The death penalty and broadcasting bans

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Chiara Sangiorgio, Death Penalty Adviser at Amnesty International, who tells us about the history of the death penalty and its effectiveness.

The programme begins with two perspectives on capital punishment: Yoshikuni Noguchi recounts his time as a prison guard on death row in Japan in the 1970s; then we hear archive recordings of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's most famous hangman.

Poland's former-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Radosław Sikorski, describes how close he came to death in the 2010 Smolensk air disaster, in which the country's President was killed.

Paul McLoone, the frontman of The Undertones, a punk-rock band, tells the bizarre story of how he became the broadcasting voice of IRA commander Martin McGuinness when the organisation was banned from British airwaves in 1988.

Finally, Karlheinz Brandenburg explains how he revolutionised the way we listen to music through his invention of the MP3.

Contributors:

Chiara Sangiorgio - Death Penalty Adviser at Amnesty International Yoshikuni Noguchi - Japanese death row prison guard. Albert Pierrepoint - British executioner. Radosław Sikorski - former-Minister for Foreign Affairs of Poland. Paul McCloone - band member of The Undertones and the voice of Martin McGuinness. Karlheinz Brandenburg - inventor of the MP3.

(Photo: Nooses. Credit: Rebecca Redmond/EyeEm via Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Love, Janessa, a brand new true crime podcast from the BBC World Service and
0:05.1	CBC Podcasts exploring the world of online romance scams. It's a story about love,
0:10.7	deceit, and survival and it's available now.
0:14.1	Find out more at the end of this podcast.
0:17.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC
0:20.0	with me Max Pearson, pulling together the witness history episodes on the world
0:23.8	service from the past seven days. This week the death penalty around the world
0:28.2	and through the ages including Britain's most famous 20th century executioner.
0:33.3	I never trouble about the crime the person had committed.
0:36.7	I was more trouble about the man who had to die.
0:39.3	And we tried to treat him with dignity in his last moments.
0:44.1	Also British government attempts to silence the IRA in the 1980s,
0:48.6	the inventor of the MP3.
0:50.7	Of course anyone who knows anything about the future will tell you that soon your CD collection will be obsolete, obsolete in a world where every song ever recorded is available to you on tap rather than on tape.
1:02.8	And the man who narrowly escaped one of Poland's worst air disasters.
1:06.8	I was invited to be on that plane.
1:09.6	My wife and I received a barrage of calls from all over the world in fact from people who thought
1:16.0	that I might be on the plane.
1:18.0	That's all coming up later in the podcast, but before that we are, as I said, focusing on the history of the death penalty ancient
1:24.6	writings codify execution as a punishment going back thousands of years BC but in
1:30.2	recent centuries fewer countries continue to kill criminals.
1:34.0	One such though is Japan.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.