Lives Less Ordinary

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The man who finds water in the desert Jun 16, 2024

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Alain Gachet quit a lucrative career in oil to search for water underground. Colleagues told him he was a 'crazy donkey', but he eventually developed an algorithm that allowed him to 'peel the earth like an onion' and detect water beneath the surface. Soon, he was asked to train his talents to help pinpoint areas of life-saving reserves of water for desperate refugees escaping the conflict in Darfur.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen Producer: Anna Lacey and Hetal Bapodra Editor: Munazza Khan

Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Kill or be killed: a climber’s dilemma, part 2 Jun 09, 2024

Show notes

Beth Rodden escaped her kidnappers, and pushed her body to its limit, following the climber code of whatever hurts makes you stronger. She married her boyfriend Tommy Caldwell, who had saved them by pushing their captor off a cliff in the Kyrgyz mountains. They became the first couple to free climb the Nose in Yosemite National Park. To the world she was a record-breaking athlete, but inside she was crumbling, haunted by that moment in the mountains. It would take her 15 years to face it head on, and in doing so she redefined what it meant to be a climber.

Beth's book A Light Through the Cracks: A Climber's Story is out now.

Clips are from NPR and the Associated Press.

Presenter: Emily Webb Producer: Louise Morris

Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Kill or be killed: A climber’s dilemma, part 1 Jun 02, 2024

Show notes

Beth Rodden was on a dream climbing expedition in Kyrgyzstan when she was kidnapped by Islamist militants. She and her friends spent days moving between hiding places in the mountains, fearing for their lives as food supplies dwindled. Then, six days in, the group found themselves at the edge of a cliff with a single young guard. They had a chance to escape, but it came with a huge ethical dilemma.

Presenter: Emily Webb Producer: Louise Morris

Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Audio for this episode was updated on 6 June 2024.

The Hiroshima survivor who's still shouting for peace May 26, 2024

Show notes

Setsuko Thurlow knows what nuclear war looks like.

She was a 13-year-old schoolgirl when an atomic bomb was dropped on her home city of Hiroshima, Japan. Most of the places she knew were destroyed in an instant. Narrowly escaping death herself, Setsuko became a witness to the aftermath of atomic warfare, and the things she saw that day would compel her to spend her life fighting for nuclear disarmament.

Archive was from British Pathé

Presenter: Jo Fidgen Producer: Jo Impey and Harry Graham Editor: Laura Thomas

Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Lost in lion country and saved by Spam May 20, 2024

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In 2016, when Jenny Söderqvist and Helene Åberg’s car exploded in the middle of the vast Kalahari desert, their supplies and only lifeline to the outside world went up in flames. No rescue would come. The two friends from Sweden would spend the next five harrowing days lost in the wilderness and stalked by lions, until their salvation appeared to them in the most unlikely of forms: a tin of Spam.

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar Producer: Edgar Maddicott

Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Painting, prison and two decades in Guantanamo May 12, 2024

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Mistaken for a terrorist, and detained without trial. Art became his refuge.

Pakistani taxi driver Ahmed Rabbani was arrested in 2002, labelled a terrorist and spent 21 years in US detention, including time in a CIA secret prison. Incarcerated without trial or charge, Ahmed was subject to enhanced interrogation, or what he describes as 62 different types of torture. When he was transferred to a cell in Guantanamo Bay, Ahmed would pick up paint and pastels and find solace through art – creating vistas he could only imagine.

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar Producer: Maryam Maruf Voiceover: Mohammed Hanif

Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

How I convinced police my dad was a murderer Apr 28, 2024

Show notes

On the day his mother disappeared in December 1989, 11-year-old Collier Landry started looking for evidence.

He suspected his father, a rich and well-respected town doctor, had something to do with it. This is the story of Collier's fight to get justice for his mother, and the detective who believed him.

Collier's film is called A Murder in Mansfield.

Presenter: Asya Fouks Producer: Helen Fitzhenry

Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Balochistan’s mystery benjo man, part 2 Apr 21, 2024

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How Ustad Noor Bakhsh, a Pakistani shepherd in his 70s, became a folk music star

After hunting for four years, Pakistani ethnomusicologist Daniyal Ahmed finally finds Ustad Noor Bakhsh, an elderly shepherd and master of the electric benjo – an obscure stringed instrument with typewriter keys. With Daniyal’s help, Ustad Noor would go from serenading his goats in the jungles of Balochistan to performing for revellers on the European festival circuit.

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar Producer: Maryam Maruf Translation: Wajid Baloch

Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Balochistan’s mystery benjo man, part 1 Apr 14, 2024

Show notes

The epic quest to find an elderly Pakistani musician and his unusual stringed instrument

Daniyal Ahmed is a flute player and anthropologist who spends his time searching out and documenting folk music across Pakistan. In 2018, he was mesmerised by a video clip of an elderly man – described as a “poor fisherman” – expertly playing a benjo, an obscure stringed instrument that looks like a cross between a guitar and a typewriter. So began Daniyal’s hunt for this mystery master musician.

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar Producer: Maryam Maruf

Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Exposing Silicon Valley's multimillion dollar fraud Apr 07, 2024

Show notes

Erika Cheung went from a trailer park to a top tech company job, but something was off.

She knew how to work hard, growing up in a one-bedroom trailer, she dreamed of pursuing her passion for science and helping others. So Erika was thrilled to land her first job out of university at a booming tech company promising a revolution in healthcare. Fronted by the glamorous and wealthy Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos claimed to have the technology to be able to tell from a few drops of blood whether someone had a range of diseases. That was not true. And it took Erika, one of their most junior employees, to blow the whistle – at great personal risk.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen Producer: Mary Goodhart Editor: Munazza Khan

Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

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