“Each one of us, we’re a constant radio station communicating and receiving. It’s just that we’re not taught how to read, how to interpret the energies and intuitions we pick up. The tarot card is a really important component in this… " Ben Okri Tarot cards are rich in visual symbolism and the stories they tell help people make sense of the ups and downs of human experience. They’ve been around for hundreds of years - from simple card games to fortune-telling, divination tools, the occult and in...
May 17, 2026•29 min
World champion Strongwomen Lucy Underdown, Rebecca Roberts and Donna Moore redefine what it means to be strong. They reveal what we can all learn from these record-breaking athletes, while also challenging what it really means to be powerful woman. Contributors: Rebecca Roberts, Lucy Underdown and Donna Moore Produced by Justine Potter Executive Producer: Geoff Bird A Savvy production for BBC Radio 4
May 03, 2026•29 min
MRI machines are a miracle of modern medicine. A long white tube that can scan inside our bodies, detecting all manner of illnesses. Getting into one though can leave many people anxious. Something called 'scanxiety'. When it's his turn to lie down and be rolled inside, presenter Ciaran Tracey must confront his claustrophobia and submit to the machine that can see what's inside his body. His scan becomes a journey through quantum physics, electromagnetism and - most surprisingly - a space age ma...
Apr 26, 2026•29 min
Andy Mycock has one of the world’s worst surnames. Despite being a renowned political scientist, his life has been punctuated by friends and strangers making fun of his name. Daily acts like meeting new people or being called in to see the doctor can be both hilarious and fraught. His surname has impacted on his professional life, meeting a partner, and forming meaningful relationships. But there are positives too - it’s almost impossible to forget Dr Mycock. As Andy learns to turn a lifetime of...
Apr 19, 2026•29 min
A farmer, a cheesemaker, a philosopher and a scientist take us on a guided tour through a cow. Told in five acts, this programme weaves together the voices of our four guides - artist-philosopher Samar Nasrullah Khan, cheesemaker Peter Dixon, farmer Nikki Yoxall and Professor of Animal Science and Microbiology Sharon Huws. They take us on a journey from deep in the soil, through a plant, into a cow’s mouth, through her four stomach compartments – home to vast civilisations of bacteria, protozoa ...
Apr 12, 2026•29 min
John Betjeman wrote that it was 'worth cycling forty miles in a head wind to visit St Wendreda's church in March, Cambridgeshire, because of the 118 angels in the roof. The wings of the C16th oak carvings are inspired by hen and marsh harriers. Once common locally - they are returning now. Nature writer Robert Macfarlane looks at the carvings, drawing connections between angels and harriers, what they say about of our feelings for the birds and angels. Robert climbs to the ringing chamber to get...
Mar 27, 2026•29 min
In 2018, the writer and actor Harriet Madeley found out that she was going to die. At least, that’s what she heard when a doctor diagnosed her with Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis, a progressive disease for which there is no medical treatment, no cure, poor understanding and a long list of frightening Google stats.. None of her loved-ones knew how to respond to this bombshell. Her best friend kept crying. Her parents preferred not to talk about it. And her fiancée? She took it upon herself to cur...
Mar 22, 2026•29 min
‘Do nothing’. So exhorts Jimmy as he overhauls the strokes, kicks and breathing of his adult swim learners at Cardiff International Pool. They plunge, roll, extend. As they learn to let go and glide, they’re overcome with a sense of joy, freedom and bodily ease. For journalist Selma Chalabi, Jimmy’s classes have been a lifeline. She joined the class to improve her swimming technique, but what she found was something so much more profound. Jimmy’s unique and philosophical style of teaching taught...
Mar 15, 2026•29 min
Historian Maurice Casey reveals the story of an anti-Nazi resistance network and the family at its heart, told through a newspaper crafted by two young girls. In the dusty corners of a Galician villa on Spain’s northern coast, Casey uncovered a forgotten archive of revolution, resistance and love. Among the documents was something extraordinary. The Alpenpost - a newspaper lovingly hand-crafted by Elisa and Alida Leonhard, two girls raised on Europe’s 1930s refugee routes. Created every fortnigh...
Mar 08, 2026•32 min
Alan Hall and his siblings have a shared story from their childhoods - their mum, Jackie, describes walking through a Liverpool park with her mum, their grandma, Hettie. It must be the 1940s. Hettie is a single mum. She'd fallen pregnant, according to family mythology, while working as a domestic servant in Scotland. Jackie has had spells in foster care. "Don't stare," Hettie says. "Those men over there, they're your uncles." Years later, after Jackie's death, Alan finds an envelope labelled, 'M...
