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BBC World Service

A window into our world, through in-depth storytelling from the BBC. Investigating, reporting and uncovering true stories from everywhere. Award-winning journalism, unheard voices, amazing culture and global issues. 

From Trump’s new world order, to protests in Turkey, to the headphone revolution, The Documentary investigates major global stories.

We delve into social media, take you into the minds of the world’s most creative people and explore personal approaches to spirituality. Every week, we also bring together people from around the globe to discuss how news stories are affecting their lives. 

A new episode most days, all year round. From our BBC World Service teams at: Assignment, Heart and Soul, In the Studio, OS Conversations, The Fifth Floor and Trending.

The Documentary Podcast

President Trump has called illegal immigration an “invasion” and what has followed is a huge rise in the arrest and detention of migrants. Some have ended up in ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ - an immigration detention centre that was speedily constructed in June, deep in the Florida swampland. ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is now subject to a number of lawsuits. Immigration attorneys say they have not been granted proper access to clients inside; environmentalists claim the detention centre is harming the protected wetlands that surround it. Within the last few days, a judge has ruled that much of the detention centre must be dismantled and no new migrants taken there. It is a preliminary ruling and the government immediately filed an appeal. Josephine Casserly follows immigration lawyer Mich Gonzalez as he attempts to meet his client inside the detention centre. 
This episode of The Documentary comes to you from Assignment, investigations and journeys into the heart of global events.

Suing 'Alligator Alcatraz': Immigration in the US

Adeju Thompson, the founder and creative director behind the Nigerian fashion label Lagos Space Programme, attempts to establish the label on the global fashion scene. Lagos Space Programme blends Yoruba heritage (notably Adire dyeing) with queer and futurist aesthetics, taking inspiration from Lou Reed, traditional Ife sculptures, and the photography of Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Robert Mapplethorpe. Thompson talks about his dedication to slow fashion, gender-fluid creations, and detailed artisan craftsmanship, blending traditional techniques with contemporary designs. Tayo Popoola follows Thompson to Paris where he unveils his collection, based on the idea of "rock'n'roll consciousness". We then join him at his studio in Surulere, Lagos where he discusses his new designs for 25/26.

Adeju Thompson: Taking fashion label Lagos Space Programme to the world

The incredible true story of how The Avontuur was locked down at sea for 188 days during the Covid-19 pandemic, with 15 people on board. The journey begins for ship’s cook Giulia Baccosi when she accepts a last-minute job aboard the sailing cargo ship The Avontuur. She tells the captain that she will stay with the ship until it reaches Mexico, in about three months’ time. After saying goodbye to her partner, Giulia settles into life on board and the responsibilities of feeding the Avontuur’s crew of 15. But before Giulia and the crew know it, everything they’re counting on will be thrown to the winds.
This extraordinary story, narrated by Siobhán McSweeney, is from the Lives Less Ordinary podcast, from the BBC World Service.

Bonus: Lives Less Ordinary presents, Hold Fast!

We take a look at some of the more unusual sports practiced on the African continent. Kelvin Kimathi recently travelled to Uganda where a muddy version of entertainment wrestling is becoming increasingly popular. Marcia Veiga discovered Capoeira Angola whilst finding a way to connect with her own Angolan heritage. Eshlin Vedan met the only black teenager in South Africa competing in tent pegging- a cavalry sport of ancient origin.

Nitin Sultane reports for BBC Marathi and recently travelled to a village in Maharashtra where discarded fabric has been turned into paper for 700 years.

This episode of The Documentary comes to you from The Fifth Floor, the show at the heart of global storytelling, with BBC journalists from all around the world. This is an EcoAudio certified production.

(Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich.)

Mud wrestling and tent pegging: Africa’s unusual sports

While US President Donald Trump spearheads efforts to halt the conflict in Ukraine, Russian drones and missiles continue to kill and injure civilians, invaders control around a fifth of the country, and many Ukrainians fear that any peace agreement could result in a permanent loss of territory. Away from the international diplomacy, we wanted to give a sense of how life has changed in Ukraine over the past three and a half years of war. We bring together three soldiers who share their experiences of the frontline. We also hear from Ukrainians forced to leave the country and bring together three women dealing with the trauma of the conflict. Sasha tells us. “Everybody has lost someone or something – be it a home, friend or someone from their closest family.”
This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from BBC OS Conversations, bringing together people from around the world to discuss how major news stories are affecting their lives.

