Lives Less Ordinary

In the ring, Blair finds calm amidst the chaos of his life. Back in the US Blair Cobbs falls again on hard times; homeless in Philadelphia his boxing dream seems out of reach. But a string of lucky …

From Beverly Hills to hiding from the law with his dad, Blair’s seen it all. To help him get through the tough times – and there’d be quite a few of those – Blair created a separate persona. This was…

A baby left in a car, another in a telephone box. It would take decades to find out why.

When he was just a baby, David McBride made headline news in Northern Ireland. He had been discovered in the fr…

Fergal Keane's work as a war correspondent was destroying him, but he couldn't stop.

It was his job as a BBC journalist to help the audience make sense of the madness of war, but he knew there was ano…

From convent to marriage to factory floor, Thivya Rakini will stand up for herself, and you. From an early age she's fought for what's right. As a child living in Tamil Nadu, she stopped eating so he…

Debra Lampshire started hearing voices aged five. Comforting at first, they soon took control.The voices became so visceral and intense that Debra had to spend 18 years in a psychiatric hospital. The…

Pilot Firoz Khimji witnessed his country's wars from above. Then conflict came for him.

For most of his life, Uganda had been unstable, but he'd been able to train as a commercial pilot despite the vi…

Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil risked everything when he faced his parents and society

He was next in line to a centuries-old royal dynasty in the Indian state of Gujarat - and grew up in the 1970s in a…

Journalist Ben Raines went in search of a sunken ship with a dark history.

A phone call out of the blue had set him on his hunt for the Clotilda, an American vessel that had illegally transported ensl…

Nakuset blocked out painful memories of being removed from her indigenous Canadian family

Nakuset only goes by one name and it means "The Sun" in her indigenous Canadian culture. Born into an abusive …

Javier Zamora travelled alone from El Salvador to the US when he was just nine years old.

He had been living with relatives after his parents migrated to the US, but longed to be in his mother’s arms.…

In 2020, Mo’min Swaitat unearthed a treasure trove of lost Palestinian music in an abandoned building. Out of thousands of dusty cassettes there was one that caught his eye: a bright yellow tape, com…

Mo’min Swaitat unearthed a vast trove of forgotten Palestinian music. Not only did it hold long-lost recordings of his own Bedouin family, but also a mysterious yellow cassette of protest songs set t…

At 18 Nikki Owen set fire to the family home – and she didn’t know why. Nikki awaited trial in solitary confinement, but her father searched for answers in medical science, and started working on a…

How the friendship of a stranger helped Betsy Sailor when she needed it most. Betsy was living alone at university in the late 1970s when a man broke into her apartment and raped her at knifepoint. …

Analía’s father was accused of being a government torturer — he said it was a lie.

A phone call turned Analía Kalinec’s comfortable life upside down. Her father was accused of crimes committed during …

Sue-Ellen Doherty was trained by her parents to spy for Australia during the Cold War.

For Sue-Ellen Kusher, nee Doherty, growing up in the suburbs of Brisbane was far from normal. Both her parents wo…

Jim is deep undercover in North Korea — but will he find proof of illegal weapons deals...

He'd been sent to the isolated country by a documentary film-maker called Mads Brugger, to pose as a fake inv…

Jim Latrache-Qvortrup posed as a weapons dealer to expose a North Korean criminal network.

Jim was an unusual secret agent. He'd grown up poor in Denmark, and had gone on to become a drug dealer to th…

In September 2020, Nicholas Opiyo awoke to a commotion in his flat. There had been a robbery and all his personal electronics had been stolen. He says he tracked his devices to a shocking and impenet…