'Prison Break' and my escape from Manus Island

Lives Less Ordinary

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.6 • 814 Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2023

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tricks from a hit TV show held the key to Jaivet Ealom’s audacious dash for freedom.

As a student in his native Myanmar, Jaivet Ealom became obsessed with the hit US TV show Prison Break. He watched it on a loop, but never in his wildest dreams did he think he’d be in a similar position to its main character. When he found himself locked up in Australia's notorious Manus Regional Processing Centre with no end in sight, could he outdo fiction and find a way out?

Presenter: Jo Fidgen Producer: Edgar Maddicott

Transcript

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0:00.0	On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.
0:06.9	It was an extraordinary news story.
0:09.1	The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,
0:13.7	mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.
0:18.0	One of the great mysteries in English criminal history.
0:20.7	We're still looking for Lucan.
0:22.1	It's honestly one of the most powerful stories
0:24.4	of my lifetime.
0:25.9	I'm Alex von Tundselman.
0:27.3	This is The Lucan Obsession.
0:29.2	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:32.7	I thought I screwed up the very first moment
0:35.2	when I was lining up for the plane.
0:37.1	I kind of rushed. And then I screwed up the very first moment. When I was lining up for the plane, I kind of rushed,
0:39.9	and then I bumped up into a passenger.
0:43.5	And the person looked back.
0:45.9	It was a nurse from the prison who actually knew me.
0:50.0	She recognized me.
0:53.2	I thought that was it. I thought that I wasn't getting anywhere. I thought that was it.
0:55.4	I thought that I wasn't getting anywhere.
0:57.2	I was just getting caught at that moment.
1:03.6	The nurse would have known him as EML-19, because you didn't have names where he'd been living.
	...

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