The Documentary Podcast
Episodes
Germany's refugee teachers
04 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Five years on from the refugee crisis of 2015, Germany is now home to over a million refugees. Naomi Scherbel-Ball explores a classroom experiment wit...
Don't Log Off
04 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Alan Dein connects with seven individuals whose lives have shifted under the coronavirus pandemic as they nervously anticipate what will come next in ...
The man who died for trees
02 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Romania's forests are the Amazon of Europe - with large wilderness areas under constant pressure from loggers. For years, corrupt authorities turned a...
Miami: The sounds of the city
31 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Peter White, who was born without sight, takes a tour of Miami, navigating primarily with his ears. Peter joins a new blind friend, George, who takes ...
Ethiopia and Eritrea: Rebirth at the border
30 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In September 2018, the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea was opened for the first time in 20 years. Physical travel between the two countries and ev...
North Korea's celebrity defectors
26 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
According to South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, there are more than 30,000 North Korean defectors living in the South. The lack of access to Nor...
Indonesia: Not cool to date
26 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Saying no to dating is part of a growing ultraconservative social movement in Indonesia being spread through Instagram and WhatsApp. “When I look at...
The importance of Jurgen Klopp
24 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The manager of Liverpool Football Club, who lead them to victory in the Champions League. But Jurgen Klopp has not always been this successful. When h...
New York Stories with Joe Pascal
22 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
He’s the DMC in the legendary Run-DMC, a titan of the music industry. The group became known as the movie stars of rap. Busta Rhymes said of them “...
Ireland’s housing hunger
19 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ireland has booming investment and lots of new jobs. But Chris Bowlby discovers how a huge housing crisis is haunting the country’s young people in ...
Funeral punks
17 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A new wave of end of life rituals is emerging across northern England. As funeral costs increase, the influence of the traditional undertaker is decli...
Behind the Hong Kong protests
15 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What motivated the demonstrators on the city’s streets – and their opponents? It all began as a peace movement to block a piece of legislation. Mi...
The trees that bleed
12 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The rosewood tree is one of the most trafficked wild products on earth. When it is cut it bleeds a blood red sap. Having exhausted stocks elsewhere, C...
She2He2She
10 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Nele and Ellie are detransitioners too. In their early 20s, they were brought up as girls, and began to identify as transmen in their teens. To presen...
Introducing 13 Minutes to the Moon Season 2
09 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Jump on-board a doomed mission to the Moon. Apollo 13: the extraordinary story, told by the people who flew it and saved it. Search for 13 Minutes t...
Something In The Air?
05 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How safe is the air inside airline cabins? In January 2020, a British Airways flight from Athens to London issued a mayday emergency call when the pil...
The Detransitioners: He2She2He
03 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Belovitch was born a boy, and then transitioned and lived for more than a decade as Natalia – a performer, club hostess and glamorous party an...
Beats, rhymes and justice: Hip-hop on Rikers Island - Part two
01 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We are back on Rikers island – New York’s largest and most notorious jail where Ryan Burvik works with inmates on a unique hip hop program. We hea...
Confessions of a mafia boss
27 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Across Italy hundreds of mafia leaders, hitmen and drug-traffickers are being jailed thanks to the most powerful weapon now in the hands of Italy’s ...
Don't log off - part two
26 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Alan Dein connects with strangers across the world via social media, exploring the things that unite people across cultures and borders. He connects w...
Houston, we have a new criminal justice system
25 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One year ago, voters in Houston, Texas, elected a slate of liberal Democrats to their local courthouse. These new judges promised to remake justice in...
Beats, rhymes and justice: Hip-hop on Rikers Island - Part one
23 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
MC and producer Ryan Burvick takes us behind bars on Rikers Island, New York’s largest and troubled jail. He leads a music production programme ther...
Riding the Motel 22: Homeless in California
20 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
‘Motel 22’ is an unusual shelter for California’s homeless people. The state is one of the wealthiest in America yet it has the largest populati...
Don't log off: Part one
19 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Alan Dein connects with strangers across the world via social media, exploring the things that unite people across cultures and borders. He speaks to ...