Mar 01, 2026•29 min
Hilik Magnus is Israel’s foremost search and rescue specialist. He has performed missions, public and private, for over 30 years across six continents. He has worked under the radar during disasters such as 2004’s tsunami and 2008’s Mumbai attacks. He has worked with everyone, from grieving families to cartels and the Taliban, all for the simple purpose of returning people to where they belong. Now, he opens up about this secretive world, and talks frankly about his origins and values. The start...
Feb 22, 2026•29 min
The Indri lemur, also known as the singing lemur, can be found only in Madagascar’s rainforests. Famous for their eerie, melodic calls, they are one of the few primates that sing and, as it turns out, they have a surprising relationship to rhythm - one that’s very similar to our own. After hearing news of these unlikely rhythmic capabilities, Georgie Styles ventures into one of the most biodiverse yet threatened ecosystems on Earth to capture the haunting songs of this critically endangered spec...
Feb 15, 2026•28 min
If you ask many women in recovery from alcoholism what the term ‘functioning alcoholic’ means to them, they will laugh. In truth, a large percentage of women who end up in treatment had been, to the outside world, ‘functioning’. Holding down jobs, raising children, paying their rent or mortgage. However, internally, ‘functioning’ is about the last word they would use to describe their mental and emotional landscape as alcohol increasingly tightened its grip on their lives. Here, two women share ...
Feb 08, 2026•29 min
In the 1930s a group of researchers descended on the northern mill town of Bolton to observe the natives. They christened their chosen case-study 'Worktown'. It was a ground breaking study of working class culture - and one thing they wanted to know was what makes people happy. The people of Bolton were asked a simple questions "What is happiness to you and yours?" The letters written in response reveal a snapshot of the innermost thoughts and feelings of ordinary people, living ordinary lives a...
Feb 01, 2026•29 min
Time is a journey - the future ahead of us, the past behind. Our burdens are a weight that we carry, our problems are a puzzle that we solve. Metaphor is at the heart of how we understand our existence. In a period of huge change and global uncertainty, are we outgrowing the metaphors we have lived by? The poet Jack Underwood is offering his services as a metaphor consultant, for a very reasonable fee. Featuring conversations with poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir; Dr Stephen Flusberg, the Dir...
Jan 18, 2026•29 min
For decades, Nigerian hall parties have been the hub for communities in the UK, it was the place where they could bring a little bit of home and be transported through music, food and fashion. Full of extravagance, warmth and culture, the word Owambe, both noun and adjective, directly translates to ‘everything is there’. Now, first generation British Nigerians continue this tradition, their way. Presenter Bisi Akins takes us on a journey through an Owambe, exploring what that “everything” really...
Jan 11, 2026•29 min
Bass guitarist and record producer Jah Wobble has had a lifetime’s immersion at the low end of the musical spectrum. Over four decades, his hypnotic bass riffs have powered music from punk to reggae, fusion to world music. He relates his first experiences as a teenager attending blues dances where Jamaican sound systems played cuts of reggae dub where the bass felt like a force like gravity, and seeing Bob Marley and the Wailers where he was captivated by the playing of bassist Aston ‘Family Man...
Dec 28, 2025•29 min
What does Christmas Day mean to you? This raw, kaleidoscopic audio portrait, made up entirely from voice notes recordings, tracks the emotional contours of the day as it unfolds. Through midnight churchgoing and moments of quiet reflection to frenetic gift-giving, culinary chaos and karaoke, the programme evokes and questions our own multifarious experiences of what Christmas Day ‘means’. Variously boozy, silly, sad, excited, warm, lonely, deeply spiritual and endearingly humanistic – the contri...
Dec 21, 2025•29 min
In 1939, Emma Freud's mother Jill was evacuated from London to the suburbs of Oxford. After staying with Lewis Carroll's friends the Butler sisters for a few years, she arrived at her next designated accommodation clutching a small suitcase and a copy of her favourite book, The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis. It was just a few weeks later, after she spotted several copies of that book on a shelf, that she realised she was actually living with CS Lewis himself. In this telling of Jill's fascinatin...
Dec 14, 2025•29 min
Like so many people at a similar time of life, the poet Paul Farley is facing up to the fact that he might need hearing aids. His wife has been asking him to turn down the volume on the telly for years, and has given up shouting downstairs for him because he never hears. Out in cafes and pubs, Paul can no longer really follow what people are saying to him, and so he often turns down invitations knowing he can’t turn up the volume. Even worse, for Paul at least, is the fact he can no longer hear ...
