4.4 • 879 Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2025
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Max Pearson presents a collection of Witness History and Sporting Witness episodes.
We start with the street artist Banksy, and his 2015 dystopian 'bemusement park'.
Then, we talk to roller coaster enthusiast Megan MacCausland, from the European Coaster Club.
Plus, we go back through the BBC archives to tell the story of the coelacanth, a fish believed to have been extinct for 65 million years.
Next, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up after the abolishment of apartheid in the 1990s. This programme contains contains harrowing testimony and graphic descriptions of human rights violations throughout.
Also, the six-day IRA siege on London's Balcombe Street in 1975, where a couple were taken hostage.
Finally, it's been 10 years since 193 countries and the European Union adopted the Paris climate agreement, in December 2015.
Our Sporting Witness programme this week looks at how an international skiing scene developed in the mountains of Bamiyan province, Afghanistan, in 2011.
Contributors:
Kurtis Young - steward at Dismaland. Megan MacCausland - European Coaster Club. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer - South African museum curator (from archive). Sisi Khampepe - served on the Amnesty Committee. Steven Moysey - saw the Balcombe Street siege unfold. Christiana Figueres - head of climate negotiations at 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. Alishah Farhang - Afghanistan skier.
(Photo: Dismaland in Weston Super-Mare. Credit: Kristian Buus/In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images)
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
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| 0:11.1 | You know, the Christmas songs you listen to on repeat. |
| 0:14.0 | Oh, ho! |
| 0:15.7 | No, no, no. |
| 0:17.5 | I'm all about the big hitting Christmas anthems. |
| 0:20.4 | Come on, guys. What about those tunes that really slay? |
| 0:23.7 | It's Christmas kitchen disco season, surely. |
| 0:26.4 | Give me hip-hip-christ bangers every day. |
| 0:28.6 | Those Christmas tracks that are straight out of Lapland. |
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| 0:36.0 | Imagine being here. |
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| 0:39.6 | The first one was dropped on a Japanese city this morning. |
| 0:42.6 | Here. |
| 0:43.0 | During the meeting, Mr. Mandela was informed of the government's decision regarding his release. |
| 0:48.1 | And here. |
| 0:48.8 | Witnesses have spoken of a wall of water that swept coastlines in Sri Lanka, Indonesia. |
| 0:54.9 | Hear from the people who were there. |
| 0:56.9 | He heard me praying while. |
| 0:58.4 | He was shooting and he just stopped. |
... |
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