency
Regan Hutchins tells the story of how dancers, spies, writers and artists brought a welcome burst of creativity to neutral Dublin during World War II.
03.06.2022
Sunday Feature: Florence Price’s Chicago and the Black Female Fellowship
The remarkable female musicians and activists who helped Florence Price's music to thrive
02.20.2022
Sunday Feature: Nixon in China
Director Daniel Kramer explores John Adams' opera Nixon in China on the 50th anniversary of the President's state visit in a feature combining art, reportage, music and politics.
01.23.2022
Sunday Feature: Hidden Women and Silenced Scores
Music historian Leah Broad uncovers the sometimes shocking stories of three marginalised 20th century female composers, and hears some of their music for the very first time.
01.02.2022
Tchaikovsky's Island of Inspiration
If it hadn’t been for Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s love of jam, he may never have completed his first large-scale work. After graduating from the Conservatory of St Petersburg, the 26-year-old started composing his first symphony, ‘Winter Daydreams’, but quickly ran out...
07.12.2021
Then there was Light - Stockhausen and LICHT, his opera cycle based on the seven days of the week
LICHT, the vast opera cycle composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen between 1977 and 2004 is an enigma, and composer and broadcaster Robert Worby goes on a personal journey to find out why it divides critics and audiences. Stockhausen was the most...
05.09.2021
Even more Kershaw Tapes
During the 1980s and 1990s, DJ Andy Kershaw travelled around Africa and the Americas searching out great music and taping it on his Walkman Pro, a new broadcast-quality cassette recorder that was bringing about a revolution in mobile recording. He...
05.04.2021
More Kershaw Tapes
In this episode, Andy meets Kenyan harpist Ayub Ogada on a beach in Cornwall, the Antioch Gospel group in a car park in New Orleans, Cuarteto Iglesias on a roof top in Cuba and a young Ballake Sissoko next to...
03.14.2021
New Generation Thinker short feature: Hilltop Histories
Seren Griffiths uses a walk along a sandstone ridge in Northern Cheshire to explore the way a landscape can hold multiple histories, and in doing so make it easier for us to contemplate distant futures. The landscape in question is bordered...
02.28.2021
NGT The Balcony
New Generation Thinker Dr Islam Issa has a strong cultural attachment to the Balcony. In his native Egypt, the place where architectural historians believe the balcony was first developed, the balcony is a pivotal part of family homes, a place...
01.17.2021
The Apple and the Tree
When he was a boy and returned to the family home from primary school in the afternoon, Carlo Gébler would often hear the sound of typing coming from the shed at the foot of the garden. This was where his...
12.15.2020
Sunday Feature - Dissecting Beethoven
An exploration of Beethoven’s music through the body that gave him so much trouble.
11.29.2020
Sunday Feature: The Fake Poet
Why does the image of the forlorn and abandoned poet Thomas Chatterton haunt us today?
11.08.2020
The Silence of My Pain
Hannah French explores a hidden disability for many musicians: pain.
10.18.2020
New Generation Thinker short Feature: COVID and The Black Death, an imperfect fit.
It's understandable that, with the onset of a global pandemic, commentators have looked to the past for comparisons. But Dr Seb Falk is concerned that with the easy headlines about the mortality rate or the economic damage, or even the...
07.15.2020
Silent Witness: John Cage, Zen and Japan
John Cage is arguably the most important composer of the 20th century, even though he's perhaps famous, or infamous depending on your point of view, for writing a piece of music that is 4'33" of silence. Famous because it made...
04.26.2020
The Crankiness of C.W.Daniel
New Generation Thinker Elsa Richardson on the radical 20th century publisher C.W.Daniel.
03.13.2020
The Queen Of Technicolor
Marie-Louise Muir traces her childhood idol Maureen O’Hara’s journey from Dublin's suburbs to star of the Golden Age.
03.12.2020
The East Speaks Back
We are used to getting a worldview from the west, but what did the east make of us? Jerry Brotton heads to Istanbul on the trail of one the world's great travellers, Evliya Celebi
01.19.2020
Ken Campbell as Never Heard Before
David Bramwell with actors whose lives were transformed by director Ken Campbell.
12.29.2019
Glitter and Villainy
Daisy Black, Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, investigates the camp villain in history.
12.22.2019
Rewiring Raymond Scott
At the height of his fame as a jazz composer and band leader in the late 1930s, Raymond Scott was billed as ‘America’s Foremost Composer of Modern Music’. Jazz legend Art Blakey confessed that his music ‘scared the hell out...
11.15.2019
Poles Apart
The unknown tale of cold war communist Poland’s unlikely love affair with electronic music. Robert Worby finds out Warsaw was a beacon of musical freedom behind the iron curtain. It was here that the remarkable Polish Radio Experimental Studio was...
11.15.2019
The Hidden Reservoir
Carlo Gebler on the role of art in remembrance and reconciliation in Northern Ireland
11.03.2019
Power Plays
As East Germany crumbled in 1989, actors were centre stage. Andrew Dickson discovers how had theatre had survived under communist rule, with its censors and secret police spies. Focusing in particular on the playwright Heiner Mueller he explores the brilliant...
10.24.2019
Al Andalus - The Legacy
Andrew Hussey journeys through Andalusia searching for the legacy of Muslim Spain

What's The Radio 3 Documentary about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Radio 3 Documentary episodes:

Time Canvasses - Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism

Tuner of the World

Supply Lines

New Generation Thinkers: The Perfect Balance

The Pleasures and Pains of Denton Welch

The Black Cantor

Sunday Feature - Shakespeare's Brum Ting

X-Ray Vision: Rudolph Fisher in Harlem

Heinrich Heine: The First Modern European

Government Song Woman

Carol And Muriel

Tutu - A Portrait of Nigeria

O Sole Mio

Metal City

Rebel Sounds: Musical Resistance in Barbados

Yiddish Glory

Scott Ross - Harpsichord Rebel

Unlocking Anne

What Walls Hold

Sunday Feature: Shostakovich and the Battle for Babi Yar

Briggflatts - A Northern Poetic Odyssey

The Most Contrary Region

Sunday Feature: Florence Price’s Chicago and the Black Female Fellowship

Sunday Feature: The Ancient Algorithm

Sunday Feature:The Emergency

Sunday Feature: Florence Price’s Chicago and the Black Female Fellowship

Sunday Feature: Nixon in China

Sunday Feature: Hidden Women and Silenced Scores

Tchaikovsky's Island of Inspiration

Then there was Light - Stockhausen and LICHT, his opera cycle based on the seven days of the week

Even more Kershaw Tapes

More Kershaw Tapes

New Generation Thinker short feature: Hilltop Histories

NGT The Balcony

The Apple and the Tree

Sunday Feature - Dissecting Beethoven

Sunday Feature: The Fake Poet

The Silence of My Pain

New Generation Thinker short Feature: COVID and The Black Death, an imperfect fit.

Silent Witness: John Cage, Zen and Japan

The Crankiness of C.W.Daniel

The Queen Of Technicolor

The East Speaks Back

Ken Campbell as Never Heard Before

Glitter and Villainy

Rewiring Raymond Scott

Poles Apart

The Hidden Reservoir

Power Plays

Al Andalus - The Legacy