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BBC Radio 4

Seriously is home to the world’s best audio documentaries and podcast recommendations. Introduced by Vanessa Kisuule. This feed is no longer being updated. Thanks for listening.

Seriously...

Meter tampering means altering a meter to prevent it from fully recording how much electricity or gas is being used, or bypassing the meter completely to energy usage being recorded at all. It may seem like a great idea, but there are consequences. It’s dangerous and it is a criminal offence. Its classified as theft and can lead to prison sentences and heavy fines. 

The number of people illegally bypassing the grid to save money is increasing at an alarming rate. Its disturbingly simple to do but the consequences can be tragic. In May 2021, two-year-old George Hinds was killed when a gas explosion caused by tampering destroyed his home in Heysham, Lancs. The explosion was triggered by a neighbour cutting through pipes with an angle grinder. He was jailed last year for 15 years for manslaughter. 
 
Crimestoppers UK say reports of gas and electricity theft have been rising sharply. In 2017 2,566 cases were reported and last year that figure rose to 10,694- though the industry believes the true figure may be closer to 200,000. Energy theft is not a new phenomenon but the cost of living crisis seems to be the main reason for this sharp increase. 

Presenter Dan Whitworth meets gas engineers at the frontline and talks to industry insiders and to Ofgem, the energy regulator to find out what they are doing about it. 

Producer: Mohini Patel

Stealing Power

There Is a club that no high school principal in the USA wants to join, but they are all incredibly grateful that its there. Because in the event of the worst possible scenario happening, they will need it 

The 'Principal Recovery Network' is made up of school leaders who have lived through the horror of a shooting in their hallways and classrooms. And in the hours after an incident they are on the phone helping the next school principal through their trauma

Sam Walker moved her family from Manchester to Arizona seven years ago and she still can't get used to her kids going through regular lockdown drills so they know what to do if their school is attacked

Sam meets some of the principals who have been through it and have come together to offer support - and now activism. 

Presenter: Sam Walker
Production: Sam Walker and Richard McIlroy
Image: Frank DeAngelis, the former Principal of Columbine High School

The Club Nobody Wants to Join

In the mountains of Latakia, Syria, Mudar Salimeh devotes much of his time to searching for butterflies. A geologist, artist, and nature lover, Mudar's fascination with butterflies began in the spring of 2018 when a great number of caterpillars appeared in his art studio. Over time, the caterpillars transformed into a cloud of white butterflies, sparking Mudar's quest to find and document these beautiful, elusive creatures.

Syria's civil war has caused extensive ecological damage, affecting far more than just human lives. Then, in February 2023, an earthquake struck the region of Latakia.

Spring 2024 arrives and butterflies start to emerge, we join Mudar as he creates an encyclopedia of the different butterfly species in Western Syria - a task made challenging by the shadows of war.

Photo credit: Mudar Salimeh
From his blog: https://syrianbutterflies.wordpress.com/

Field Recordings by Mudar Salimeh
Music by Samer Saem Eldahr a.k.a. Hello Psychaleppo
https://www.psychaleppo.com/
Lepidoptera Sound Recordings: Maria Brænder

Produced by Nanna Hauge Kristensen
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4

Searching for Butterflies

Every 17 years in the eastern United States, a roaring mass of millions of black-bodied, red-eyed, thumb-length insects erupt from the ground. For a few glorious weeks the periodical cicadas cover the trees and the air vibrates with their chorus of come-hither calls. Then they leave a billion eggs to hatch and burrow into the dirt, beginning the seventeen year cycle all over again. 

Sing. Fly. Mate. Die. This is Brood X or the Great Eastern Brood. It’s an event which, for the residents of a dozen or so US states, is the abiding memory of four, maybe five, summers of their lives. 

In a programme that’s both a natural and a cultural history of the Great Eastern Brood we re-visit four Brood X years....1970, 1987, 2004 and 2021…. to capture the stories of the summers when the cicadas came to town. 

Princeton University's Class of 1970 remember the cicadas’ appearance at their graduation ceremony, during a time of student unrest and protest against the Vietnam War; a bride looks back to the uninvited - but welcome - cicada guests attending her wedding; a musician recalls making al fresco music with Brood X; and an entomologist considers the extraordinary life cycle of an insect which is seems to possess both great patience and the ability to count to seventeen. 

Brood X cicadas spend 17 years underground, each insect alone, waiting and listening. In 2021, as Brood X stirred and the air began to thicken with the cicadas’ love songs, we all shared with them that sense of emerging from the isolation of lockdown and making a new beginning.

