PODCAST · society
The Radio 3 Documentary
by BBC Radio 3
In-depth documentaries which explore a different aspect of history, science, philosophy, film, visual arts and literature. The Sunday Feature is broadcast every Sunday at 6.45pm on BBC Radio 3.
Episodes
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Sound Sources
Paul McCartney, Jean-Michel Jarre and Lee Renaldo on their debt to classical music.
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Time Canvasses - Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism
In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing music, and new ways of seeing art. It was here that the American experimental composer Morton Feldman said, “What was great about the fifties is that for one...
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Tuner of the World
"For the next hour, I need your ears". It's 1974 and someone is trying to recruit you for a listening experiment on public radio in Canada. Pioneering Canadian composer and soundscape maestro, R Murray Schafer really wants you to commit: "if you're just listening to this programme casually, you'd...
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Supply Lines
Via ports and truck-stops, fulfilment centres and ring roads, Aidan Tulloch follows the supply chain and reimagines the journey an item goes on in the age of 24/7 delivery.
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New Generation Thinkers: The Perfect Balance
Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri searches for different perspectives on the idea of balance.
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The Pleasures and Pains of Denton Welch
Denton Welch lived the last years of his short life in Kent during the Second World War. His writing career took off in 1943 and in the same year he met his companion, Eric Oliver. His writing is mostly autobiographical and carries his readers from a childhood in Shanghai, boarding school in…
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The Black Cantor
Known in Yiddish as Der Schvartze Khazn--the Black Cantor--Thomas LaRue Jones was an African American tenor who sang Jewish music in the early decades of the twentieth century. Famed for his soulful voice and perfect Yiddish pronunciation, he performed in synagogues and theatres across the…
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Sunday Feature - Shakespeare's Brum Ting
Over a century ago, in 1881, the city of Birmingham purchased a copy of Shakespeare's first folio. It was to be the crown jewel of their new Shakespeare library, the brainchild of the first librarian George Dawson. From the outset it was to be the People's Folio, the property of the city's Free...
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X-Ray Vision: Rudolph Fisher in Harlem
Lindsay Johns makes the case for writer Rudolph Fisher's portraits of Black American life
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Heinrich Heine: The First Modern European
One day, three decades after the event, the German poet and man of letters, Heinrich Heine, stood on the site of the battle of Marengo, one of Napoleon's earliest and most important victories and had an epiphany - or he invented one for his readers: ""Gradually, day by day, foolish national...
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Government Song Woman
American musician Rhiannon Giddens investigates the fascinating life and recordings of the folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell. Travelling thousands of miles all over the US in the depression era, Cowell was willing to track down songs in unlikely places, once writing "I don't scare...
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Tutu - A Portrait of Nigeria
Chibundu Onuzo tells the fascinating story of ‘Africa’s Mona Lisa’ and artist Ben Enwonwu.
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O Sole Mio
“All Neapolitans were born to be musicians, to be singers,” says musicologist Dr Dinko Fabris, referring to the foundation myth of Naples, according to which the city was created by the siren Partenope. Song has been woven into Neapolitan life ever since, giving the city an extraordinary musical...
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Metal City
Metalworking has been central to the rise and success of Birmingham over hundreds of years. But how has this industry affected the culture of the city? Did the experience of working with metal and hearing the continuous clang of metal-on-metal seep into the personality and creativity of...
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Rebel Sounds: Musical Resistance in Barbados
From 1627-1807, nearly 400,000 human beings were kidnapped, sold and shipped in horrific conditions across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the tiny island of Barbados. There, they were enslaved by British landowners and forced to work the sugar plantations that covered the island. Uprooted...
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Yiddish Glory
During World War II, approximately 1.6 million Soviet, Polish and Romanian Jews survived the Holocaust by escaping to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, avoiding imminent death in ghettos, firing squads and killing centres. Many of them wrote music about these horrors as the Holocaust was unfolding...
