Documentaries

Throughout the week BBC World Service offers a wide range of documentaries and other factual programmes. This podcast offers you the chance to access landmark series from our archive.

• DocArchive: StoryCorps - Part One

  How would you like to leave a record of your life for your great-great-great-grandchildren? That's the future for participants of StoryCorps, an American oral history project. What do people choose to talk about?

  Duration: 23mins | File Size: 11Mb
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• DocArchive: Assignment Malvinas War Crimes

  Twenty seven years after Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falklands, or the Malvinas islands, Argentine army officers are facing prosecution. Not for the way they treated the enemy, but for crimes allegedly committed against their own troops.

  Duration: 23mins | File Size: 11Mb
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• DocArchive: Assignment - The Congo Connection

  In Assignment Peter Greste investigates whether Rwandans in France and Germany are controlling a deadly African militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For the last 15 years, the rebels of the FDLR have enforced their control through a series of brutal atrocities. Now Assignment has secret intelligence suggesting that they were taking orders from political leaders living openly in Europe.

  Duration: 23mins | File Size: 11Mb
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• Short Changing the Planet

  The BBC World Service has been investigating the controversial issue of whether poor countries have ever seen all of the money promised by industrialised countries in 2001. According to some less than 10 percent of it has been paid: others disagree.

  Duration: 23mins | File Size: 11Mb
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• The Crescent and The Cross: Part Three

  In the third instalment of The Crescent and the Cross, Owen Bennett Jones examines one of the most important Muslim empires in history - the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it focuses on the time of Suleiman The Magnificent, a towering figure in the rivalry between Christianity and Islam, and a crucial battle - the 1565 Seige of Malta.

  Duration: 26mins | File Size: 13Mb
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• DocArchive: John Simpson Returns to 1989 - Part Two

  The BBC's World Affairs Editor John Simpson tells the story of 20 years of post-communist life. Through personal stories, he traces the different roads that East Germany, the Czech Republic and Romania have taken since 1989. In part two John returns to Prague to speak to those who lived through the Velvet Revolution.

  Duration: 23mins | File Size: 11Mb
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• A Dollar A Day - Part Three

  In Nepal, severe drought and unreliable monsoon rains have led to acute food shortages. The impact is felt most by people like Charuri who is struggling to feed three children and cannot afford the medical help she needs.

  Duration: 23mins | File Size: 11Mb
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• The Crescent and The Cross: Part Two

  Owen Bennett Jones explores five crucial battles in the relationship between Christianity and Islam. This episode looks at the Crusades.

  Duration: 25mins | File Size: 12Mb
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• Africa's Forgotten Soldiers

  Seventy years after the start of the Second World War the overwhelming impression is of a conflict fought on the battlefields of Europe by white troops. Britain’s war effort was bolstered by soldiers from the white Commonwealth – Australia, Canada and New Zealand and later by the United States. The war in the Far East is often overlooked, as is the fighting that took place in Africa. Yet one million African troops participated in the conflict, fighting their way through the jungles of Burma, across the Libyan deserts and in the skies over London. In this documentary we hear first hand from the African troops who participated in the war – and who played a critical part in freeing the world from the threat of fascism. Martin Plaut reports.

  Duration: 23mins | File Size: 11Mb
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• DocArchive: Assignment: Better Banking

  As governments struggle to curb the so-called “casino-banking” practices which some blame for the global financial meltdown, Michael Robinson now reports on growing concerns over super-fast, computerised share-dealing systems which are earning massive new profits for banks.

  Duration: 22mins | File Size: 11Mb
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