Nov 23, 2025•29 min
From Rock-a-bye Baby to Brahms to AI…Has the lullaby become a lost art? Matt Edmonds is trying to sing his child to sleep. It’s not working. As his baritone produces My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean for the 19th time and his toddler says 'Dada, stop!’, he drifts into a parallel reality. Could AI do bedtime for him? Surely it would be simpler? And he would be spared lying on the floor of his child’s bedroom. What is a lullaby? What gives it its magic? The tune? The words? The rhythm? The very act of...
Nov 10, 2025•29 min
Emily Berry leads us on an exploration of agoraphobia: a poetic journey through the lives of people who don't like going on journeys. Agoraphobia is elusive and elastic – and it's very probably not what you think it is. Poet Emily Berry was diagnosed with agoraphobia over ten years ago, a condition which limits her ability to travel. And so she's setting off in a different way: on a journey into the life of the mind, guided by a chorus of fellow agoraphobics. What does it mean to come up against...
Nov 09, 2025•29 min
The Piano Boat, the floating concert hall where world-renowned concert pianist Masayuki Tayama played, sits empty. His wife, Rhiana, is left with a boat with no captain and a Steinway she was never allowed to play. We join her as she processes her grief and considers the future of The Piano Boat without Masa. Rhiana and Masa commissioned the boat in 2019 and planned to run concert cruises, on board the boat, along the inland waterways. It was a dream project for both of them – a life designed fo...
Nov 02, 2025•29 min
There are so many problems in the world. For the past three years, Estonian clown Julia Masli - armed with a microphone taped to a mannequin leg - has been trying to solve them. So far, during the performances of her live show ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, where Julia asks audience members their problem, she has recorded 1574 problems. A few people feel homesick, some worry about the collapse of society, and many lament their retreating hairlines. But we are not alone with our problems: Janet is not the...
Oct 26, 2025•29 min
This is a story about a community on the north east coast of Scotland that talked to plants with miraculous results. Established in 1962, the Findhorn community gained international recognition for 40lb cabbages, 8-foot delphiniums, and roses that bloomed in snow. With seemingly no gardening experience, community founders Peter and Eileen Caddy and their friend Dorothy Maclean transformed the barren sand dunes surrounding the 30-foot caravan they were living in, into a modern-day garden of Eden....
Oct 19, 2025•29 min
Clint Buffington spends his time where land meets sea, searching for a very specific treasure - messages in bottles that have drifted across oceans. Over the past 20 years he has recovered more than 140 of them, each carrying a clue - sometimes decades old - waiting to be discovered. Finding a bottle is only the beginning. The real mystery unfolds when Clint carefully extracts the fragile paper in his Utah home lab. He first teases out the faint, salt-blurred words, deciphering a message damaged...
Oct 12, 2025•29 min
On the 75th anniversary of the iconic comic strip Peanuts, psychoanalyst and author Josh Cohen shares how Charlie Brown and the Snoopy gang have become his constant companions—and how they can help us navigate the frustrating squiggle of life. Charles Schultz’s daily newspaper comic strip is perhaps the most enduring, beloved and iconic cartoon ever penned. Even if you’ve never read the strip itself, you are unlikely to have escaped its famous characters’ journeys across the decades and the glob...
Oct 05, 2025•29 min
Alan Dein takes to the road to explore the social and cultural resonances of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. The music begins the way journeys begin: with a clunking car door and churning ignition, before rolling onwards on a warm rhythmic throb - a 23-minute conceptual road-trip of swerves and curves, gentle gradients and blaring horns, tarmac-rumbling rhythms and doppler-shift effects that simulate the sensory whoosh of passing vehicles. Kraftwerk's lyrical paean to the possibilities of freedom via the ...
Sep 28, 2025•29 min
200 years ago, the modern railway was born. On 27th September 1825, the first ticketed passenger train, powered by steam travelled on a public line in County Durham. Katrina Porteous, a poet with generational connections to the area follows the track of that inaugural journey, accompanied by a rich aural soundscape by Joe Fowler. She also journeys through time, accelerating from the coal mines which fuelled the railway to the modern day, racing to a future of international travel and modern tech...
Sep 21, 2025•29 min
When decapitated cats start appearing in South London, animal rescue duo Boudicca Rising and Tony Jenkins spring into action. They’ll do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this mystery. It’s 2015 and the two volunteers running the South Norwood Animal Rescue and Liberty (SNARL) Facebook page, stumble upon a vet’s poster telling locals to keep their pets safe as there have been a series of “mutilations” in the area. When Boudicca and Tony share the vet’s warning, they’re flooded with messa...
Sep 07, 2025•30 min