Featuring: Elias Bonaros, Liz Dugan, Anisa George, Ray Gibbons, Peter Kuper, Gene Kritsky, Gregg Lange, David Rothenberg, Gil Schrage and Gaye Williams

Producer: Jeremy Grange

Cicada audio recorded by Cicada Mania and David Rothenberg

Programme Image: Prof. Gene Kritsky

Brood X

When Bury FC was expelled from the Football League after 125 years, the government commissioned a fan-led review of football's financial stability. Centring the importance of football clubs to hundreds of local communities, it recommended tough new rules about governance and ownership of football clubs. Five years on and with both Labour and the Conservatives supporting the creation of a new regulator, Scunthorpe United has become a case study for why politicians think they need to step in. A succession of owners, a string of relegations and a more than gloomy balance book left the North Lincolnshire town wondering what life without its football club might look like. But the efforts of the local community led to a small piece of hope. For Radio 4, lifelong Scunthorpe fan and BBC political journalist (in that order) Jack Fenwick tells the inside story of how it all went so wrong and what happened next.

Presenter and producer: Jack Fenwick

Stoppage Time for Scunthorpe

At the last general election, three of the four seats with the lowest turnout, where the lowest number of eligible people came out to vote, were in Hull. 

Alex Forsyth sits down with people who stay at home on election day to find out why. 

She begins in Hull East, the seat which had the lowest turnout in the UK at the last general election, visiting Marfleet, a ward with low turnout at local elections. She explores how a pattern of not voting is repeated in other parts of the city. Alex goes on to examine the complex reasons for not voting and speaks to those who believe key events in the city's history might provide part of the answer.

Presented by Alex Forsyth
Produced by Camellia Sinclair for BBC Audio in Bristol
Mixed by Ilse Lademann

The City That Stayed at Home

Poet Ian McMillan has a gift for the art of small pleasures; the joy of close observation; revelling in everyday things, places and encounters; describing and re-describing them endlessly. In the company of fellow poets Helen Mort, Steve Ely and Dave Green he takes us to ordinary places that fascinate him: a railway platform with a striking red bench, on a bus journey, to a village cafe, and a local museum of curiosities; where we discover they can be portals into different ways of thinking, of feeling, and of being, where anything can happen, where the ordinary can become the extraordinary if we simply open our eyes and our ears. 

Presented by Ian McMillan

Produced by Cecile Wright

The Beauty of Everyday Things

Examining how the Israel-Gaza war is affecting students here in the UK. Anwar Akhtar is a director at the Samosa Project, a media and arts charity working to create understanding across cultures. He heads to Leeds, and gets a close-up view of the tensions bubbling over at the university.

This programme was first broadcast on 12 May, 2024.

Conflict on Campus

Three people from three different eras reveal what it's like to live with multiple personalities, or Dissociative Identity Disorder.

A retired librarian who lived through the disorder's most controversial time and has found peace as several parts; an early YouTuber who fought stigma about DID and now lives as one person; and a young TikToker navigating life as a 'system'.

The BBC has been sharing stories and tips on how to support your mental health and wellbeing. Go to bbc.co.uk/mentalwellbeing to find out more.

Presenter/producer: Lucy Proctor
Researcher: Anna Harris
Mixed by: James Beard

The Switch

A top secret little-known mission that changed the outcome of World War II. Not Alan Turing's Enigma code-breaking mission but a daring foray, conducted behind enemy lines on the shores of Normandy. 

Harrison Lewis and wetland scientist Christian Dunn re-enact one of the most remarkable feats of the Second World War and discover the intricate details of the daring but forgotten science that underpinned D-Day.

The Beaches

Actor Michael Sheen explores the history of Port Talbot's Plaza Cinema. A beautiful art-deco building , first opening in 1940, the Plaza was the heart of cinema entertainment for the people of Port Talbot for decades - a place where Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins watched everyone from George Formby to Bogart and Cagney and where, growing up in Port Talbot in the 1970s and 80s, Michael Sheen had his early encounters with the film industry in which he would thrive. 

But as well as charting the onward march of the multiplex which lead to the Plaza's eventual demise, and talking to the last projectionist and cinema manager who fought so hard to make it viable, Michael Sheen explores the importance of places like the Plaza to towns and communities all over the UK. Is it possible to turn it around, find a new use or even see crowds return to the elegant interior, or is the Plaza now only a monument to a past life , rich in nostalgia but which can no longer provide what a modern community needs ? Michael also hears from two other Plaza goers and children of Port Talbot - Rob Brydon and the Opera Singer Rebecca Evans.

Producers: Joanne Cayford and Tom Alban

Photographs: Copyright John Crerar.

Port Talbot Paradiso

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