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Scott Ross - Harpsichord Rebel
In 1984, an American harpsichord player called Scott Ross quit a teaching job in Canada and returned to France, the country that since he was a teenager had been his adopted home. It was the year that Frankie Goes to Hollywood had a Europe-wide hit with Two Tribes and Steve Jobs launched the...
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Unlocking Anne
Anne Lock, a woman living in 16th-century England, wrote the first ever sonnet sequence in the English language? Impossible, thought Clare Pollard. As a celebrated playwright and poet, with much of her work focused on giving a voice to forgotten women, how could she not have known about Anne…
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What Walls Hold
London. Tavistock House. 1851. It shaped Charles Dickens’ life and career. Home to The Smallest Theatre in the World, Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage and an alluring French lodger called Charles Gounod, Tavistock House is reputable for having been the home of three eccentric creatives - the Mancunian...
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Sunday Feature: Shostakovich and the Battle for Babi Yar
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was inspired by an unflinching poem about the ‘Holocaust of Bullets’ at Babi Yar in Ukraine, one of the biggest massacres of World War Two. Lucy Ash pieces together the events leading up to the controversial first performance by speaking to people who...
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Briggflatts - A Northern Poetic Odyssey
Rory Stewart travels across Cumbria and Northumbria from an ancient Quaker meeting house in Brigflatts, to a medieval tower on Newcastle city walls, in search of clues in Basil Bunting's life and work to help understand this neglected masterpiece of twentieth century modernist poetry . It's a...
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Sunday Feature: Florence Price’s Chicago and the Black Female Fellowship
The remarkable female musicians and activists who helped Florence Price's music to thrive
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Tchaikovsky's Island of Inspiration
If it hadn’t been for Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s love of jam, he may never have completed his first large-scale work. After graduating from the Conservatory of St Petersburg, the 26-year-old started composing his first symphony, ‘Winter Daydreams’, but quickly ran out of steam. “No other work cost him...
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Then there was Light - Stockhausen and LICHT, his opera cycle based on the seven days of the week
LICHT, the vast opera cycle composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen between 1977 and 2004 is an enigma, and composer and broadcaster Robert Worby goes on a personal journey to find out why it divides critics and audiences. Stockhausen was the most gifted composer of the post-war European avant-garde.…
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Even more Kershaw Tapes
During the 1980s and 1990s, DJ Andy Kershaw travelled around Africa and the Americas searching out great music and taping it on his Walkman Pro, a new broadcast-quality cassette recorder that was bringing about a revolution in mobile recording. He also used it to capture his celebrated Kitchen...
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More Kershaw Tapes
In this episode, Andy meets Kenyan harpist Ayub Ogada on a beach in Cornwall, the Antioch Gospel group in a car park in New Orleans, Cuarteto Iglesias on a roof top in Cuba and a young Ballake Sissoko next to the railway tracks in Bamako, Mali. On his very first day recording with his Walkman…
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New Generation Thinker short feature: Hilltop Histories
Seren Griffiths uses a walk along a sandstone ridge in Northern Cheshire to explore the way a landscape can hold multiple histories, and in doing so make it easier for us to contemplate distant futures. The landscape in question is bordered on the north by the M56 motorway. Commuters making their...
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NGT The Balcony
New Generation Thinker Dr Islam Issa has a strong cultural attachment to the Balcony. In his native Egypt, the place where architectural historians believe the balcony was first developed, the balcony is a pivotal part of family homes, a place that blurs the line between private and public…
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The Apple and the Tree
When he was a boy and returned to the family home from primary school in the afternoon, Carlo Gébler would often hear the sound of typing coming from the shed at the foot of the garden. This was where his mother, the writer Edna O’Brien, sometimes went to write her novels. Later, when he lay in…
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Sunday Feature - Dissecting Beethoven
An exploration of Beethoven’s music through the body that gave him so much trouble.
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Sunday Feature: The Fake Poet
Why does the image of the forlorn and abandoned poet Thomas Chatterton haunt us today?
