Greg and David are desperate to get on the ladder. They rent a small flat together in Greater Manchester and have spent the last year of lockdowns living on top of each other. The dream is to get somewhere with a bit more space. A place of their own. It feels beyond their budget until they realise they can afford a new build house under the government’s Help To Buy scheme. The scheme works as an equity loan, where the government loans the buyer 20% of the house price to go toward the...

Grace Dent follows Cornwall Airport Newquay over the tough pandemic winter. The Untold has been tracking the fortunes of the airport since March 2020, when the regional airline Flybe collapsed. Since then successive lockdowns and travel restrictions have left the airport close to permanent closure. The Untold follows the airport’s director and staff over the difficult winter months, as well as speaking to one of the airport’s taxi drivers and the owners of the nearby airport hotel, the...

In an unexpected twist of Lockdown 3, sea shanties blew up on social media. Suddenly, everyone was singing ‘Wellerman’, a mid-19th Century whaling song about life on-board a whaling ship. A song of hope and unity which brought people together via the power of the internet. JD, Dave, Andy and Robbie find themselves at the centre of this shanty storm. They are old friends who together make up The Longest Johns, a sea shanty band from Bristol. Back in 2018, they released a version of...

John’s mother thinks he is involved with county lines. How can she get him to stop? From a fun and gorgeous, football-loving youngster John has turned into an uncontrollable teen. He has had several run-ins with the police, has vast amounts of money in the house and sleeps with a knife under his pillow. Tanya and Antony are middle-class professionals and had big dreams for their son. Now they just want to keep him safe. “I went from academic expectation, to no GCSEs - then I got down...

Young entrepreneur Jack needs to earn big this Christmas if he wants to save his global company. Jack is only 27, but he's already CEO of his own firm. He left school to start up an online business, establishing a successful international trade in fancy dress costumes...until the pandemic hit. With everything he'd built under threat, he's decided to risk it all on a new venture: BargainFox, an online store selling discounted items. It's an industry full of big players, with whom he'll...

In March this year the musical 'City of Angels' was about to open in the West End. Sadie-Jean Shirley was one of the youngest members of the cast. As well as a key role in the ensemble she'd also been chosen as a cover for one of the leads. After years of training and earning her spurs in the business this was a real breakthrough moment for the 24 year old performer. And then lockdown. 'City of Angels' didn't even make it to the first night. Producer Tom Alban has been in touch with...

24 year old Khady Gueye loves the area of Gloucestershire she lives in but doesn't want her young daughter to grow up facing the same prejudice she has encountered over the years. In June, she and her close friend set out to organise a small event in Lydney, a town in the heart of the Forest of Dean, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Initially, they were granted the permissions they needed, but as word spread, so did local opposition. We follow Khady through the summer and...

Grace Dent follows a parent-led campaign to stop Ocado from opening a new distribution depot next to a primary school in North London. Yerbury Primary School in Upper Holloway backs onto a light industrial estate. Over the past year, Ocado has been developing a distribution centre at the site. With the Covid pandemic the demand for online grocery services has risen dramatically. But this has also led to a conflict with the school and parents who believe a depot like this, adjacent to a...

Grace Dent follows Cornwall Airport Newquay as it fights for survival during one of the most difficult periods in aviation history. The Untold first visited the airport earlier in the year when the regional airline Flybe collapsed. Then the national lockdown forced the temporary closure of the passenger terminal. Now the terminal has reopened for business, but the airport continues its struggle to remain viable. The Untold follows the airport’s director and staff over a tough summer, as...

Grace Dent follows two young Hong Kongers over a crucial two weeks in their bid to make the UK home. Friends and housemates Chris and Louise have been living in the UK for the past two years. After the recent turmoil in Hong Kong, they now want to settle in the UK permanently. There's just one problem - Chris's visa is about to expire. The Untold follows them over a critical couple of weeks which will determine their future forever. Producer: Laurence Grissell

A year ago, when Sam graduated with a masters in Modern History, and headed back to his hometown near Bristol, he had no idea what the year would bring. But it wasn’t this. Suddenly, something Sam’s done has become an international news story. As he finished his degree, his friends convinced him to start up an Instagram page – rating public benches. It was a joke. But in the gloomy days of readjusting to life at home without a job, back sharing his childhood bedroom with his brother, it...

In the first of a new series, we hear the stories of people on different sides of isolation in the midst of the Coronavirus. OnHand is an app set up not long ago. Its purpose was to match older adults who needed help with verified volunteers in their local area. A way find someone to fetch the shopping, walk the dog or just come round for a chat. Then in March 2020, in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, everything changed. OnHand went from a source of help to a lifeline for vulnerable...

In Autumn last year AMIS, an organisation and helpline for Abused Men in Scotland based in Edinburgh, faced the prospect of closure. In spite of being busier than it had ever been in almost a decade of operation, a crucial element of their funding had been cut. It left them unable to pay for the office, phones and staff required to keep even the most basic Helpline service available. In the run up to Christmas Producer Joel Cox follows Iris, Alison and Elizabeth as they face the crisis...