Crossing Divides: The exchange
18 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Casey Spradley is a beef rancher in New Mexico – and runs a sustainable business with a responsible approach to irrigating the land. Thousands of mi...
Gospel meets hip-hop
16 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Some of the biggest rappers in the world like Kanye West, Chance the Rapper and Stormzy are combining gospel and hip-hop in their music. It is bringin...
Reinventing Miss America
15 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How can beauty pageants, a competition steeped in tradition, reinvent itself in the wake of a seismic shift in women’s rights? The #MeToo movement h...
El Salvador: the story of Karla Turcios
13 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On 14th April 2018 El Salvadorean journalist Karla Turcios was brutally murdered. Twelve days later prosecutors pressed charges against her husband fo...
Blasian love
11 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ithra and Tumelo have the world at their feet. Both 24, both in the last year of medical school, both from loving families, and in love. Ithra is Asia...
Life on the line
09 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Billions of people across the world live in an area that runs along a fault line, where everyday life is balanced with a constant risk of an earthquak...
Tony's Freehold Grill: Politics on the side
08 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The best place to hear about the twists and turns of the 2020 presidential election is over the countertop at an iconic New Jersey diner. Sandra Kant...
Panic in Bulgaria
06 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Schools in Roma districts of Bulgaria emptied in minutes in a mass panic recently. Parents dragged their children out of class, fearing that if they s...
Vanuatu’s stolen generation
05 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On the tiny island of Tanna in Vanuatu in the South Pacific the ocean is a huge part of everyday life. The Tannanese rely on the sea for their livelih...
Polygamous marriage in modern Malaysia
04 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Muslim Malaysians often have complex and tangled views about polygamy. Their feelings and beliefs are not always mirrored by their actions. What role ...
Colombia’s new cocaine war
30 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Colombia produced a record 1.5 million kilograms of cocaine last year - about 70% of the world’s supply. In the regions where coca is grown, gangs f...
Survival and revival in the Torres Strait
29 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Climate change is lapping at the shores of Poruma, a tropical island in Australia’s Torres Strait. It is a dot in the Pacific Ocean, just two kilome...
South Korea’s hope in hell
28 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Academic expectations, job competition and financial pressures are forcing some young South Koreans to give up on relationships, marriage and kids. Th...
The remarkable resistance of Lilo
24 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the heart of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, members of the Resistance worked tirelessly and at great risk to themselves to help those whose lives were th...
Finland's race to go carbon neutral
23 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How do you achieve net-zero carbon emissions in just fifteen years? In Finland, a fisherman-turned-climate scientist believes he has part of the answe...
Disagreeing better
22 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we hold our opponents in contempt? Former British politician Douglas Alexander believes that disagreement is good - it is how the best argument...
My father the killer
21 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“Did you actually kill hundreds of people, Dad?” This is certainly not a question that many people feel the need to ask their parents. But for a g...
Greenland: Why music matters
19 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Kate Molleson visits the world’s largest island to explore the role of traditional and new music for its communities today. Between the capital of N...
Ayahuasca: Fear and healing in the Amazon
16 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Psychedelic plants, the spiritual tourism backlash - and sexual abuse. Increasing numbers of tourists are travelling to the Peruvian Amazon to drink a...
The Coffin Club
14 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2010, Katie Williams – a former palliative care nurse – started the first Coffin Club in her garage. The idea was that elderly New Zealanders w...
Germany: Justice and memory
12 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This year, 2020, sees the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two. Its legacy remains. Nowhere more so than in Germany, where the rise of Nazism ...
Belarus: The wild world of Chernobyl
09 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ninety year old Galina is one of the last witnesses to the wild natural world that preceded the Chernobyl zone in southern Belarus. 'We lived with wol...
Trans in Japan
07 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Japan to change gender, people must be sterilised, have gender reassignment surgery, not have any children under the age of 20 and must be single. ...
The world turned upside down
03 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For more than a century, the world has revolved around fossil fuels. Wars have been fought over them. The nations that had oil and gas had power. They...
Disappeared in Thailand
02 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Polajee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen was last seen on April 17, 2014. At the time the human rights activist was working with lawyers in Bangkok to stop...
