He's racing to avoid jail, but can he make it through the course?

P Diddy Kong Racing

During an Easter parade in 1929, a group of well-dressed young women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City under a banner printed with the slogan Torches of Freedom. They were smoking cigarettes. This feminist demonstration against the "ancient prejudice" that stigmatised women smokers was, in fact, staged by the tobacco industry in a campaign to expand its market.

Since the invention of the Bonsack cigarette rolling machine in 1880 through to attempts in 2024 to roll back the legal age for buying tobacco products, our relationship with smoking has been complicated. Alan Hall, who quit smoking (mostly) in 1990, considers how a habit that's so evidently dangerous and anti-social can have been adopted by so many for so long - and to have remained for a century so, well, cool.

With Rosemary Elliot, author of Woman and Smoking Since 1890; William B. Davis, the actor who played the Cigarette Smoking (or Cancer) Man in The X Files; Stuart Evers, who wrote Ten Stories About Smoking, and Amy Westervelt, a journalist who traces parallels between the propaganda machines of Big Oil and the tobacco industry.

First broadcast on 2nd November 2024, BBC Radio 4
Presented and produced by Alan Hall
Music by Mark McCambridge

Up In Smoke

This powerful and highly personal series investigates how criminal networks systematically exploit vulnerable young people, transforming them from ordinary schoolchildren into drug dealers through manipulation, violence, and trauma. An estimated 50,000 children in Britain have been groomed into county lines drug trafficking, yet their stories remain largely hidden.

In this first episode, Phoebe McIndoe hears from those caught in the web of county lines. Between the promise of quick money and the reality of extreme violence, we reveal how Britain's drug trade is being built on the backs of traumatized children, and why the system often fails to protect them.

First broadcast 25th November 2024, BBC Radio 4
Presented by Phoebe McIndoe
Produced by Redzi Bernard and Phoebe McIndoe
With original music by Phoebe McIndoe

County Lines: Their World 1/3

Siren song, lunar eavesdroppers and the gathering dark - Josie Long presents short documentaries about venturing into the night.

Siren Song
Featuring melancholydi
Produced by Kalli Anderson

Lunar Eavesdroppers
An extract from Space Ham, first broadcast in BBC Radio 3's Between the Ears
Produced by Rose de Larrabeiti and Caroline Devine
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 3

Beneath
Produced by Sami El-Enany

Brücke
Featuring Stephen Jenkinson
Produced by Phil Smith

First broadcast 3rd December 2024, BBC Radio 4
Curated by Axel Kacoutié, Eleanor McDowall and Andrea Rangecroft
Series Producer: Eleanor McDowall

S40: Short Cuts: Into the Night 1/6

Feeding the birds, sharing meals and chaotic menus - Josie Long presents short documentaries and audio adventures about eating together.

Bird Feeder
Produced by Stella Sims

And to Start...
Produced by Mae-Li Evans

Foodhall
Produced by Nadia Mehdi

First broadcast 17th December 2024, BBC Radio 4
Curated by Axel Kacoutié, Eleanor McDowall and Andrea Rangecroft
Series Producer: Eleanor McDowall

S40: Short Cuts: Feast 3/6

This highly personal series investigates how criminal networks systematically exploit vulnerable young people, transforming them from ordinary schoolchildren into drug dealers through manipulation, violence, and trauma. An estimated 50,000 children in Britain have been groomed into county lines drug trafficking, yet their stories remain largely hidden.

Phoebe McIndoe is both journalist and sister to someone caught in county lines and, in this final episode, she widens the lens to understand how austerity and social breakdown created fertile ground for county lines to flourish. From youth club closures to a crumbling care system, she considers how the loss of community safety nets left children vulnerable to exploitation.

Through conversations with activists and those leading innovative solutions, she asks what must change to break this cycle of exploitation and rebuild the protective networks our children need.

First broadcast 9th December 2024, BBC Radio 4
Presented by Phoebe McIndoe
Produced by Phoebe McIndoe and Redzi Bernard
With original music by Phoebe McIndoe

County Lines: Hope 3/3

The Doc Elderhead Show - 200 - Hindu Kush

Drawing on an iconic recording of Dylan Thomas reading his tale A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Cerys Matthews digs into the archive to discover those other writers and poets - both the wide-eyed and the cynical - who have been inspired to write Christmas through the eyes of a child.

