The Documentary Podcast Folgen

Greystones made global headlines a year ago when, concerned by rising anxiety levels among their pupils, the headteachers from all the primary schools in the town invited parents to sign a voluntary pact or code; not to buy their child a smartphone before they moved up to secondary school. In Ireland that’s usually at age 12. Beth McLeod talks to teachers, pupils and parents about their reaction to the initiative. Has there been any backlash? At one of the town’s secondary schools she meets an assistant headteacher who is passionately demanding a culture change around phone use for older students too, warning parents that although they think they are giving their children access to the internet, they are really giving the internet access to their children. She speaks to teenagers about their views on what is the right age to be on social media and asks the Irish Health Minister what the government is doing to hold tech companies to account.

Released in 2017, the video game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice saw players take control of dark-age warrior Senua as she battled to rescue the soul of her dead lover from the Norse underworld. The action-adventure game from British studio Ninja Theory won awards for its gameplay, acting and storytelling, as well as plaudits for its nuanced and well-researched depiction of psychosis. German actor Melina Juergens was awarded a Bafta for her performance as the titular character. Now studio head Dominic Matthews and his team are working on the sequel, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II. Nathan Jones joins Dominic, Melina and the rest of the team in Cambridge as they tell this next chapter of their story.

The Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, attracted no fewer than two million pilgrims in 2023. But this pilgrim boom has an environmental downside: climate scientists are warning that the five-day Hajj alone, with its bargain flights, hotels, catering and local transport, produces over 1.8 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, roughly the amount New York City emits every two weeks. Yet the Saudi government has plans to go much bigger still: by 2030, they want 30 million pilgrims a year to take part in the Hajj and Umrah. Zubeida Malik asks what the Saudi authorities, local groups and campaigners, religious scholars and the pilgrims themselves can do to reduce the environmental footprint of one of the largest religious gatherings on the planet.