Referendums and Teletubbies

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We hear how a comic book fan and his friends began the very first comic convention in New York in 1964. Our guest is comic book expert Dr Barbara Postema, from the University Gr ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes.This week, we hear about the first solar-powered flight around the world, and discuss other moments in the history of solar power with Prof Laura Herz, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, in th ...  Show more

Classicist Mary Beard picks Tacitus as a figure who still has relevance if we're thinking about satire, power and celebrity. Shahidha Bari is joined by Mary, historian Helen Carr, who co-edited What is History Now? political sketch-writer from The Times newspaper Tom Peck and Kon ...  Show more

It's 20 years since elections in French Polynesia in 2004, where the independence movement stunned the France-aligned government of the day, propelling pro-independence leader Oscar Temaru to the presidency. It was a landmark in the country's politics, where protests against Fren ...  Show more

"The babysitter." Television is Billy's eleventh lyric, and the BFI's TV expert Dick Fiddy takes Tom and Katie back to the 1950s when it began to take hold. The impact of TV through the 20th century and into today is fascinating and unexpected, from advertising and snooker to pre ...  Show more

Worlds within worlds - Matthew Sweet talks to filmmaker and author Neil Jordan about his new novel Carnivalesque, which features a hall of mirrors and stolen children. He makes a tour of Flat Time House in south London and speaks to the Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost ...  Show more