Documentary adventures that encourage you to take a closer listen.

Lights Out

Documentary adventures that encourage you to take a closer listen.

The image of the atomic mushroom cloud is powerfully symbolic, yet the grainy black and white footage that we're familiar with can create a sense of something historical, abstract and almost cinematic.

The legacy of the UK's atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in Australia and the South Pacific is still, to some degree, shrouded in mystery. But for veterans and their offspring, as well as often forgotten islanders, these events are something very present that they carry with them everyday in an ongoing fight for acknowledgement.

This documentary brings together these interconnected, intergenerational testimonies and considers the possible physical, psychological and cultural fallout that has occurred in the years following Operation Grapple on Kiritimati (then Christmas Island) and the Minor Trials in Maralinga.

With contributions from Tekaobo Wainwright, John and Laura Morris, Steve Purse, Philomena Lawrence and Stacy & Rose Clark.

First broadcast 6th September 2021, BBC Radio 4
Producer: Hannah Dean
Consultant: Becky Alexsis-Martin. and additional research from Susie Boniface

Lights Out: Fallout 1/4

Transcript: https://www.keepandshare.com/doc9/27658/the-last-taboo-transcript-pdf-97k?da=y

We rarely speak about familial childhood sexual abuse. We should.

Through one woman's story, we hear how the silence surrounding childhood sexual abuse compounds trauma in ways that ripple through survivors' lives, touching and tainting relationships and experiences of parenthood, and leading to problems with mental health and addiction.

If we could talk about familial abuse more openly, could we help survivors, and make it more difficult for perpetrators to hide behind secrecy?

Too often, our mental health systems treat the symptoms of abuse and trauma rather than unlocking the cause. But if we continue to create worlds which permit and encourage silence, are we perpetrators too? Perhaps it's time to speak up.

Featuring extracts from The Flying Child by Sophie Olson, founder of The Flying Child Project, and work by John Slater, co-founder of moMENtum.

Produced by Redzi Bernard and Phoebe McIndoe
First broadcast 13th September 2021, BBC Radio 4

Lights Out: The Last Taboo 2/4

What does it feel like to be a child or teenager navigating the ups and downs of youth, under the shadow of constant media scrutiny about your identity, your choices and whether you fit into society?

Transgender kids and teenagers are often spoken about in the media, but rarely get the chance to speak for themselves. In this episode of Lights Out, three young trans people, aged 10, 15 and 16, let us into their inner worlds. Their mums share how media scrutiny of their families affects their lives and an academic in media studies and queer theory reflects on how the media constructs narratives about marginalised groups, exploring why queer people and children are easy targets for moral panic.

First broadcast 20th September 2021, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Arlie Adlington

Lights Out: Kaleidoscope 3/4

Eleven years after the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the United Kingdom, a sequence of events unfolded that would rock the British political establishment and test those campaigning for gay rights in the United Kingdom. It resulted in a dead dog, a political career in ruins, a classic comedy sketch and the cause of gay liberation being set back years.

Through remarkably candid interviews not previously broadcast in this country with Norman Scott (the former model) and Andrew Newton (the suspected hitman), two of the main protagonists in the trial of Jeremy Thorpe (former leader of the Liberal Party), this documentary revisits a very English scandal and gauges its impact on the struggle for gay rights.

We hear from the human-rights activist Peter Tatchell; a member of the Brixton Faeries, Julian Hows, who staged a satirical play based on the Thorpe case; and Tom Robinson, whose song Glad to be Gay hit the charts in 1978. We also hear from Derek Stimpson, archivist of the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers, and archive of Peter Cook as the 'biased judge'.

Archive of Norman Scott and Andrew Newton from 'The Jeremy Thorpe Affair' courtesy of CBC Radio's Sunday Morning (1978).

First broadcast 27th September 2021, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Alan Hall

Lights Out: A Service For Society 4/4

Across the course of a single day, a documentary-maker hosts an open-call audition for subjects to star in her next project. Accounts and Accountability offers a dive into the ethics of buying and selling true stories.

With music composed by Eliza Niemi
Sound Recording by Fivel Rothberg
Assistant Producers: Kristine White, Kyle Damiao, Jose Salazar and Emma Rose Brown
Special thanks to Sean Hanley, David Pavlovsky, and Kelly Anderson

First broadcast 12th December 2022, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Jess Shane

Lights Out: Accounts + Accountability 1/6

It's 40 years this month since 30,000 women 'embraced the base' at RAF Greenham Common, Berkshire in protest at the proposed siting of cruise missiles there. For some of them, the Women's Peace Camp became home and the RAF base the scene of countless actions, as political convictions led inevitably to arrests, court appearances and imprisonment.

