The Documentary Podcast: Archive 2015

Even by the sometimes-bizarre standards of modern Japanese culture, the annual love-your-wife shout-out is one of the stranger rituals to have emerged in recent years. But what does it tell us about love and life in Japan today?

Slum settlements have a strong visual identity. We are used to seeing TV footage of densely packed, ramshackle homes squeezed onto strips of land in inner cities. Dr Tom Rice, a sound anthropologist, takes an alternative perspective and explores what a slum sounds like and how this embodies and reflects the local culture. Tom meets up with Dr Tripta Chandola, an urban researcher, who for 10 years has studied the slums of Govindpuri in India’s capital, Delhi.

Last summer the deaths of four innocent teenagers in Israel, three Jewish and one Israeli Arab, heightened tensions leading to the start of the 2014 Gaza war. Mike Thomson travels to Israel to speak with the friends and family of Naftali Fraenkel, one of the murdered Jewish schoolboys and those of Mohammed Abu Khdeir.

Germany's nascent anti-Islamisation movement, Pegida, is attracting a new middle aged following to its weekly marches around the country. Catrin Nye meets its leader.

For decades rubbish pickers crawled their way over the biggest rubbish dump in South America. Their lives in Gramacho, just outside Rio de Janeiro, living alongside their pigs and dogs, amongst the hundreds of thousands of tons of bloody hospital waste, dead bodies, festering food, needles and other sharp objects, were unimaginably hard and poor. But in the lead up to Brazil’s hosting of the World Cup in 2014 Gramacho was closed. So what happened to them and how have they survived in this new world?

Machado de Assis was born in 1839 of mixed race, an epileptic with little formal education. Yet from these humble origins he went on to become Brazil’s greatest writer - the ‘Charles Dickens’ of Rio de Janeiro. Juliana Iootty of the BBC Brazilian Service goes out onto the streets of Rio to discover what the people of this vibrant and colourful city make of their literary star.

The protest by cleaners, laid off from tax offices and the Greek Finance Ministry, which has captured the imagination of those opposed to the country's harsh austerity programme.

The olive harvest in the West Bank is all about tradition. The first rains of the winter signal the start of gathering the olives on which so many Palestinian farmers depend. In a land where everything is politicised, so is the olive harvest.

Allen Ginsberg arrived in early 1960s Calcutta to discover a collective of angry young poets whose anti-establishment antics were uncannily reminiscent of his own past. This is the story of the so-called Hungry Generation - born in the slums, but highly educated and primed for a revolution in both literature and society. Through their verse, they broke strict rules of Bengali poetry as well as social taboos.

In the 1950s and 1960s tens of thousands of migrants came to Britain from the Indian subcontinent. Many arrived with no more than £3 in their pocket - the limit set by the Indian authorities. They came to work in Britain's factories, foundries, and new public services. Kavita Puri hears their stories.

Former jihadi Aimen Dean gives a unique insight into the workings of Islamic State. Dean left school in Saudi Arabia to fight jihad in Bosnia in the 1990s. But with the rise of al-Qaeda he became disillusioned with his comrades’ drift towards terrorism. He joined al-Qaeda – but working undercover for the British government.

James Fletcher travels to Japan to find out why they decided earlier this year not to ban graphic cartoons depicting children in sexual situations.

Noor Inayat Khan was one of the most courageous, unusual secret agents of World War Two. She was determined that even as a Muslim of mixed origin and as someone with Sufi pacifist beliefs, she would commit to the British war effort. Shahidha Bari uncovers Khan’s story

We like to think of our romantic lives as pure and unbothered by the cold business of spreadsheets and tax documents. But serious relationships are both romantic and financial partnerships.

A year ago, we asked former Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill to identify the next big emerging economies, and he picked the MINT nations - Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. How has 2014 been for these countries - are they proving to be the drivers of growth that were predicted?

In Medellin there's a huge dump. Locals say it's where the truth is buried - they're talking about victims killed in the armed conflict. Now there are moves to excavate it.