Lives Less Ordinary

Jo Fidgen, Asya Fouks

podcast.support@bbc.co.uk

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Booking Overview

Human-interest interview series focused on extraordinary true stories, typically featuring people recounting deeply personal experiences and unusual life journeys. Credible pitches include memoirists, survivors, and individuals with compelling first-person stories involving profound recovery, family experiences, identity, or unexpected reversals; booking difficulty is high because the show appears editorially curated around exceptional narratives rather than standard expert commentary.

Metrics

Episodes: 230

Frequency: Weekly

Rating: 4.6/5.0

Estimated listeners: 10k-100k

Gender skew: Unknown

Location: USA

Contact Information

podcast.support@bbc.co.uk

For verified host and producer emails, sign up to view.

Host

Jo Fidgen - Presenter for the BBC World Service.

Asya Fouks - Presenter for the BBC World Service.

Booking Intelligence

Booking Requirements

high
Typical Credentials:  
A highly compelling first-person account of an extraordinary, emotionally resonant life experience; published writing or a memoir can strengthen the pitch but is not essential.
Required Achievements:  
Published memoir

Recent Guest Discussions

Serena Kutchinsky - Her Father's Creation Of A Giant Golden Egg, The Collapse Of The Family Jewellery Business, And Her Later Search For The Egg.

Samina Ali - Surviving Catastrophic Brain Damage And Amnesia After Childbirth, Recovering Memory, Rebuilding Family Relationships, And Returning To Writing.

Samina Ali - Her Experience Of Pre-eclampsia, Coma, Brain Injury, Memory Loss, Motherhood, And The Early Stages Of Recovery.

Recent Topics

Human Interest, Resilience, Recovery, Family

Episodes

Here's the recent few episodes on
Lives Less Ordinary
:

The prisoner who was forced to celebrate a World Cup victory

July 13, 2026

Miriam Lewin was never much interested in football. Growing up in Buenos Aires, she cared far more about politics than the team her family supported. But in 1978, when Argentina won the World Cup, she found herself among the celebrating fans, hidden in plain sight as a political prisoner.A year earlier, aged 19, Miriam had been abducted by Argentina's military dictatorship and became one of the country's desaparecidos – the "disappeared." Detained in secret and tortured because of her politic...

My father and the curse of the golden egg

July 06, 2026

Serena Kutchinsky was 10 years old when her jeweller father Paul unveiled his masterpiece to the world: a giant, golden, diamond-encrusted egg. Paul had recently taken over the family business, the celebrated London jewellers House of Kutchinsky, and wanted to make his mark, commissioning the production of a spectacular jewelled object like no other. The egg was crafted from 15kg of solid gold, decorated with over 20,000 rare pink diamonds, and put on sale for £7m – today’s equivalent of arou...

I had a baby – then lost my memory, part 2

June 29, 2026

After an undiagnosed case of pre-eclampsia caused catastrophic brain damage and amnesia, Samina Ali returned home from hospital to begin a long recovery.At 29, she found herself relearning the basics of daily life – how to walk, speak and make sense of the world around her. She could still communicate in Urdu, the language of her childhood partly spent in India, but much of her recent life in California felt unreachable. Her husband was a stranger, and her newborn son Ishmael someone she stru...

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