Podcasts - Documentary of the Week

This weeks podcast is one of many I listen to provided by the BBC. Over here in Blighty, we are quite lucky to have a public service broadcaster that is funded by the television licence fee paid yearly by all owners of a colour television in the country. Now, those of you from overseas may baulk at the idea of paying for a licence to own a television, but generally the vast majority of quality programming made in Britain is due to the enormous amount of funding received by the British Broadcasting Corporation from the licence fee. The fee is about £120 a year, and about 50 million people pay it. Six hundred million quid a year is not to be sniffed at. That isn't all the revenue they receive either. Nice work if you can get it...Anyway, I digress. Please read on.





Now, BBC Radio is a pretty big deal. They have channels for everything. One particular channel is predominately spoken word with factual content and is called Radio 4. I listen to a whole load of podcasts from this channel and the one I'm going to talk about today is called Documentary of the Week. 


Radio Four has loads of factual /documentary programming and once a week, they choose one of the best ones and release it on podcast for your aural delectation. That is nice of them isn't it?


So, a quick run down of a few previous episodes is needed here.

I have listened to a piece about the Domesday Reloaded project in Bradford where they have followed children born there in all kinds of communities. Now they are in their early twenties the piece ecplored what has happened to them over that time. It is a fascinating insight into modern British life and how society and the education system treats children and what they take from it.

There was a great episode about the Japanese peoples reaction to the nuclear incident and tsunami recently. How people have managed to scrape their communities back together after the devastation and start their lives again. Some of the testimonies were absolutely heartbreaking.

An interesting one recently was a documentary about gay people who have decided that homosexuality wasn't for them and how their transfer back to a "straight" way of life isn't as easy as you would think. "Hasbians" and "Yestergays" tell their stories of years of flag waving gayness and then meeting members of the opposite sex, falling in love and starting families. It seems the gay community isn't as forgiving as you might think when it comes to defectors...

Follow the links above to the Radio 4 page on and the Documentary of the Week page too. The episodes are available from the site and also from iTunes, Zune and RSS feed. You won't be disappointed.