The Forum
Csatorna részletek
The Forum
The programme that explains the present by exploring the past.
Legutóbbi epizódok
398 epizód
Weddings: romance and ritual
One of the first recorded examples of a marriage ceremony is dated more than 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia. And it seems that through the ages, weddin...
The unfolding history of the magazine
When magazines first emerged, they were the preserve of an elite who could afford to pay for them. But as time went on, the cost of paper fell, printi...
Movie theatre magic
The speed with which cinema caught the public’s imagination is remarkable. The first film screenings took place in the 1890s and just two decades late...
Customer service: The rise of the doom loop
The quality of customer service can make or break a company. That has always been true but the kind of customer experience we now expect when things g...
What makes us nostalgic?
Nostalgia is one of those complicated emotions: we long to be transported to a place or moment in the past that we have loved but at the same time fee...
How airports took off
Airports: at their most basic level places to fly from to reach destinations near and far. And yet so much more. Iszi Lawrence and guests take a look...
Libraries in the digital age
What is the purpose of libraries in the era of the internet and AI? Whether at a school or in a community, libraries used to be key providers of infor...
How the US dollar came to dominate the world
From Colombia to Vietnam and beyond, the US dollar is the currency in which much of international business is conducted, and which many people outside...
The seductive dance of charisma
Where do charismatic personalities come from? Are they people born with special or even divine gifts? Or have they simply mastered a few effective tec...
The rise of fans and fandom
When the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, readers were so angry that thousands cancelled t...
The enduring allure of jewellery
Jewellery can enthral us in many ways: it can delight, inspire and uplift us or it can transport us to the place where we acquired it. It can also ma...
Why sleep sometimes eludes us
Do you find it difficult to get a good night's sleep? If you do, you are not alone. According to the US National Institutes of Health, between 6 and 3...
The high-speed train race
The first public run of the Japanese ‘bullet train’, the Shinkansen, on the 1st of October 1964, captured public imagination worldwide. And it wasn’t...
The diary: A life page by page
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people found that keeping a diary was one way of reducing stress during uncertain times. They also felt that it was...
The only way is up: A history of mountaineering
Humans have always co-existed with mountains, as ancient remains found in glaciers prove. But our interest in them may have been more spiritual or re...
Music on the move
Many of us remember the first portable music device we owned: a transistor radio, a boombox, a Walkman or perhaps an iPod. We might even recall the so...
The fight for women’s education
Among all the talk about ‘knowledge economy’ it is easy to forget that universal schooling is a relatively new phenomenon. Mandated first in a few Eur...
Feeding the world and the Green Revolution
In February 2024, the renowned Indian geneticist Dr. MS Swaminathan was posthumously awarded the country’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna....
Etiquette
‘Always pass the salt and pepper together, even if your fellow diner has asked just for one of them’. That’s the standard advice given by countless di...
Supermarkets
Supermarkets: they are ubiquitous yet hard to define, lauded and vilified in roughly equal measures, and in many countries they have a huge influence...
Diplomacy
In the 1990s, an advert for a brand of chocolate depicted a sophisticated gathering hosted by the foreign ambassador of an unspecified country. It hin...
The story of throwaway living
The humble plastic bag is actually a marvel of engineering: it is cheap, light, strong, waterproof and it has conquered the world. In countries where...
Political parties and us
Political parties come in all shapes and sizes and their ideas are just as varied. But what kind of parties best reflect 21st-century society? How do...
What makes a good boss?
We can probably all think of examples of bad bosses – the people who we love to gossip about with our colleagues outside work. And even if you’re luc...
The joy and sorrow of roads
Whether we are pedestrians, cyclists or drivers, roads play a crucial role in our everyday lives. But where and how should we build any new ones? What...
Pets and us
For every young American under the age of 18, there are about two cats or dogs receiving free food and lodgings in US homes and that pattern is replic...
The evolution of teenagers
In some ways the 21st century is a very unusual time when it comes to adolescence - a study in the US found that teenagers smoke less, drink less and...
Global mass tourism
From Bhutan to The Bahamas and Iceland to Indonesia, mass tourism has grown at an unprecedented rate over the last few decades. Today’s top destinatio...
A deep dive into deepfakes
Are we in a new age of information warfare? The technology to create deepfakes has progressed steadily over the past decade and enables anyone to crea...
How the mobile phone changed everything
When telecoms engineer Martin Cooper first chatted in public on a mobile phone 50 years ago few would have predicted that this brief telephone call wo...
The submarine: Stealth machine
Given the submarine's importance to many of the world's navies, it's perhaps surprising to learn that for many years it was considered an inventor's f...
Hazel Scott: Jazz star and barrier breaker
A child prodigy on the piano, then a glamorous jazz and popular music entertainer, a civil rights campaigner and the first black American woman to hos...
The bittersweet tale of cocoa
Do you like cocoa? You are in good company: in South and Central America people have been enjoying the fruit of the cacao tree - the source of cocoa,...
The dam builders
The Hoover Dam in the US, the Aswan Dam in Egypt and the recently opened, and sumptuously named, Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam. Since modern times,...
Alexander the Great or not so great?
From Persia to India to Greece – they called him The Great – that is Alexander the Great. Also known as Alexander III of Macedon, he was one of the mo...
Rituals: Our anchors in a changing world
From coronations to cup finals, many of us love a big event, a ceremony with age-old observances. Indeed rituals, whether public spectaculars or more...
Tropicália: the movement that defied Brazil’s dictatorship
Drawing on traditional music, pop culture, kitsch, rock and modernist poetry to mention just a few of their sources of inspiration, the short-lived Tr...
How the shipping container changed the world
Nearly everything we consume is transported by ship. The biggest container ships in the world are among the largest moving structures made by man and...
Neanderthals: Meet the relatives
Developments in new technology such as DNA sequencing have transformed our understanding of the Neanderthals, one of a group of archaic humans who occ...
Cavalry and code-breaking: The Polish-Soviet war
A Russian army stands at the gates of the capital of another country, a country that Russia has previously occupied and one that, according to Russian...