Ukrainians at war and their hopes for peace

In one of his final official acts before he died, Pope Francis put Antoni Gaudí, Spain’s most famous architect, onto the path to sainthood. Gaudí's masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia, is a towering basilica, strangely designed and bursting with colour. It stands in the heart of Barcelona and its walls recount the entire story of the Catholic religion. After 140 years, having survived wars, arson attacks and dictatorship, it is still under construction. As Gaudí worked on it throughout his life, he became obsessive and it intensified his devotion. By the end of his life he was living like a monk. The BBC's Max Horberry has been to Barcelona to see Gaudí's work and speak to the people who have been working to finish the Sagrada Familia and campaigning for Gaudí's sainthood. He finds out more about the path to sainthood and how architecture, nature and religion intertwine in Gaudí’s life.
This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from Heart and Soul, exploring personal approaches to spirituality from around the world.

Gaudí: God’s architect

Science journalist Roland Pease asks whether the rounds of cuts, reorganisations and political strong-arming in US science can be weathered, and how they will likely affect us all. Eighty years ago Vannevar Bush proposed what became the pact between government and universities that led to decades of global scientific dominance. Today, US scientists fear the Trump administration is ripping up that agreement, mandating what and what can’t be studied, who can study it, and redefining expertise. The specialist agencies are either being closed down or defunded to the extent that tens of thousands of government scientists are already unemployed. Multi-year experiments are being closed down uncompleted. Top universities are besieged by mandates on who and how they hire, tied to their future funding. Data streams that benefit researchers around the globe are being switched off. Even definitions of what counts as evidence are being redrafted. Can the administration's declared aim of "restoring gold standard science", be achieved?

White Coats v the White House

The inaugural premier league football match at Everton’s much anticipated new stadium will kick-off on 23 August 2025, as the home side play against Brighton & Hove Albion. Everton Football Club's radical new home was designed by innovative sports architect Dan Meis, who has developed a reputation for out-of-the-box, innovative thinking while creating projects that redefine their respective building types. This includes the design for the Staples Centre in Los Angeles and “transformable” venue in Japan that mechanically changes from arena to stadium. In 2021, former professional footballer Neil Danns joined Meis as he commenced the design process for the Everton's new football stadium.
This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from In the Studio, exploring the processes of the world’s most creative people.

Dan Meis: Designing Everton Football Club's new stadium

In the summer of 2015 tens of thousands of people left their homes in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq in the hope of finding a safe haven in Europe. The journeys they took were often hazardous and not everyone reached their destination. In one of the most notorious cases, 71 migrants were found dead in the back of a refrigerated truck on a motorway in Austria. They had all suffocated. Could this tragedy have been prevented? For Assignment, Nick Thorpe speaks to two of the people smugglers who are now serving life sentences in a Bulgarian prison. He visits a man in northern Iraq who lost his younger brother and two children aboard the truck and asks the police in Hungary if they could have acted sooner.

This episode of The Documentary comes to you from Assignment, investigations and journeys into the heart of global events.

Europe’s migrant crisis: the truck that shocked the world

A vast herd of life-size puppet animals travel from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle, to flee the effects of climate change. Following their internationally successful project, The Walk with Little Amal, in which a 13-foot puppet visited 17 countries, drawing attention to the vast numbers of children fleeing war, violence, and persecution, David Lan, previously the artistic director of the Young Vic and Amir Nizar Zuabi the celebrated Palestine theatre director, have created a new global project, The Herds. Concerned with raising awareness of climate change, it is inspired by the notion that animals are the first to sense environmental disaster and respond alarmingly. The animals, designed in Cape Town by the Ukwanda Puppet Collective and replicated by partners along the route, reflect the countries through which they passed. 
This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from In the Studio, exploring the processes of the world’s most creative people.

The Herds: Life-sized puppets flee climate change

While some countries fight to reclaim antiquities that were stolen centuries ago, Cambodian investigators are dealing with far more recent thefts. Many of the country’s prized treasures were taken by looters in the 1980s and 1990s and then sold on to some of the world’s most prestigious museums, including the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert museum, in London. At the centre of many of the sales was a rogue British art dealer. 

Celia Hatton joins the Cambodian investigative team and gains unprecedented access to looters who have become government witnesses. The Phnom Penh government has now launched a legal campaign in the UK to get some of its most prized statues back. For many Cambodians these are not simply blocks of stone or pieces of metal, they are living spirits and integral to the Khmer identity. The Gods, they say, are cold and lonely in foreign collections and they want to come home. 

Producer: John Murphy

(Image: Monks at Angkor Wat temple, Cambodia. Credit: BBC)

Cambodia: Returning the gods

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