The Documentary Podcast Folgen

There’s a moral panic in Russia and several former Soviet states about a craze in which teenagers and children dress up as animals and walk on all fours like their favourite animals. In one TikTok video, a group of youngsters are seen scampering across Moscow’s Red Square wearing fox masks and tails. Politicians and religious leaders have warned the trend is a threat to civilised values and a cover for LGBT and western ideology. Legislation is now being considered to ban quadrobics and fine or arrest parents of enthusiasts. But quadrobics has a longer history as a form of exercise. We speak to the pioneering Japanese athlete who holds the world record for covering 100m on all fours in 15.7 seconds, which he set in 2015.Audio for this episode was updated on 27th February 2025.

In Germany some 300 villages have been destroyed since the Second World War because of the coal that lay beneath them. Villagers have grown up in the knowledge that one day their house will be torn down and generally they’ve accepted the deal on offer: the mine buys their house and they build a new one in a brand-new village. But the demands of climate change and the need to curb CO2 emissions has changed attitudes to fossil fuels. In one region west of Cologne all mining activity will cease by 2030, 15 years earlier than planned. Which means that villages designated for demolition are now going to survive. That news isn’t always welcome. Tim Mansel has visited one of them.

Dublin-born Jennifer Walshe is one of the world’s most bold and imaginative contemporary classical composers, and holds the prestigious post of professor of composition at Oxford University. Whether it is Barbie dolls or recipe books, the mundane and strange materials of life are central to Walshe’s work. Now, for the Irish National Opera, she is developing a major new work set on Mars. Walshe’s opera will respond to astrophysics data, Martian meteorites, trashy sci-fi, eco-anxiety in young people, and tech billionaires’ obsession with conquering space. Broadcaster Katie Derham tracks Walshe as she launches into the project, with months of immersive intergalactic research.