Hey Sisters, Sew Sisters
31 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Space travel is not always high-tech. When the Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon in 1969, seamstresses made their spacesuits at a company famous fo...
Time has chosen us
29 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The story of the Soviet war in Afghanistan told through its teenage soldiers and the music they created. The 10-year conflict from 1979 to 1989 was on...
Iceland: The great thaw
26 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Iceland's glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate, with scientists predicting that they could all be gone 200 years from now.How is this affecti...
Ii: The greenest town in Europe
24 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The town of Ii in northern Finland is a green trailblazer. It has managed to stop burning fossil fuels and will have reduced carbon emissions by 80% b...
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
22 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the leading liberal Judge on the US Supreme Court. At 86 she has spent many decades fighting for women’...
Living with Star Wars
22 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This is the true story of how Star Wars Episode IV-A New Hope got made. A film that, as plain old Star Wars, transformed cinema to become part of a po...
County lines: Girl drug runners in the UK
19 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
New figures released in the UK have revealed at least 4,000 young people are currently caught up in what are known as "county lines" – meeting order...
Romania’s revolution 30 years on
18 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Thirty years after Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed on Christmas day, Tessa Dunlop looks back at the violent birth of post-...
The Rainbow Railroad
17 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Jane and Patricia fled their home in the middle of the night. Days before they had narrowly escaped an arson attack. It’s illegal to be gay in Barba...
Judy Garland: The final rainbow
15 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Judy Garland's last concerts at London's the Talk of The Town in 1969 is the subject of a new feature film. Weaving together newly restored archive re...
A fight for light in Lebanon
12 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Life in Lebanon is a daily battle to beat the power cuts caused by the country's chronic electricity shortage. If you live in a block of flats, you ha...
From Bude to Berlin
11 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Gordon Corera becomes the first journalist allowed to record inside GCHQ's listening station at Bude on Britain’s south-west coast. The station has ...
My Big Korean-Iranian Wedding
10 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Hossein Sharif is an Iranian boy, about to marry Hee Sue, a South Korean girl. As the families begin to meet, Sharif discovers all the criss-crossing ...
The digital election: How social media is reshaping UK democracy
07 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the UK’s 2019 general election, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram are playing a more prominent role than in an...
Sri Lanka: The new climate of fear
05 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a new climate of fear in Sri Lanka. This time it’s the Muslim community who are fearful of the future. The Easter bomb attacks in Sri Lank...
How Scarborough saved the world
04 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The work of GCHQ started just after the end of World War One as telegraph became a vital means of military communications. We hear from people who wor...
Giving peace a chance
03 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed-in for peace protest and the people who witnessed it
The man who laughed at al-Qaeda
28 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Raed Fares, founder of Syria's legendary Radio Fresh FM, was mowed down by unknown gunmen as he left his studios in rebel-held Idlib in November 2018....
Emperor complex
26 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the span of five years, Chairman Huang turned farmland in China’s Sichuan province into Seaside City. The ocean-themed town, which Huang says was...
The Malawi tapes
24 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A race is on to save thousands of tapes of traditional Malawian music in danger of disintegrating in the archives of state broadcaster, Malawi Broadca...
Russian women fight back
21 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Domestic abuse in Russia is endemic with thousands of women dying at the hands of their partners every year. Despite this a controversial law was pass...
Sierra Leone: The price of going home
14 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Fatmata, Jamilatu and Alimamy all see themselves as failures. They’re young Sierra Leoneans who risked everything for the sake of a better life in E...
Hong Kong: Love in a divided city
12 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Unprecedented mass protests have caused chaos in Hong Kong’s public sphere – but what has it meant for private life? How have they affected the in...
Comrade Africa
10 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How Communist East Germany tried to influence Africa via radio, during the Cold War. The West often saw the GDR as a grim and grey place, so it’s so...
Albania’s Iranian guests
07 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Who are Albania’s Iranian guests? In July, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani visited an Albanian village just outside Tirana. At a t...
Moondog: Sound of New York
06 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
New Yorker Huey Morgan examines the life, work and enduring appeal of the musician known as Moondog, who lived and worked on the city's streets in the...