Grace Dent follows the story - through the autumn - of the owner of a family business at the crossroads over Brexit uncertainty. For John Shirley the stakes are high: he's put his house up for sale because he believes leaving the EU Customs Union will ruin his Dover based freight agency company. We follow the Shirley's - who have different views about leaving the EU - through Brexit deadlines and the General Election as John works out what to do. Producer Neil McCarthy

Niyi's eating disorder has stopped him coming home for Christmas. This year, after nearly losing his mother to a brain tumour, he wants to change that. Niyi is a young, successful Cambridge student with a bright future ahead of him. But for the past few years, he has struggled with an eating disorder. It has made him very conscious of eating with others and the pressure of being around the family dinner table at Christmas has been too much. So he stayed away. But this year is different....

The Alabama 3 singer and co-founder Jake Black died in May: as the next tour date draws near band members must decide whether they can continue without him and how they mark his absence on stage. The decisions on a way forward started within days of Jake's unexpected death and whilst his body was still in the mortuary - moulds were taken of his face and hands in the hope that a death mask might help recreate his presence on stage. In addition of the death mask, sound experts have...

In a community centre in inner city Bristol, next to the nursery, and the café and the hall for local meet-ups and yoga, sits a very special place. The BCfm – Bristol Community FM – radio station. From their studio next to Easton community centre’s reception, 204 volunteer radio presenters broadcast to the city of Bristol and beyond. Dezzi Rankin (the resident Sunday morning reggae host), Shout Out (LGBTQ+), Silver Sound (for the older listener), Mid-Week Sports bar, Real Women – they’re all...

This Christmas Eve, for the first time, Croydon Minster's midnight mass is being broadcast to millions. But when you're a choirboy whose voice is about to break, there's no guarantee you'll make it. In the edition of The Untold, two boys are coming to the end of their time in Croydon Minster Boy's choir. They're desperate to hold on until Christmas Eve, when they will have the chance to sing for the nation at BBC One's Midnight Mass. If they can hit the notes there's the chance of a solo, ...

In 2017 Jay-Z phoned Hannah… three times… and she missed the calls because she was surrounded by fifty of her music students on a coach back from Leeds. For a decade, Hannah had been making soul music – juggling being head of music at the University of Winchester, fronting a soul band and being a mum to Leo. Her little known nine piece band, Hannah Williams and the Affirmations, had recently released an album. It turned out Jay-Z had stumbled on a song from her album, Late Nights and...

Hazel loves her job. She is very good at. But there is pressure on her to leave. An impressive career has led Hazel to a perfect job at The University of Chichester: it’s stimulating, she loves the students and she is widely respected. With no age discrimination, Hazel could continue forever. And she would like to. Work is her very identity and the idea of pootling around the garden and joining a choir fills her with horror. But Hazel suspects friends, family and colleagues think...

Lacey is a drag queen. Her drag persona is Lacey-Lou, a pink, over the top, ultra fem with lots of feathers, pearls and lace. Lacey is also a woman and although she's been doing drag for seven years, she's been dogged by critics who screen-shot the dictionary definition to prove that drag is for men only. So Lacey approaches the Oxford English Dictionary in an attempt to get the dictionary definition changed, to remove its gender specificity and to give her detractors one less thing to throw...

Selina Medford grew up in Port Talbot, South Wales, where people of West Indian heritage were in a minority. Now she takes her daughter back to relive her experiences. Touring around the town, they delve into the good, the bad and the ugly struggles that Selina and her family faced growing up during the 1960s. On the way, her daughter Sian, who was born and raised in Birmingham, begins to understand her mother’s experience and how the multi-cultural world she grew up in, and often took for...

Three survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire - Alison Moses, Emma O’Connor and Antonio Roncolato - recount the hardships they have endured since that fateful night in June 2017. Starting with memories of the disaster, the survivors then describe what has happened to them since - from being re-housed in temporary accommodation to their feelings about the immediate and long-term political responses to the fire. How do you cope with losing friends and family and still living in the charred...

Fran De’ath is a retired UN Election Organiser who now lives on a houseboat in Bristol, but the voyage of her life is extraordinary - a true story of an ordinary person rising to meet extraordinary circumstances. She was a peacekeeper in 1990s South Africa and, in the 2000s, she de facto wrote the election law in Afghanistan, despite a suicide bomber in her office. But the work Fran is most proud of is what she did in East Timor’s independence referendum. Along mountain passes and into a...

This documentary-drama presents a binaural experience which follows two very different true stories of abduction - one without long-lasting consequences, the other, devastatingly fatal. The feature asks if we are we blind to the possible risks in our everyday lives as, through the power of binaural surround sound, Kidnapped places you in the victim’s place giving the listener the experience of being abducted. For the best listening experience - put your headphones on, close your eyes, and...