Fictions and Factions
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Volodymyr Zelensky played a President in more than 50 episodes of TV comedy - but does that mean he can do the job in real life? Jonah Fisher reflects from Kiev on a surreal election campaign - and catches up with a box set.
Kate Adie introduces this and other stories from correspondents and reporters around the world.
India's election, the largest in the world - and thus the largest ever held - is also under way. While covering this extraordinary exercise of democracy, Rajini Vaidyanathan met one man in the Himalayas who has an enduring faith in the electoral process. He's 102 years old and has voted in every Indian election since independence.
Jonathan Griffin loves the soul-shaking sound of South African choral music - and recently heard songs of freedom, defiance and rivalry during a political debate near Johannesburg, where the contingents competed with vocals as well as rhetoric.
There's not much arable soil in the United Arab Emirates - but plenty of sand and sunshine - so the government's keen to bolster food security by growing more and importing less. Georgia Tolley tastes the fruits of high-tech agriculture, coaxed from a desert greenhouse.
And Stephen McDonell reveals an unsuspected side of Beijing - beyond its vast official spaces and political power plays. The city is also home to a raucous, ramshackle, rebellious underground music scene. But in the face of rising rents and increasing red tape, how long can its live bands play on?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:04.6 | Hello, today we drive at high altitude around hairpin bends in the Himalayas |
| 0:10.4 | to meet the oldest voter in the world's largest democracy. In South Africa, some |
| 0:16.1 | political grudges are expressed in melody as rival activists try to sing their |
| 0:21.8 | opposition to a standstill. We bite into the |
| 0:25.1 | tomatoes being coaxed from the sands of the United Arab Emirates with the help of a |
| 0:29.9 | high-tech greenhouse and brace yourself for a Beijing blast as our correspondent |
| 0:36.0 | reveals the freewheeling often daring sound of the underground music scene. |
| 0:42.4 | First to Ukraine where the course of the presidential election |
| 0:46.2 | being held tomorrow has been baffling foreign policy analysts and regional |
| 0:50.4 | experts for weeks. It's another tale of political disruption where the campaign |
| 0:55.9 | of an outsider candidate who once wouldn't have had a hope has really taken off overturning |
| 1:02.1 | all conventional political wisdom. |
| 1:05.7 | Ukraine's 42 million people live in one of the poorest countries in Europe. |
| 1:10.9 | Wages have stagnated and it's still on a war footing facing off against Vladimir Putin in Russia. |
| 1:17.0 | So how is it possible for a 41-year-old television comedian to have become the front runner. |
| 1:25.0 | Opinion polls this week showed Volodomir Zelensky leading the incumbent President |
| 1:30.3 | Petro Poroshenko by around three votes to one. How did it come to this? |
| 1:35.0 | Jonah Fisher in Kyiv has been trying to figure it out. |
| 1:39.0 | There aren't many jobs where you can put your feet up and work your way through a TV box set without feeling |
| 1:45.0 | the slightest bit guilty. But here in Ukraine putting in the hours in front of the screen |
| 1:50.2 | has become one way of trying to understand what has been at times quite a baffling election. |
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