Podcast Episodes

The assassination of Burundian President Melchior Ndadaye

In July 1993, Melchior Ndadaye became Burundi’s first democratically elected president.

He was also the first president to come from the country’s Hut…

3 years, 8 months ago

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, 8 months 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, 8 months 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, 8 months 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, 8 months 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, 8 months 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, 8 months 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, 8 months 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, 8 months 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, 8 months ago