From Raymond Briggs and Judith Kerr, to Dylan Thomas and CS Lewis, time-travelling back to a childhood Christmas is a strange, nostalgic drug. Its rituals, sounds, smells and emotions become a lens through which to explore pure wonder but also more thorny issues of loneliness, grief and coming-of-age.

Cerys talks to author Katherine Rundell who says, “For children, Christmas has such a surfeit of magic and limitless possibility. For the adult you see it from the other side – you see how Christmas is made – but you never really get to experience it again as something miraculous. That is, unless you conjure it once again by catching it in your text.”

Writer and actor Mark Gatiss describes how Christmas tales can also be a way to carry our child heroes to the edge of the adult world, a place of peril, haunted by the spectres of mid-winter. Think of Susan Cooper’s eerie cult classic, The Dark is Rising and John Mansfield’s The Box of Delights.

In this parallel other Christmas, Cerys also finds themes of entrapment within family and religion and she talks to the author Lemn Sissay about his experience of writing Christmas through the eyes of the orphaned or the fostered child. ‘To really be a child without a family at Christmas is perhaps the most painful story of all,’ he says.

Including reference to:
Dylan Thomas - A Child's Christmas in Wales
Hans Christien Andersen - The Little Match Girl and The Snow Queen
Raymond Briggs - The Snowman
Clement Clarke Moore - The Night Before Christmas
Jacqueline Wilson - Tracy Beaker's Christmas
Katherine Rundell - One Christmas Wish
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading - Sam Leith
Judith Kerr - Mog's Christmas
Charles Causley - Shepherds' Song
Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
John Agard - If Only I Could Take a Snowflake Home
Carol Ann Duffy - Christmas Eve
CS Lewis - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
John Masefield - The Box of Delights
Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising
Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol

Readers: Jesse, Aurora, Ori, Lochan, Ionas, Elba
With music by The Enchanted Cinema

First broadcast 21st December 2024, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Sarah Cuddon

A Child's Christmas

I was delighted to contribute a soundscape commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the Shipping Forecast being broadcast on the BBC. This audio piece was featured on a special edition of Front Row, and was recorded in front of a live audience at the iconic Cutty Sark in London, adding to the occasion's magnitude.

While researching and exploring artistic concepts for the soundscape, I discovered how important the Shipping Forecast is to many people, and most notably how it helps people in getting to sleep. This notion of the Shipping Forecast serving as the nations lullaby really resonated with me, becoming the central inspiration for shaping my composition.

It was an honour to be a part of this historical moment and to be featured alongside other incredibly talented poets, authors and musicians. 

Link to the full episode on the BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002699w 

Released: 01 Jan 2025

Special thanks to: Julian May, Samira Ahmed, Royal Museums Greenwich “Cutty Sark” and the brilliant team behind the live recording.

BBC Shipping Forecast Soundscape for Front Row on BBC Radio 4

Josie Long presents short documentaries and audio adventures as the clock slips closer to midnight.

In the last Short Cuts on BBC Radio 4, 13 years after the broadcast of our first ever episode 'Misadventures', we listen to radio waves after dark with the Shortwave Collective, tumble into a radio poem alongside a sleeping child, tune into a late night pirate radio station from the early 1960s, and raise a parting glass.

At Least
Featuring Xelis de Toro
Produced by Phil Smith

Voice of Nuclear Disarmament
With thanks to the British Library Sound Archive, and the family of John Hasted
Produced by Jonny Matfin

Perhaps at Midnight, When All Boundaries Are Lost
Produced by the Shortwave Collective

Good Company
Featuring Jesse Lawson, Izzy Yon and Femi Oriogun-Williams
Produced by Jesse Lawson

First broadcast 7th January 2025, BBC Radio 4
Curated by Axel Kacoutié, Eleanor McDowall and Andrea Rangecroft
Series Producer: Eleanor McDowall
Mix by Mike Woolley
Executive Producer: Alan Hall

S40: Short Cuts: Midnight 6/6

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.

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

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