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The Silence of My Pain
Hannah French explores a hidden disability for many musicians: pain.
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New Generation Thinker short Feature: COVID and The Black Death, an imperfect fit.
It's understandable that, with the onset of a global pandemic, commentators have looked to the past for comparisons. But Dr Seb Falk is concerned that with the easy headlines about the mortality rate or the economic damage, or even the positive transformations inspired by plagues of the past and...
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Silent Witness: John Cage, Zen and Japan
John Cage is arguably the most important composer of the 20th century, even though he's perhaps famous, or infamous depending on your point of view, for writing a piece of music that is 4'33" of silence. Famous because it made his reputation - after all composers write music not silence – and...
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The Crankiness of C.W.Daniel
New Generation Thinker Elsa Richardson on the radical 20th century publisher C.W.Daniel.
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The Queen Of Technicolor
Marie-Louise Muir traces her childhood idol Maureen O’Hara’s journey from Dublin's suburbs to star of the Golden Age.
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The East Speaks Back
We are used to getting a worldview from the west, but what did the east make of us? Jerry Brotton heads to Istanbul on the trail of one the world's great travellers, Evliya Celebi
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Ken Campbell as Never Heard Before
David Bramwell with actors whose lives were transformed by director Ken Campbell.
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Glitter and Villainy
Daisy Black, Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, investigates the camp villain in history.
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Rewiring Raymond Scott
At the height of his fame as a jazz composer and band leader in the late 1930s, Raymond Scott was billed as ‘America’s Foremost Composer of Modern Music’. Jazz legend Art Blakey confessed that his music ‘scared the hell out of me’. Electrical engineer, inventor, composer and musician Raymond…
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Poles Apart
The unknown tale of cold war communist Poland’s unlikely love affair with electronic music. Robert Worby finds out Warsaw was a beacon of musical freedom behind the iron curtain. It was here that the remarkable Polish Radio Experimental Studio was established in 1957, and this was the first...
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The Hidden Reservoir
Carlo Gebler on the role of art in remembrance and reconciliation in Northern Ireland
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Power Plays
As East Germany crumbled in 1989, actors were centre stage. Andrew Dickson discovers how had theatre had survived under communist rule, with its censors and secret police spies. Focusing in particular on the playwright Heiner Mueller he explores the brilliant creativity and unique relationship…
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Al Andalus - The Legacy
Andrew Hussey journeys through Andalusia searching for the legacy of Muslim Spain
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Plot 5779: Unearthing Elizabeth Siddall
Actor Lily Cole plays Elizabeth Siddall who climbs out of her grave to tell her story.
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Literary Pursuits: Lord of the Flies
Golding's classic novel was saved from being rejected by Faber by the luckiest chance.
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Cold War in Full Swing - Louis Armstrong in the GDR
Jazz and communist East Germany seem unlikely bedfellows. Yet in 1965 Louis Armstrong became the first American entertainer to play jazz there at the height of the Cold War. East Germans celebrated Armstrong, and his visit became a propaganda victory for East Germany, helping it to boost its...
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Sir Isaac Newton and the Philosopher's Stone
Dafydd Mills Daniel investigates Isaac Newton's more obscure studies in Alchemy.
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A Unicorn Quest
Hetta Howes sets off to find the unicorn of myth in 21st century Britain.
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Robinson Crusoe Road-Trip
300 years since Robinson Crusoe was published, Emma Smith traces it across the centuries
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Radio 3 Documentary have?
The Radio 3 Documentary currently has 229 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Radio 3 Documentary about?
In-depth documentaries which explore a different aspect of history, science, philosophy, film, visual arts and literature. The Sunday Feature is broadcast every Sunday at 6.45pm on BBC Radio 3.
How often does The Radio 3 Documentary release new episodes?
The Radio 3 Documentary publishes regularly with 229 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to The Radio 3 Documentary?
You can listen to The Radio 3 Documentary on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Radio 3 Documentary?
The Radio 3 Documentary is created and hosted by BBC Radio 3.
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