Brave reporting on the Today programme from Lyse Doucet; Rajan Datar’s investigation into contemporary racism; and a fascinating real-life mystery
Today (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
The P Word (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Chameleon: Wild Boys (Campside Media) | apple.com
Having moved away from the Today programme over the past few years, I find myself a regular listener once more. This is due to the brilliant Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, who’s been based in Kyiv since the start of the Russian invasion. At 8.10am, instead of a heavyweight political interview, the programme has been turning to Doucet. Her descriptive, directly worded reports are devastating. On 18 March, she said, of Mariupol, that Russian forces were “choking the city of its life… Russia realised it couldn’t take a city of nearly half a million people with ground forces, so it took the people first, starving them into submission, it hopes… 90% of Mariupol is flattened… Look at the photos of Aleppo in northern Syria. This is Mariupol today.” Doucet’s distinctive voice (she’s Canadian, of Acadian, Irish and Mi’kmaq ancestry) adds to her authority.