Cameroon's MMA champion
05 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
By the age of 10 Francis Ngannou was working in a sand quarry, where he dreamed of becoming a world class boxer. As a young man he traversed the Sahar...
The Zogos of Liberia
31 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When Miatta was 14 years old, armed rebels stormed into her classroom and forcibly recruited her and her classmates. They were trained to use machine ...
Northern Ireland 1969: The violence spreads
30 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Ruth Sanderson grew up in Northern Ireland yet never really understood how the Troubles started. In the second programme, looking back at Scarman test...
Uganda's war in the bush
27 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Alan Kasujja tells the story of the guerilla war in Uganda which began nearly 40 years ago and led to the current President Yoweri Museveni taking pow...
Being black in Italy
24 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Dickens Olewe meets Italy’s first and only black senator, Tony Iwobi, and hears how a new generation of black Italians are fighting to claim their p...
Northern Ireland 1969: Battle lines
23 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Ruth Sanderson grew up in Northern Ireland, yet never really understood how the Troubles started. Although the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement effective...
Looking for love: The Zoroastrian way
22 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Zoroastrian community has given the world Freddie Mercury, produced some of India’s richest businessmen and practises one of the world’s oldes...
Super Sisters
20 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1979 a young girl named Melissa Rich asked her mother Lois why there were no women trading cards. So Lois decided to produce her own set called “...
Argentina’s ‘white gold’ rush
17 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Are lithium-powered electric vehicles as ‘green’ as we think they are? With the advent of electric cars, manufacturers tell us we’re racing towa...
The Gospel of Wealth
16 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What should billionaires do with their money? The world’s greatest philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie said they should give it all away. Andrew Carnegi...
My personal history of sormeh
15 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The eyes have always been a focal point of Persian beauty for men and women and they have always been embellished with sormeh, or thick black eyeliner...
Cuba's digital revolution
13 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A revolution is underway in Cuba. The country’s communist leaders, who normally retain tight control of the media, have encouraged Cubans to become ...
Nigeria: sex for grades
10 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
University lecturers sexually harassing and blackmailing their students. It's a problem which plagues West Africa but it's almost never proven. Until ...
Translating for mum and dad
09 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Across the UK, in supermarkets, hospitals, council houses and solicitors’ offices, children and young people are doing vital unpaid work: interpreti...
Passport to paradise
08 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Citizenship is changing; and half the world’s governments are making money through citizenship schemes. In Vanuatu, a tiny Pacific Island Nation, a ...
Undercover with the clerics: Iraq’s secret sex trade
03 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Muslim men and women are forbidden to sleep together outside marriage, but in Iraq, it’s possible for men to find a way round this obstacle to sexua...
How to buy your own country
01 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Citizenship is changing; and half the world’s governments are making money through citizenship schemes. We investigate the booming trade in passport...
America's child brides
29 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A tense debate is taking place in states across America. At what age should someone be allowed to marry? Currently in 48 out of 50 states a child can ...
Chile’s Stolen Babies
26 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A Chilean man - adopted at birth and sent overseas - searches for the mother forced to give him up. He is among thousands now finding out the truth ab...
The imam and the artist
24 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
On 27 September 1969, Imam Abdullah Haron – an outspoken Muslim cleric in South Africa – died in police detention. Abdullah Haron was the only Mus...
World War Two: The economic battle
22 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The story of World War Two is usually told in terms of heroism on the battlefield, but perhaps the most important struggle was the economic battle. Ac...
The bitter song of the hazelnut
19 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Every August tens of thousands of Kurdish migrant workers, including children, toil long hours for a pittance in the mountains of northern Turkey pick...
Living with leprosy
17 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When Aleks Krotoski was six years old she lived in a world surrounded by people with leprosy, or Hansen's Disease as it's officially known. Both her d...
Colombia’s kamikaze cyclists
12 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Precipitous mountain roads, specially-modified bikes, and deadly consequences. Simon Maybin spends time with the young men who race down the steep roa...
Hearing me
10 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
(This programme contains audio effects that may cause discomfort to people living with hearing conditions. There is a modified version of this program...