Misha Glenny explores the world of rare earth metals and other critical raw materials. They are vital for the future of technology and the green transition. But some see China's monopoly on production as a major global threat. In the first of five episodes, Misha finds out what the 17 rare earth metals are and hears about their weird and wonderful applications. He also discovers how China has managed to dominate the mining and refining of them. Guests: Dr Julie Klinger, Assistant Professor in th...
Sep 30, 2022•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast A recent visit to Taiwan by Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has heightened tensions between the US and China. America has accused China of dangerous military provocations in the region. China has warned the US not to play with fire. Add to all that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and concerns that China could be contemplating something similar in Taiwan, and it’s time to ask the question: Will the US and China go to war over Taiwan? Contributors: James Lin from the Univer...
Sep 16, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Big money, glamorous work trips abroad, and becoming your own boss - the world of door-to-door selling and chugging on the high street has been rebooted for the social media age. The industry has been around for decades, but revenues have seen a boost over the last few years and it is now worth £2.6bn a year in the UK. Some direct selling firms in the UK are jumping on the popularity of trends such as hustle culture to recruit young, ambitious people into entry-level jobs in ‘marketing’ or ‘mana...
Sep 13, 2022•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Bhopal gas tragedy was the world's worst industrial accident. Tens of thousands of people died and many more suffered long term illnesses when lethal methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide plant in the city in central India on 2nd December 1984. For the previous two years one man had been predicting that Bhopal was an accident waiting to happen. Forty years ago this month the Bhopali journalist Rajkumar Keswani wrote his first article warning of the dangers posed by safety lapse...
Sep 09, 2022•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Bhopal gas tragedy was the worlds worst industrial accident. Tens of thousands of people died and many more suffered long term illnesses when lethal methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide plant in the city in central India on 2nd December 1984. For the previous two years one man had been predicting that Bhopal was an accident waiting to happen. Forty years ago this month the Bhopali journalist Rajkumar Keswani wrote his first article warning of the dangers posed by safety lapses...
Sep 09, 2022•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Bhopal gas tragedy was the worlds worst industrial accident. Tens of thousands of people died and many more suffered long term illnesses when lethal methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide plant in the city in central India on 2nd December 1984. For the previous two years one man had been predicting that Bhopal was an accident waiting to happen. Forty years ago this month the Bhopali journalist Rajkumar Keswani wrote his first article warning of the dangers posed by safety lapses...
Sep 09, 2022•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Bhopal gas tragedy was the worlds worst industrial accident. Tens of thousands of people died and many more suffered long term illnesses when lethal methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide plant in the city in central India on 2nd December 1984. For the previous two years one man had been predicting that Bhopal was an accident waiting to happen. Forty years ago this month the Bhopali journalist Rajkumar Keswani wrote his first article warning of the dangers posed by safety lapses...
Sep 09, 2022•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Bhopal gas tragedy was the worlds worst industrial accident. Tens of thousands of people died and many more suffered long term illnesses when lethal methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide plant in the city in central India on 2nd December 1984. For the previous two years one man had been predicting that Bhopal was an accident waiting to happen. Forty years ago this month the Bhopali journalist Rajkumar Keswani wrote his first article warning of the dangers posed by safety lapses...
Sep 09, 2022•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Art by women is literally undervalued. The highest price achieved by a contemporary female artist is $12.4m, while it is $91m for a man. If a painting is signed by a man it goes up in value, signed by a woman it goes down. We might expect this historically, but as the majority of art students today are women, why is there such a gender value gap now? To untangle this mystery, Mary Ann Sieghart enters a thrilling world of glitzy, high-stake auctions and make-or-break gallery decisions. She lifts ...
Aug 30, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rima Ahmed takes the bus into Leeds and tries to find out why it is “the biggest city in Western Europe without a mass transit system”. Rima meets passengers, campaigners and history buffs as well as local politicians to delve into why the city has had so many failed attempts to improve its public transport system since its tram was abolished in 1959. Leeds was a transport pioneer - it introduced the first electric trams and trolleybuses in the country. In the 1970s and 80s, local councillors pr...
