Welcome to Seriously...

Seriously… is BBC Radio 4’s home for quirky, curious and, well, seriously interesting documentaries. Here you'll find the latest strange tales, fascinating stories and compelling voices, from the neurosurgeon who wants to perform the world's first head transplant to comedian Stewart Lee's passion for musical improvisation.

Seriously gets the inside track on the most stunning of stories.

Seriously... Podcast

Formerly known as Documentary of the Week, the Seriously podcast offers an even richer selection of programmes available for you to download.

At Seriously no subject is too strange and no idea too weird.

A new podcast featuring a full documentary from Radio 4 is released every Tuesday and every Friday, and each programme features an introduction from one of the presenters, Ashley John-Baptiste and Andy Brooks.

• Femi Martin had hypnotherapy at age 17 to help her get over her fear of cats, and it worked!
• She can play the clarinet to Grade 5 standard
• Femi is a big fan of 1960s soul music, especially anything released on the Stax label
• An avid reader of non-fiction, Femi has a particular interest in the brain and neuroscience
• Femi has presented her own autobiographical Seriously documentary - The Achalasia Diaries. Listen to it here

• Andy Brooks is better known in the world of rap and spoken word performance as Testament
• He has a strange scar at the top of his head where hair cannot grow due to a childhood incident with a washing machine. Looks okay for a rapper though...
• As a youngster visiting New York, he ran out of money and walked the streets for a night
• He has performed for Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama and the President of Costa Rica - all at the same time!
• One of his ancestors was a freed slave who made it back across the Atlantic to Ghana

• Ashley John-Baptiste is a Broadcast Journalist at the BBC
• He was born and raised in South-East London
• He loves to write - essays, articles, songs… all sorts
• When he's not walking out on The X Factor, he can’t resist a chicken burrito
• He once rode a donkey in Inner Mongolia

Seriously also delves deeper into the stories explored in our range of documentaries, with articles about some of the exciting topics covered in the programmes.

Harry Shearer

These include Simpson's star Harry Shearer writing about his hometown of New Orleans a decade after the devastion wrought by Hurricane Katrina. There are profiles of The Bletchley Girls - five amazing women who worked as codebreakers when some were still teenagers World War Two. And award-winning author Philip Hoare has published his ruminations on beached whales and dolphins.

In the Archive you can find more amazing documentaries, permanently available to listen to online.

There are collections - like Strange Sounds, with a selection of programmes about weird instruments and maniacal music making, and Seriously Funny, with the fascinating backstories of great comics.

You can also find shows like My Big Fat Documentary - a unique view of fat activism from artist, broadcaster and cabaret star Scottee - and Minimal Impact - a two-part series uncovering minimalist music's journey from conception by radical composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich to its influence on groups including The Orb and The National.