Alan Davies

Rubina Pabani is the executive producer, Emily Jarvis is production manager and sound design is by Nick Handley and Tom Butler.

The commissioning editor for Radio 4 is Rhian Roberts.

This is an ITN production for BBC Radio 4.

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Not exactly cute or charismatic, their reputation has been dragged through the mud throughout history.

They've been associated with death, decay, disease, take your pick.

Meanwhile, these small creatures have paid absolutely no attention to our human vanity and, frankly, our ignorance.

Their enormous, adaptable, diverse family has been quietly thriving in almost every corner of Earth.

burrowing through soil for over 500 million years, earning job titles as natural ploughs and ecosystem engineers, breathing life into death.

And despite everything, they've always been there for us.

Whether you think of the food we grow, the clean water we drink, or the little birds singing outside your window, happy and full, you've got worms.

in a good way.

Welcome to Life Without, where I pull a single thread from our magnificent world, something we take for granted, just gone with my powers.

No warning, no clever workarounds, just the unravelling.

How far will it run?

Can we stitch a patch and survive the wear and tear?

BBC Radio 4, this is Life Without, with me, Alan Davis.

And together, we'll find out if a life without worms ends up unpicking reality as we know it.

What I know about worms I mostly learned at school, and that, you might be surprised to hear, was a long time ago.

So here to help me construct this world, Sandra Salazar-Decker, a soil sister, horticulturalist, and the founder of Go Grow With Love, a women-led enterprise teaching communities to reconnect with the land through food growing.