Aug 23, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast In homes across the UK, partition is not history but a live issue for its young descendants. Over the course of a year, Kavita Puri follows three people as they piece together parts of their complex family history and try to understand the legacy of partition and what it means to them today. She connects with a young man who goes to the Pakistani village where his Hindu grandfather was saved by Muslims; a woman who has always thought of herself as British Pakistani but a DNA test reveals she als...
Aug 16, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Can video games change lives? And, if so, how? 50 years after the arrival of Pong, gamer and writer Keza MacDonald considers what gaming has done for us. Using the rich BBC Archives, she explores how video games grew from a niche pursuit to a cultural phenomenon which stokes the imagination of, and offers agency to, those who fall for its charms. Games now influence who we are, what we think and how we act. Keza speaks to collectors, competitive gamers, psychologists, games designers and, mostly...
Aug 02, 2022•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast The government has described Rwanda, where it intends to send some people who arrive illegally in the UK, as "one of the world's safest nations". But this small, landlocked country in east Africa divides opinion. To some, it’s the Singapore of Africa, with a burgeoning economy, clean streets and gleaming skyscrapers. It’s also heralded for having the highest proportion of women parliamentarians in the world. But to others, Rwanda is a frightening and repressive place. In this programme, Victoria...
Jul 29, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast More than a million refugees from the war in Ukraine have ended up in the arms of the enemy, Russia. Have they been rescued? Or illegally deported in another Kremlin war crime?
Jul 26, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Film and theatre producer Anwar Akhtar, Director of the educational charity Samosa Media, visits schools exploring diversity and the curriculum and asking questions about difficult topics such as segregation and the importance of an inclusive education. A Mancunian and first generation son of Pakistani immigrants, Anwar traces his career development to his school days at Loreto College in the 1980s. Educated with students from a range of multicultural backgrounds, he developed a sense of belongi...
Jul 12, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, the actor Ionica Adriana lives with her family in the North Yorkshire countryside - but her life could have turned out wildly different. Until the age of two-and-a-half, Ionica lived in an orphanage, in Transylvania, north-western Romania. From 1965-1989, the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu enforced a strict set of policies to set about vastly increasing the Romanian population. But widespread poverty meant it was impossible for many Romanian parents to look after their newborn child...
Jul 05, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast This summer marks a decade since the 2012 Olympics - a moment of national pride when London represented Britain on the global stage. Ten years on from those Olympian heights, the capital is struggling. Scarred by the pandemic and entrenched inequality, London faces challenges which are often overlooked or ignored. Meanwhile a cultural backlash, an anti-Londonism, threatens a crisis of confidence - at a time when the city's success looks far from guaranteed. London expert Dr Jack Brown, who was b...
Jun 07, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast A dancer at the top of her career can't do her job without the skill and attention to detail of their shoemaker. Francesca Hayward is a principal dancer for the Royal Ballet and Bob Martin is her shoemaker. It’s a very personal choice for a dancer to settle on the perfect shoe - each maker is different - and so once they've found one, they rely on the maker of that shoe for their whole career. Pointe shoe making is a dying craft which has recently been given heritage craft status in the UK. Ther...
Jun 03, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Why are people with mental illness committing themselves in advance, when well, to treatment that they know they may want to refuse when they become unwell? Sally Marlow investigates. Juan was diagnosed with bipolar in his late teens. In the decade that followed, he suffered an episode of severe mental illness once nearly every year, plagued by intense paranoid thoughts that distorted his thinking. Each time this happened, it got to the point that he could no longer care for himself and he was d...
May 27, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast What do we want the synthetic future to look like? It’s seeping into our everyday lives, but are we ready? We need a conversation about the legal, policy and ethical implications for society. Deepfakes’ murky origins are in a form of sexual image abuse that is being used against hundreds of thousands of people, most of them women. Presenter and synthetic media expert Henry Ajder speaks to journalist Sam Cole, who first reported on deepfakes in 2018. She uncovered a Reddit forum sharing pornograp...
May 20, 2022•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast If anything can be a deepfake, perhaps nothing can be trusted - and politicians can take advantage of the so called "Liars' dividend" by dismissing real media as fake. In satire, deepfakes have already had a controversial impact, targeting politicians, business leaders, and celebrities. Meanwhile, convincing deepfake audio and video have the potential to create a new wave of fraud where faces, voices and bodies can be stolen. These malicious uses of deepfake technology started out targeting cele...
