13 of BBC Radio’s most heart-breaking moments of 2016

Whether documenting huge upheavals across nations, or tiny moments of personal crisis, radio is the perfect medium for capturing the full emotive weight of what has been a tumultuous year.

Some of these selections are ultimately heart-warming, some are more upsetting, or may reopen old wounds but they all have one goal in mind: to tell the truth about a painful topic in as clear and direct a manner as possible.

As part of BBC Radio 1Xtra’s Words First special at The Roundhouse in London, spoken word artist Solomon OB delivers this highly emotional and clearly very personal poem – the result of a year of work – about his experiences as a fostered child. It’s a hugely affecting performance, particularly as his voice starts to crack after the devastating line, "We were not a mistake, some stain to be erased."

2016 has been a year in which it felt as if too many of the most beloved figures in popular culture – from Alan Rickman to Victoria Wood, Prince to Leonard Cohen – had suddenly been taken away. This clip –in which 6 Music’s Shaun Keaveny and Matt Everitt audibly struggle to deal with the then-breaking news that David Bowie had died – captures the queasy, shocked feeling that something monumental had changed, an emotion that has never seemed too far away this year.

On the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, BBC Radio Wales dedicated a day of broadcasting to memories of the fateful day that wiped out a generation of children from a small mining village in the South Wales valleys. Jeff Edwards was the last child to be pulled alive from the rubble of his school on that day in 1966, and he took Radio Wales reporter Stephen Fairclough on a poignant walk around the graveyard where the victims of the disaster – his former schoolmates – are buried.

Six years ago, Melanie Reid was thrown from her horse while riding in the Scottish countryside. She broke her neck and back, and since then has been paralysed from the armpits down. As she explains to BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions, she found that her relationship with music had been irrevocably changed. At first she found it unbearable – “If I even heard a few notes… the pain and emotion it provoked in me was unstoppable” – but over the years, she has come to find music to be a source of inspiration and even solace.

Jay Beatty is 11 years old and has Down’s syndrome. He’s also a huge Celtic fan and has become something of an ambassador for the club, thanks to his friendship with their striker Georgios Samaras. However, because of this, his father Martin had to deal with a series of threatening and abusive private messages online concerning Jay’s condition. As he tells BBC Scotland’s Kaye Adams, this is the story of a little boy who has touched many lives, and the value of forgiveness.

5 live’s Phil Williams talked to junior doctors and curated a series of audio diaries, which provided a range of insights into the extreme pressure and responsibility of the work they do. This clip features a 30-year-old doctor discussing one particular patient, a small boy who had been brought in after choking on a grape.

Today Programme correspondent Mike Thomson managed to make contact with a small anti-Islamic State activist group called Al-Sharqiya 24, in the IS-controlled city of Raqqa. One of the group's members agreed to write a series of personal diaries for the BBC about life for him and his family and friends there under Islamic State rule. What followed is an extraordinary and at times chilling insight into how so-called Islamic State's brutality and injustices permeate just about every level of life in their now infamous capital.

On 16 June, Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, died after being shot and stabbed shortly before attending a constituency meeting in Birstall, West Yorkshire. Her death was a huge shock Something of that desperate shock is captured in this clip from BBC Radio 4, in which the former Labour MP Joan Walley has to suddenly find the words to pay tribute to her former colleague.

As part of her BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra Stories documentary Running with Grief, an exploration of grief and loss, Radio 1’s Clara Amfo talks about the day she found out her father had passed away. She had taken the phone call just as she was preparing to run the Paris half-marathon, and to celebrate her new job as Radio 1’s mid-morning host, before, as she puts in, being "plunged into the emotional turmoil that is bereavement".

In a warm and touching interview, Caroline Jones talks to Georgey Spanswick, about the unique way she found to raise money for charity in memory of her mother, who died of breast cancer. Her big idea was to wear only clothes she had bought from charity shops for an entire year, in tribute to her bargain-hunting mum. And as she explains, it was a campaign that needed fairly careful handling: "If you think about bringing the story of cancer together with the story of style, the two don’t necessarily come together, so it was a balancing act."

Norway is at the centre of a significant debate over child protection, as there are claims that Norwegian social workers are removing children from their parents with excessive zeal, permanently breaking family bonds and putting a greater burden on parents, some of whom are from immigrant backgrounds, to clearly demonstrate a loving bond with their children. In this clip, parents Ruth and Marius discuss the moment they realised they had failed to convince their child’s social worker, and their baby would be taken from them.

BBC Radio Scotland marked 100 years since the first day of the Battle of the Somme by tracking the fortunes of the Scottish troops involved in the fighting across the day. The special coverage started at 06:28 with a poem commissioned from the award-winning Scottish poet and novelist Angus Peter Campbell, entitled "Dawn, 1st July 1916, The Somme".

In March 2016, Sean McGrotty, his young sons Mark and Evan, mother-in-law Ruth Daniels and sister-in-law Jodi Lee Daniels all drowned when their car accidentally fell off a pier at Buncrana in County Donegal. Having seen the car enter the water, Davitt Walsh swam out to help, and rescued the family’s baby girl – the sole survivor. As he explains in this remarkable interview on BBC Radio Foyle, as far as he is concerned, the tragedy of the event far overshadowed the heroism of his actions.