Olympic breakdancing qualifiers begin today - and it's the first time the sport's ever featured in the games. The high-profile competition could boost its popularity, but not everyone's pleased to see 'breaking' in Paris. Cameron Angus Mackay joins a class in Glasgow to find out why.

Breakdancing at the Olympics - for BBC Radio Scotland

ON&ON

ANYWHERE HERE IS PERFECT

NERVOUS

Saxophonist Pauli Lyytinen travels to Sápmi, to Ohcejohka (Utsjoki), the northernmost municipality of Finland and the European Union, to visit his friend, writer–musician Niillas Holmberg. The two artists go rowing in the river, improvise under the Sámi bridge, and make music with birds. Along the way, with researcher Karoliina Lummaa, they confront questions of understanding: do the birds understand them—or do they understand the birds? And does it even matter?

Sound design and field recording: Suvi Tuuli Kataja and Jussi Liukkonen
Script consultant: Elli Salo
Background research: Roosa Stenroos
Music: Niillas Holmberg and Pauli Lyytinen
Poem (in Northern Sámi and English translation): Niillas Holmberg
Production manager: Pinja Korhonen

First broadcast 2nd November 2025, BBC Radio 3
Produced by Suvi Tuuli Kataja

Ohcejohka - Saxophone, Joik and Birds

For Caroline Bird, writing poetry has always occurred in 'seasons.' 'I'll have a year or two of frantic writing, where every billboard, every conversation, sparks a magpie thirst in me and the words just seem to connect and spark off each other. And then it will disappear. Suddenly, overnight...'

In this documentary, Caroline Bird seeks out the company of other poets to explore these anxious silences, where it feels as if words have abandoned you. She speaks with Marie Howe, Vanessa Kisuule, Liz Berry, Oliver Carmichael, Jack Underwood and Hannah Copley.

Original music composed by Phil Smith

First broadcast 9th November 2025, BBC Radio 3
Produced by Eleanor McDowall

When the Words Leave

The value of art 'has become mysterious', to quote the critic John Berger. Artists, commentators and voices from the BBC Sound Archive consider Berger's question: 'where does this value come from?'

Including extracts from:
The Moral Maze, Radio 4
Private Passions, Radio 3 (featuring Keir Starmer)
Favourite Things, BBC TV (featuring Margaret Thatcher)
Coronation Street, Granada Television
Desert Island Discs, Radio 4 (featuring Maria Balshaw)
Headliners with Nihal Arthanayake, BBC Sounds (featuring Stewart Lee)
Harry & Paul, Tiger Aspect Productions
Yes Minister, BBC TV
Lord Keynes, Home Service, The Arts Council: Its Policy and Hopes

With readings by the poet Dorothy Spencer and the writer Carl Cattermole, including statistics from the Campaign for the Arts/University of Warwick, the Panic! Survey and an Industria inquiry based on Artist Leaks.

First broadcast 7th December 2025
Produced by Alan Hall
Archive Producer: Phoebe McIndoe

Art Class

Katherine Rundell unearths the Christmas ghost story from pagan origins to Dickens, Susan Hill and 1970s folk horror television and considers what these curious bedfellows say about our complex relationship with this time of year.  

Ghost stories have always been best told on a midwinter night — preferably aloud, around a blazing fire. Katherine joins Jeanette Winterson at the hearth of her haunted home to share ghostly archival tales from MR James, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens and to trace what she describes as ‘the greatest of pleasures’ - that combination of an icy haunting dark, hemming a Christmas globe of light. 

She learns how midwinter, not Halloween, is the traditional time to usher in a world beyond ours. In the company of Professor John Mullan, Katherine returns to some of our oldest texts including Beowulf to discover how spectres and ghouls have allowed us to express loss, resolution and rage around the fire over centuries.

Reading from her childhood diary, writer Sarah Waters describes her own long fascination with ghost tales in midwinter and reflects on the BBC’s reigniting of this tradition with its ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ adaptations in the 1970s and then again more recently. She examines yuletide motifs for horror including ancient houses where families gather once a year, creaking staircases and children’s faces at snowy windows.

Music by The Cabinet of Living Cinema and Zac Gvi

First broadcast 20th December 2025, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Sarah Cuddon

Breakdancing at the Olympics - for BBC Radio Scotland

Cameron Angus-Mackay