Understand

The centuries old battle between public good and private profit that’s still being fought today.
Kate Lamble holds her nose and plunges into the long history of the water industry and some of the many conflicts that have shaped it.
Reported and presented by Kate Lamble
Producer: Elle Scott
Sound Design: Andy Fell
Executive Producer: Joe Kent
Commissioning Executive: Tracy Williams
Commissioning Editor: Dan Clarke
Rinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

After watching their local river grow murky and lifeless, two retired neighbours decide to take on the water industry and its regulators. The unlikely sleuths begin a ten-year battle to clean up our rivers.
On the banks of the River Windrush in Oxfordshire, Kate Lamble meets campaigners Ash Smith and Peter Hammond
Reported and presented by Kate Lamble
Producer: Elle Scott
Sound Design: Andy Fell
Executive Producer: Joe Kent
Commissioning Executive: Tracy Williams
Commissioning Editor: Dan Clarke
Rinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

This is the story of a sewage scandal. How a centuries old battle between public good and private profit created an almighty stink. And who pays to clean it up.

Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are. With time spent reading - and even reading ability - starting to nosedive, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading changed humanity, and what might happen if we stop.
In this episode James digs into the question of whether literacy led to the invention of democracy, asks whether reading helps us proof ourselves against misinformation, and asks what happens to our politics if reading dies out?
Contributors include
- Jung Chang, author
- Robert Darnton, historian
- Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University
- Naomi Alderman, writer and presenter
- John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter for the Financial Times
- Nick Harris, ideas editor at the New Statesman
- Professor Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA
Producer - Beth Sagar-Fenton
Editors - Chris Ledgard & Alasdair Cross

Reading seems an unremarkable skill. When we say something is as “easy as ABC”, we mean it is very easy indeed. In fact, learning to read has dramatic and irreversible consequences for people and for societies. Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are. With time spent reading - and even reading ability - starting to nosedive, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading changed humanity, and what might happen if we stop.
In this programme, James asks whether the spread of novel reading in the 18th century caused a moral revolution, whether a book played a role in the abolition of slavery, and whether the rise of reading, a solitary and slightly lonely activity, was one of the factors setting us on the path to our atomized and isolated modern society.
Contributions from:
- Jung Chang, author
- Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University
- Sarah Maxwell, founder of Saucy Books
- Robert Darnton, historian
- Naomi Alderman, writer and presenter
- Joseph Henrich, professor of anthropology at Harvard University
- Maryanne Wolf, professor and Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA
Producer - Beth Sagar-Fenton
Editor - Chris Ledgard