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BBC World Service


The programme that explains the present by exploring the past.


The Forum

When the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, readers were so angry that thousands cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine in which the stories appeared. The editor and Conan Doyle himself were overwhelmed with letters from a furious public - fans who instead of accepting the death of their favourite fictional character then started to write and share their own stories featuring Holmes. They eventually formed clubs and appreciation societies, brought together by a common interest.

This practice is something we recognise today across the globe. In areas as diverse as sport, music, film and TV (to mention just a few), fans are not just passive consumers as the recent activities of Swifties (Taylor Swift fans) demonstrate. They’re actively engaged, creating content of their own and connecting with others to nurture a shared identity. The internet has made that easier than ever before, with fans now using their platform to influence political discourse too.

Iszi Lawrence discusses the history and inexorable rise of fandom, with guests Paul Booth, Professor of Media and Pop Culture at DePaul University in Chicago in the United States; Areum Jeong, Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at Arizona State University in the US and Corin Throsby from the University of Cambridge in the UK, whose research focuses on Romantic literature and early celebrity culture. 
The programme also includes contributions from Julian Wamble, Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and the creator of Critical Magic Theory: An Analytical Harry Potter Podcast, and listeners around the world share their fan stories.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service.

(Photo: Fans wait to pay for items of merchandise as they visit a pop-up store of South Korean K-pop sensation BTS. Credit: ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images)

The rise of fans and fandom

Where do charismatic personalities come from? Are they people born with special or even divine gifts? Or have they simply mastered a few effective techniques for cordial social interaction that anyone can learn? As business, entertainment and politics increasingly turn into popularity contests conducted through social media and TV, charisma seems to matter more and more: hence the proliferation of companies offering to teach aspiring leaders how to acquire it. But the influence that magnetic personalities can have on an audience long predates modern screen media: in 1896, a speech brimming with charisma earned one little-known young orator a not just a 20-minute standing ovation but also a US presidential nomination.

Iszi Lawrence explores the role of charisma in politics and business with Julia Sonnevend, Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications at The New School for Social Research in New York and author of Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics; John Antonakis, Professor of Organizational Behaviour in the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne, and co-author of a political charismometer that predicts US presidential elections among other things; Jeremy C. Young, historian of political culture and social movements, author of The Age of Charisma: Leaders, Followers, and Emotions in American Society; as well as World Service listeners.

(Photo: Smiling businessman in discussion. Credit: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images)

The seductive dance of charisma

From Colombia to Vietnam and beyond, the US dollar is the currency in which much of international business is conducted, and which many people outside the US use as a means of exchange and a store of value. So how did a country with just over 4 percent of the world’s population come to dominate global banking and trade? When the position of the US dollar as the linchpin of global commerce was confirmed at the end of the Second World War, not everyone was happy with this state of affairs: the French soon spoke of the Americans having an ‘exorbitant privilege’. Did they have a point? And what of the more recent efforts to replace the Greenback with other currencies?
 
Iszi Lawrence follows the history of the US dollar from its origins to today with H W Brands Jr., Professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin; Barry Eichengreen, Professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley; Carola Frydman, Professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University in Evanston; Perry Mehrling, Professor of international political economy at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University and World Service listeners.

[Photo: A roll of US dollar notes. Credit: Getty Images]

How the US dollar came to dominate the world

What is the purpose of libraries in the era of the internet and AI? Whether at a school or in a community, libraries used to be key providers of information and enjoyment for many. But now, in a digital age, more books and periodicals are available online than even the biggest library can hold. If terabytes of text can now be stored on a single laptop, do we need to think differently about the way we access and navigate books? Could well-designed AI tools be trusted to make sense of this information abundance in a similar way that a good librarian can?

Rajan Datar discusses the past, present and future of libraries with Randa Chidiac, Director of Library Services at the American University in Dubai; Dr. Andrew Hui, Head of Literature Studies at Yale-NUS College in Singapore; and Brewster Kahle, computer engineer and digital librarian, founder of the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine. We also hear from World Service listeners.

(Photo: An artist's impression of a digital book. Credit: Alengo/Getty Images)

Libraries in the digital age

Airports: at their most basic level places to fly from to reach destinations near and far. And yet so much more. Iszi Lawrence and guests take a look at the evolution of airports, from their beginnings as military airstrips to the modern-day behemoths with their luxury shopping outlets, gardens and art galleries.

The early European airports were modelled on railway stations, as that was the only blueprint for a transport hub. The public became so enthralled by air travel that airports eventually became popular as destinations in themselves. Airports today are places filled with emotion: the scene of farewells and arrivals, as well as the stress of international travel in an age of terrorism.

Iszi is joined by cultural historian Alastair Gordon, author of Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure; Lilia Mironov, an architectural historian and air steward who wrote Airport Aura: A Spatial History of Airport Infrastructure; and architect and airport planner Su Jayaraman who teaches at the University of Westminster in London. Plus a range of Forum listeners from around the world contribute their personal experiences of airports.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for BBC World Service.

