You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

This is the BBC.

A man roasts and eats his neighbor's dog inside a skyscraper.

A scientist explores the lagoon over the flooded remains of London, a group of fetishists obsess

over the gory details of car crashes, some of the unforgettable and frankly horrifying images that sprang from the mind of today's great life.

The British novelist and short story writer James Graham Ballard, G. Ballard.

Here he is talking to the BBC in 2001.

We are a race of partly civilized hunter killers who've adapted loosely to sort of living in, you know,

large enclaves. If we're going to be truthful about our real natures and that we are

other violent creatures who enjoy violence, it might be necessary to administer small doses of not just violence but of

psychopatic behavior. Very small doses rather like the very small doses of

strict nein in a nerve tonic they stimulate the system.

Behind the dystopia, the violence and the wild creativity of his writing, what kind of a man was he and what legacy has he left behind?

Well, here in the studio with me is his daughter, B. Ballard.

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