May 20, 2022•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast If anything can be a deepfake, perhaps nothing can be trusted - and politicians can take advantage of the so called "Liars' dividend" by dismissing real media as fake. In satire, deepfakes have already had a controversial impact, targeting politicians, business leaders, and celebrities. Meanwhile, convincing deepfake audio and video have the potential to create a new wave of fraud where faces, voices and bodies can be stolen. These malicious uses of deepfake technology started out targeting cele...
May 20, 2022•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ever since the 2018 mid-term elections in the US, people have been sounding the alarm that a deepfake could be used to disrupt or compromise a democratic process. These fears have not yet come to pass, but recently deepfakes of Zelensky and Putin were deployed as the Ukrainian conflict escalated. How much disruption did these deepfakes cause? How convincing were they? And are they an omen of things to come? Could deepfakes enhance disinformation campaigns that already cause significant harm? Pre...
May 20, 2022•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast What do we want the synthetic future to look like? It’s seeping into our everyday lives, but are we ready? We need a conversation about the legal, policy and ethical implications for society. Deepfakes’ murky origins are in a form of sexual image abuse that is being used against hundreds of thousands of people, most of them women. Presenter and synthetic media expert Henry Ajder speaks to journalist Sam Cole, who first reported on deepfakes in 2018. She uncovered a Reddit forum sharing pornograp...
May 20, 2022•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Is the use of the ‘P’ word ever acceptable? Prompted by the recent allegations of racism at Yorkshire CCC by cricketer Azeem Rafiq, Rajan Datar and producer Rajeev Gupta go on a journey of personal exploration. Like many South Asians in the 1970s and 80s, Rajan was routinely called the P-word as he walked to and from school, but a new generation of young British Asians say they now claim the word and it can be used within the community as a sign of power. Rajan finds out for himself how true thi...
Apr 15, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Scottish writer and broadcaster Alistair Heather is not proud of some of his past interactions with women. In a previous job as a builder’s labourer, he would watch and laugh as co-workers wolf-whistled and cat-called passing women. In the street, on trains, in cafes, bars and other public places, he would see it as his right to approach and talk to women. He knows that in behaving like that he has contributed to women and girls feeling excluded and unsafe. Now he wants to find out what he shoul...
Apr 12, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast From allegations of cursing the king's ships, to shape-shifting into animals, or dancing with the devil, three centuries ago witch-hunting was a mania that spread right across Europe. But nowhere did it exert a greater grip than in Scotland, which had an execution rate five times higher than England's. It remains an example of just how vicious sexism and misogyny - exacerbated by superstitious beliefs and religious extremism - can be. Now campaigners are on course to win an official pardon for t...
Apr 01, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast BBC Radio Manchester presenter Mike Sweeney and former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson go back a long way. They used to play football together and bonded over their love of music from the sixties. In this edition of Archive on 4, they sit down together to talk about Sir Alex as a young man and the influences which shaped his extraordinary career. Sir Alex reflects on his upbringing in Govan, the tenements where he lived and the people who first believed in him. He reveals how his ear...
Mar 29, 2022•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast WH Murray was one of a pioneering group of climbers in Scotland in the 1930’s, establishing new routes in Glencoe, Ben Nevis and The Cuillin. But it was one particular mountain that he loved – and climbed – the most; the iconic Buachaillie Etive Mor at Glencoe. This was the last mountain he climbed just before leaving for war in 1941. Murray was captured in the African desert but his life was saved when he uttered the words, ‘Cold as a mountain top.’ The German officer was also a mountaineer and...
Mar 25, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Bayeux Tapestry is coming to Britain in the near future. It’s among the world’s most famous works of art, but it's also a mystery: no one knows who made it. The stitching, though, is full of clues. Abigail Youngman seeks to reveal the truth about the lives of the women who stitched it, to unpick the secrets they left in plain sight, in the margins of the tapestry. The Bayeux Tapestry records great historical events but its humanity is in the details: the little boy holding his mother's hand ...
Mar 11, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
