90 years of the BBC World Service

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. This week, we hear from a perfumer who in 1990 helped create the world’s first perfume archive in Versailles France. Our guest is Dr William Tullett, a Senior Lecturer in Histor ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. On the 40th anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, we hear from one man involved in the clean-up operation. Our guest is Jordan Dunbar, presenter of the BBC documenta ...  Show more

It is the 90th anniversary of the BBC World Service. Broadcasting to countries behind the Iron Curtain without a free or independent media between 1947 and 1991 was arguably the service’s finest hour. The corporation was on the front line of the information war as the BBC’s forme ...  Show more

This week Jack picks through the long and turbulent relationship between the government and the BBC, and asks why these two great pillars of British public life can't seem to get along. Veteran BBC Radio 4 presenter and author Edward Stourton and BBC historian Professor Jean Seat ...  Show more

Since February, thousands of international volunteers have travelled to Ukraine to help in the fight against Russia. We hear about some foreign combatants whose stories have been reported by our language services, with Sunyoung Jeong of BBC Korean, Benny Lu of BBC Chinese and Bev ...  Show more

What should the BBC do about the Match of the Day host, after criticism of his tweets on the government's asylum policy?Former director of BBC News, Richard Sambrook, reveals how he would handle the comments, from an impartiality point of view, and media editor, Katie Razzall, di ...  Show more