Lyn Barlow served something between 15 and 20 sentences - she lost count - and Sue Say at least eight. Mild-mannered former teacher Mary Millington has journals documenting her numerous prison terms. Greenham Convictions traces why these women put not just their bodies but "their entire beings" on the line for a cause - and at what price.

With thanks to Rebecca Mordan of Greenham Women Everywhere.

First broadcast 19th December 2022, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Alan Hall

Lights Out: Greenham Convictions 2/6

A man, a Mouse and a morse key: the story of a radio amateur in Kyiv as the Russian invasion unfolds.

When his wife and two children flee Kyiv to escape the war, Volodymyr Gurtovy (call sign US7IGN) stays behind in their apartment with only his radios and the family hamster, Mouse, for company.

Before the war, he used to go deep into the pine forests, spinning intricate webs of treetop antennas using a fishing rod, catching signals from radio amateurs in distant countries.

Prohibited by martial law from sending messages, he becomes a listener, intercepting conversations of Russian pilots and warning his neighbours to hide in shelters well before the sirens sound. After three months of silence, he begins transmitting again. Switching his lawyer’s suit for a soldering iron, he runs a radio surgery for his friends and neighbours, dusting off old shortwave receivers and bringing them back to life.

During air raids, he hides behind the thickest wall in his apartment, close to his radios, their flickering amber lights opening a window to another world. A story of sending and receiving signals from within the darkness of the Kyiv blackout.

Music: Ollie Chubb (8ctavius)

First broadcast 27th December 2022, BBC Radio 4
Producer: Cicely Fell

Lights Out: Call Signs 3/6

Having devoted decades of their life to fighting for a better world, three activists in their 70s reflect on keeping going, hope and despair as the year turns - while a retired clergyman and his wife explore what’s drawn them to activism in their 60s.

Featuring Leila Hassan Howe, Angie Zelter, Linda Clair and Bill and Rosemary White; alongside radio clips from BBC news programmes, Outlook and Mattie's Broadcast (produced by Veronica Simmonds).

With music by Lucinda Chua

Featuring the tracks Semitones (written and engineered by Lucinda Chua, produced by Lucinda Chua and Adam Wiltzie, mixed by Adam Wiltzie and Francesco Donadello and mastered by Nathan Boddy) and An Avalanche (written, engineered and produced by Lucinda Chua, mixed by Adam Wiltzie and Francesco Donadello and mastered by Nathan Boddy)

Development producer: Michael Segalov
Additional recording: Andrea Rangecroft

First broadcast 1st January 2022, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Eleanor McDowall

Lights Out: The Night Sky 4/6

TRANSCRIPT: https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/Lights_Out/CountyLines_TranscriptV2.pdf

Four people recount their involvement with “county lines” - gangs that exploit children and vulnerable adults to sell drugs around the UK.

Underneath their stories lies a series of unspoken, unanswered questions. Who gets to decide the boundary between criminal and victim? Why do we view 'county lines' through the lens of crime and punishment? And how well does the system support individuals and families devastated by the impact of 'county lines'?

With thanks to St Giles Trust SOS Project, Not In Our Community, Escape Line and Eski Media

First broadcast 2nd January 2023, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Phoebe McIndoe and Redzi Bernard

Lights Out: County Lines 5/6

“Somewhere between the narrow entry of Who I am and What I seem to be, lies a vast and nameless place.”

In this transmission, Axel Kacoutié discovers a new sense of self in the cosmologies, concepts and realities of queer and indigenous folks. What are the links between gender expression and our relationship with the Earth? How does it destabilise colonial and capitalist imaginations of what we’re told a gender binary is meant to be?

Featuring the voices of:
Opaskwayak Cree Nation Professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Dr Alex Wilson
Artist Buitumelo Kotekwa
Afro-Taino Two-Spirit change-maker Cleopatra Tatabele
Scholar and Research Assistant, Karyn De Freitas
Transmasculine, non-binary scholar and Founder of the Free Black University, Melz Owusu.

Artwork by Erin Tse
Development Producer: Eleanor McDowall
Assistant Producer: CA Davis
Additional Recording: Heidi Chang and Israel Ramjohn
Sound Design, Music and Mixing Production: Axel Kacoutié

First broadcast 9th January 2023, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Axel Kacoutié

Lights Out: Gatekeeper 6/6

Transcript: https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/Lights_Out/LightsOut_DeadEnds.pdf

“Should we delete the sex tape?” Should we get rid of the crime scene photographs? How do I find a true image of my mum amidst the recordings, fragments and images she left behind?"

