Understand

Rivers work when everything is in balance, but what happens when things are thrown off course?

Peter Hammond draws on his past as an academic specialising in machine learning to spot a problem everyone else has missed and expose what he believes is a national scandal.

We can all look the same picture, but what you make of it depends on who you are. Kate Lamble attempts to untangle the financial engineering that underpins parts of the water industry.

Reported and presented by Kate Lamble

Rinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

The 'Dossier of Despair' that reveals what's happening to some of Britain’s rivers.

A retired police detective, a former machine learning academic, an ex-water industry insider and their neighbours join forces to dig for data. But will anyone listen to the campaigners calls for change?

Reported and presented by Kate Lamble

Rinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

The centuries old battle between public good and private profit that’s still being fought today.

Kate Lamble holds her nose and plunges into the long history of the water industry and some of the many conflicts that have shaped it.

Reported and presented by Kate Lamble

Rinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

After watching their local river grow murky and lifeless, two retired neighbours decide to take on the water industry and its regulators. The unlikely sleuths begin a ten-year battle to clean up our rivers.

On the banks of the River Windrush in Oxfordshire, Kate Lamble meets campaigners Ash Smith and Peter Hammond

Reported and presented by Kate Lamble

Rinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

This is the story of a sewage scandal. How a centuries old battle between public good and private profit created an almighty stink. And who pays to clean it up.

Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are. With time spent reading - and even reading ability - starting to nosedive, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading changed humanity, and what might happen if we stop.

In this episode James digs into the question of whether literacy led to the invention of democracy, asks whether reading helps us proof ourselves against misinformation, and asks what happens to our politics if reading dies out?

Contributors include

Producer - Beth Sagar-Fenton

Reading seems an unremarkable skill. When we say something is as “easy as ABC”, we mean it is very easy indeed. In fact, learning to read has dramatic and irreversible consequences for people and for societies. Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are. With time spent reading - and even reading ability - starting to nosedive, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading changed humanity, and what might happen if we stop.

In this programme, James asks whether the spread of novel reading in the 18th century caused a moral revolution, whether a book played a role in the abolition of slavery, and whether the rise of reading, a solitary and slightly lonely activity, was one of the factors setting us on the path to our atomized and isolated modern society.

Contributions from:

- Jung Chang, author

Producer - Beth Sagar-Fenton

Reading seems an unremarkable skill. After all, everyone can read. Even small children. When we say something is as “easy as ABC”, we mean it is very easy indeed. In fact, learning to read has dramatic and irreversible consequences for people and for societies. Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are.

Over three episodes, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading made us, and what might happen if we stop.

In this first programme, James finds out how unnatural the process of reading is, and the complex alchemy our brains create to make words on the page make sense to us, and asks what we gain - and lose - when we learn to read.

Guests include:

- Professor Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA

Producer - Beth Sagar-Fenton

The story of how reading made us and what might happen if we stop - with James Marriott.