Lives Less Ordinary BBC World Service
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- Society & Culture
Have you ever locked eyes with a stranger and wondered, "What’s their story?" Step into someone else’s life and expect the unexpected. Extraordinary stories from around the world.
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My father Faiz: Pakistan’s revolutionary poet, part 1
Salima Hashmi grew up in Lahore witnessing the radical poetry of her celebrated father, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. It inspired her own path into art and performance, creating Pakistani TV’s first ever political satire show, Such Gup.
Presenter: Mobeen Azhar
Producer: Maryam Maruf
Get in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784 -
The man who finds water in the desert
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
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
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
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
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