Exploring an archive of home videos, photographs, memories and news reports, Talia Augustidis reflects on how we choose to remember someone. Told through five chapters, each part focuses on a single image of her mum, who died when Talia was three.

Dead Ends is an exploration of what privacy and control is afforded to people who sit at the heart of our news stories, as accidental absences and fragments of memory piece together these self-contained narratives of loss.

Talia collected the tape for Dead Ends over several years. In 2022 she received a Content is Queen micro-grant, which allowed her to begin piecing these stories together.

Original music composed by Jeremy Warmsley

First broadcast 16th October 2023, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Talia Augustidis

Lights Out: Dead Ends 1/6

“I was well aware of this synchronicity: that Cornwall was going onto lithium, or what I prefer to call ‘lithifying’, just as I was ‘delithifying’, or coming off it. This wasn’t an accidentally aligned pairing of incidents. I’d planned it that way.”

In 2022, Laura Grace Simpkins made two big life changes. She decided to stop taking lithium (a medication she was prescribed for her mental health) just as she moved to Cornwall—the only place where lithium is being mined in the UK. In 'Lithified', Laura gets ready for her future without the silvery-white metal, while exploring the landscape it will soon be coming from.

Featuring the voices of:
Marcia Bjornerud, Professor of Geology and Environmental Studies at Lawrence University
Jeremy Wrathall, Founder and CEO of Cornish Lithium
Dr Beth Simons, Cornish geologist and author of ‘Variscan Coast’

Image: ZEISS Microscopy. Lithium ion battery cathode, no beam damage of sensitive binder material, imaged at 500 V with ZEISS GeminiSEM

First broadcast 23rd October 2023, BBC Radio 4
Written and narrated by Laura Grace Simpkins
Music and sound by Alice Boyd
Produced by Alice Boyd and Laura Grace Simpkins

Lights Out: Lithified 2/6

Infamous during the Greenham Common protests of the 1980s for the recklessness of her activism and her multiple prison sentences (as heard in Lights Out: Greenham Convictions), Lyn Barlow now lives quietly in Somerset. She spends her time making textile art, huge tapestries that document the turbulence of her childhood in care and the struggles of her adulthood - both with the State and herself.

Now that her work is on display in Watchet's East Quay gallery, in an exhibition shared with Grayson Perry called Common Thread, Lyn reflects on the textures, the threads and the imagery of her life.

Photo credit Joseph Horton, from the Common Thread exhibition at East Quay, Watchet

First broadcast 30th October 2023, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Alan Hall
(with music by Alabaster DePlume, licensed courtesy of Domino Publishing Company Limited.)

Lights Out: Threads 3/6

Sahid has spent years on a relentless journey. Crossing international borders, he has confronted the harrowing realities of human trafficking, slavery, and rafting across the Mediterranean Sea. But his journey isn't over yet - Sahid is at risk of being sent back to the first European Union country he arrived in, a country where he was unlawfully imprisoned and tortured.

This is the story of one man's search for safety, from Sierra Leone to Strasbourg.

First broadcast 6th November 2023, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Phoebe McIndoe and Redzi Bernard

Lights Out: Crossings 4/6

From handfuls of dust to watching geological time mark the landscape, this documentary flows from the night skies into the deepest known point in our oceans.

"I noticed that language seems to fail us. How do you write about the foundations of our existence? That is how mythology enters very naturally into the story, because history is about ideas, religions, empires, wars and culture. Mythology is about the fundaments. Sun, moon, wind, oceans, great floods and tragic gods... We are living in mythological times, where we are shaking the fundaments." - Andri Snær Magnason

Drawing on ideas in his book, On Time and Water, the Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason and the Scottish artist Katie Paterson explore how our imagination can help us hold the moment we live in. 

TRANSCRIPT: https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/Lights_Out/Dust_Transcript.pdf

Archive recording from Raddir - Voices: Recordings of Folk Songs courtesy of the Árni Magnússon Institute
'Vatnajökull (the sound of)' recording courtesy of Katie Paterson

Recording of the journey to Okjökull by Guðni Tómasson
Music composed and performed by Phil Smith and Zac Gvi

First broadcast 20th November 2023, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Eleanor McDowall

Lights Out: Dust 6/6

For generations, queer people have moved to London from more conservative parts of the UK, in search of community and to live as their authentic selves. Now, with housing so unstable, queer people are among the marginalised communities for which homelessness is on the rise. They continue to come to London now to find their place, but the trade off is extreme financial insecurity.

Can you really feel at home when the four walls around you are unstable?

Jesse Lawson talks to Karen Fisch, Topher Campbell, Carla Ecola and Reggie Lennox about what it means to have to choose between one form of home over another.