(Photo: John F. Kennedy International Airport, the TWA Flight Center, terminal 5, designed by Eero Saarinen. Credit: Lehnartz/ullstein bild/Getty Images)

How airports took off

Nostalgia is one of those complicated emotions: we long to be transported to a place or moment in the past that we have loved but at the same time feel sad that it has gone forever. It is also a bit of a slippery intellectual concept: regarded as a malady when the term was first coined in the 17th century, nostalgia is now thought to be benign or even mildly therapeutic. And beyond personal recollections, business uses it to sell all manner of things and some politicians skilfully deploy it to hide their real objectives. So what actually is nostalgia?

Iszi Lawrence explores the past and present of nostalgia with Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster , author of Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, Prof. Krystine Batcho who devised the Nostalgia Inventory and Dr. Tobias Becker author of Yesterday, A New History of Nostalgia. We also hear WS listeners’ views on nostalgia.

(Photo: Vintage photographs with a dried rose. Credit: Alicia Llop/Getty Images)

What makes us nostalgic?

The quality of customer service can make or break a company. That has always been true but the kind of customer experience we now expect when things go wrong with our purchases is vastly different from what we wanted half a century ago. 1960s answering services, the new organisations managing calls on behalf of businesses, relied on a single technology: the telephone. Now a firm needs to offer its customers multiple ways to contact it. But which one should a company prioritise, especially in these financially straitened times? The latest AI-enabled chatbots? Well-trained, empowered people in call centres? Or something else entirely? And how do these changes impact customer service representatives, the people who actually deliver the service to us every day?

Iszi Lawrence discusses these questions with Jo Causon, CEO of the Institute of Customer Service in the UK; call centre researchers Professors Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha from the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad; Franco-American service designer Matthew Marino and World Service listeners.

(Photo: A woman in jeans interacting with virtual contact icons on a screen. Credit: Umnat Seebuaphan/iStock/Getty Images)

Customer service: The rise of the doom loop

Is the idea of a pristine landscape an illusion, given that over thousands of years human activity has almost everywhere left its mark? Bridget Kendall asks the gardener Gilly Drummond, the land artist Danae Stratou, the archaeobotanist Dorian Fuller, and the historian William Beinart. 

(Photo: Blenheim Palace Park where English landscape architect Capability Brown created a 150-acre lake and planted more than a million trees to make perhaps his finest artificial landscape © Blenheim Palace)

Taming Nature

Bridget Kendall explores extreme living and what it tells us, from human exploration to deep sea fish and synthetic biology. Bridget and her guests explore hot dry deserts and sub-zero polar ice, deep sea vents, salt heavy lakes, acid hot springs and outer space. NASA scientist Lynn Rothschild is a pioneer in the field of astrobiology, interested in probing the limits of life on earth, to better understand where we might find life signs elsewhere in the universe. Oliver Crimmen is the Fish Curator at the Natural History Museum in London. He’s an expert on how some sea creatures can survive both freezing and hot water – and several miles beneath the surface of our oceans. And explorer Rosie Stancer takes her own body to the edge – with solo trips to both the South Pole and the Arctic North, and a new expedition planned across China’s largest desert.

(Image credit: Science Photo Library)

Living at the Edge: Life in Extreme Environments

Bestselling Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, Nick Bostrom from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and Ann Phoenix from UCL's Institute of Education trace the evolution of 21st century identity with the BBC’s Jo Fidgen. Are technology and geopolitics conspiring to create a new type of human, unrecognisable to our forebears? Is ‘serial migration’ the new norm for transnational families and what effect is this having on the identity of the young? Or perhaps we should drop the concept of Identity altogether?

(Photo: Left to right, Ann Phoenix, Elif Shafak and Nick Bostrom)

A Single World, Many Identities?

The birth of modern plastic began in 1907 with the invention of Bakelite, one of the first plastics to be made from entirely synthetic components. But plastic in a particular form was being used many thousands of years ago by the Olmec, the earliest known civilisation in Mexico, who played with balls made of a natural polymer - rubber. 

Over the years the plastics industry has grown from the work of a handful of inventors to a global player whose products reach into almost every corner of our lives. Plastic has been at the heart of one of the most important changes in virtually all societies since the second world war: the consumer revolution. 
But while it is a force for good in many areas and a highly versatile material that appears in the most surprising places, plastic today is a major environmental preoccupation. Can we modify our use towards this wonder material, or can scientists rise to the challenge of creating a plastic that will break down completely when it has reached the end of its useful life?

Rajan Datar is joined by nanoscientist Professor Ajay Mishra, chemist Professor Andrea Sella and journalist Susan Freinkel to explore the story of plastic.

Photo: Plastic bottles on a production line (Getty Images)

Plastic: How it Changed the World

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