Lanre Bakare

speaker

569 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 7 Aug

Lanre Bakare’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Today in Focus · Plagiarism and a pig’s head: the rise and fall of Jason Arday · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

Even though I had my doubts, it was a complete gobsmacking moment.

I remember speaking to the officer on the phone and just there my mouth open thinking, I cannot believe he's told me this and it doesn't stack up at all.

So at that point, I think I was pretty stunned and obviously came back, spoke to my editor at The Guardian and we sat down and had a chat about it and what we were going to do with the story and we realised it was a completely different story that we were involved in.

Yeah, so in various interviews and live events that Professor Arda has done over the years, he's made various claims about his fundraising, which started way before he became a name in academia.

He started fundraising when he was 17, so he was still at college.

But he said in interviews before that he's raised between, well, the number oscillates between 5 million and 5.5 million for around 70 charities over a 20-year period.

So a serious amount of money.

I mean, that is a vast amount of money for someone who's not famous to raise.

It must be pointed out.

And in 2012, when he was interviewed, he said by the time he was 50, he hoped to raise about 250 grand, which would still be a really, really impressive feat.

So yeah, Professor Arday said that he'd ran 30 marathons in 35 days.

which is impressive, not impossible obviously, but very, very impressive.

But the thing that made that story stand out was that he'd met Andy Murray in 2012.

Right, tennis player.

Yeah, as part of the Surprise Surprise TV show.

They'd arranged this meeting because Jason had been a torchbearer for the 2012 Olympics, in part because of his charity work.

And he told Andy Murray, who repeated this story to journalists, that he'd had an epileptic seizure during one of his marathon runs and suffered a hairline fracture of his leg, of his fibula.

Well, yeah.

I mean, it's like a stress fracture, very, very serious.

But he hadn't stopped running.

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