Music by Femi Oriogun-Williams

First broadcast 13th November 2023, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Jesse Lawson

Lights Out: Four Walls 5/6

Slow radio which weaves together tropical thunderstorms in Australia, parrots heard through a window in Italy and erupting applause amid the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

Audio-makers reflect on the sonic worlds they want to inhabit in this moment in time. With contributions from Daria Corrias in Italy, Ariana Martinez and Benjamin Riskin in America and Caddie Brain in Australia.

Featuring recordings from the archive of the Field Recordings podcast, including:
Starling Murmuration, Nobber, Co. Meath, Ireland in January 2019 by Zoë Comyns
42nd St and 1st Avenue, New York, USA on 7th April 2020 by Benjamin Riskin
Hollow Tree, Sergiyev Posad, Russia on 11th March 2011 by Vladimir Kryuchev
Frogs, Hilo, Hawaii, USA in 2018 by Helen Zaltzman
Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire April 2018 by Axel Kacoutié
Backyard storm, Darwin, Australia by Nyah Bertschi and Caddie Brain
Sinharaja tropical rainforest, South West of Sri Lanka, at daybreak by Alannah Chance
Hogsback, Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, last summer by Neroli Price
Terrace, Rome, Italy, during the lockdown by Daria Corrias
Combate, Puerto Rico by Ariana Martinez.

First broadcast 20th April 2020, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Eleanor McDowall

Lights Out: The Outside World 6/6

The documentary series that invites a closer listen.

On 18th January 1981, Yvonne Ruddock was celebrating her 16th birthday party in the family home at 439 New Cross Road in south-east London. What followed devastated countless families, scarred the community and shifted the position of black politics in British society. A fire broke out in a downstairs room and 13 young people were killed, including Yvonne and her elder brother Paul. A 14th young person died subsequently.

With the 40th anniversary of the fire approaching, Lights Out revisits the events of that night and their aftermath. The musician Johnny Osbourne encapsulated the official and media response to the fire in his song Thirteen Dead and Nothing Said.

At first, the police and local community suspected arson - a racist attack. After all, this was only a short time after the Battle of Lewisham in which black residents and activists had successfully confronted a National Front march just up the street. But no one was ever charged and, at the Inquest, an open verdict was returned.

Survivors of the fire - including members of the Ruddock family and Wayne Haynes, who was DJ'ing that night, along with community activists such as Sybil Phoenix who were witnesses to it and the subsequent Black People's Day of Action - share their understanding of what happened and what the New Cross Fire has come to symbolise.

With a specially commissioned sequence of poems by unofficial Lewisham Laureate, Mark 'Mr T' Thompson.

First broadcast 26th October 2020, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Cherise Hamilton-Stephenson and Alan Hall

Lights Out: From The Ashes Of New Cross 1/3

Lights Out - a space for documentaries that encourage you to take a closer listen. In this episode - flight, return and silence. An exploration of the lives of women trapped by an international treaty.

The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction was set up in the 1980s to make sure children who’d been taken by one parent to another country without the other parent’s permission were returned quickly. Today, the majority of abductions are committed by women, many of whom are fleeing domestic abuse and returning to their home country taking their children with them.

Two British mothers share their experiences of being ‘Hagued’ by their ex-husbands - one was a rare exception who won her case, while the other returned with her children to her ex-husband’s country voluntarily, only to lose everything. A third woman speaks for the many others who are still silenced years after going through a Hague Convention court case.

Details of organisations offering information and support with domestic abuse are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline, or you can call for free, at any time to hear recorded information on 0800 888 809. Alternatively, these organisations offer support:
https://www.reunite.org/
https://www.globalarrk.org/

First broadcast 2nd November 2020, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Andrea Rangecroft

Lights Out: Silent Mothers 2/3

A dreamlike glimpse at our collective consciousness in this documentary composed entirely of questions.

Featuring Caroline Bird, Ross Sutherland, Axel Kacoutié, Rachel Long, Juliet Jacques, Melissa Harrison, Pejk Malinovski, Rikke Houd, James T Green, Sara Brooke Curtis, Rebecca Tamás, Joe Dunthorne and Bertie Warmsley.

First broadcast on 10th November 2020, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Eleanor McDowall

Lights Out: How Do You Sleep At Night? 3/3

We make documentaries and audio art for radio, podcasts and public spaces.

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Falling Tree has two full-time Directors – Eleanor McDowall and Alan Hall – and we work with freelancers across our projects, including the core Short Cuts production team of Alia Cassam, Axel Kacoutié and Andrea Rangecroft.

We are one of the founding signatories of the Equality in Audio pact. 

You can listen to hundreds of our documentaries in the free, online Falling Tree archive.

Lights Out

Falling Tree Productions