Podcast Episodes

Columbia space shuttle disaster

The US space shuttle Columbia broke up on its way back to Earth on 1 February 2003.

It had been in use since 1981.

Iain Mackness spoke to Admiral Hal…

3 years, 1 month ago

Czechoslovakia's 'Velvet Divorce'

30 years ago this month, Czechoslovakia split into the separate states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

It was a rare instance of a state separati…

3 years, 1 month ago

Palestine Post bombing

Mordechai Chertoff was the foreign editor on the Palestine Post (precursor to the Jerusalem Post) when it was bombed on 1 February 1948.

He tells Luc…

3 years, 1 month ago

Invention of the MP3

Professor Karlheinz Brandenburg from Germany spent more than a decade developing MP3 technology, which was developed to convert audio into digital fo…

3 years, 1 month ago

Albert Pierrepoint: Britain's executioner

Using archive recordings, Alex Last tells the story of Britain's most famous hangman.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Albert Pierrepoint was responsible …

3 years, 1 month ago

Smolensk air disaster

In 2010, a plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczyński, crashed near the Russian city of Smolensk, killing everyone on board.

It was one of t…

3 years, 1 month ago

Japanese death row guard

Yoshikuni Noguchi spent time as a guard in one of the prisons in Japan that would carry out the death penalty, and witnessed the hanging of a condemn…

3 years, 1 month ago

When Britain tried to censor the Troubles in Northern Ireland

Frontman of punk-rock band The Undertones, Paul McLoone, recalls the “weird, slightly funny, slightly sad, slightly surreal” time he was the voice of…

3 years, 1 month ago

Swine flu vaccine and narcolepsy

In 2009, hundreds of teenagers’ lives were changed forever, when a vaccine designed to protect them against swine flu appeared to trigger a sleep dis…

3 years, 1 month ago

France's nuclear tests in Algeria

Between 1960 and 1966, France carried out 17 nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara.

High levels of radioactivity, and a failure to safely dispose of n…

3 years, 1 month ago