Illuminated13 Apr 2025

The Big Ask

How many questions have you asked today? How many were rhetorical, “boomer-asking”, passive/aggressive or just boringly functional?

Did you know that our appetites for question-asking peak at the age of five, then steadily diminish? That kids ask an average of 40,000 questions between the ages of 2 and 5, while adults ask fewer than ten questions a day? Why are we asking fewer, meaningful questions? In an age where antisocial behaviour has become normal — where it’s entirely acceptable to spend most of the time looking down at our phones, or ranting on social media — shouldn’t we be asking what we’re losing in the process?

Can journalist Ian Wylie, who uses the five Ws daily, reignite our curiosity and appetite for asking questions? And can he discover better questions that unlock bigger stories and deeper conversations? What will he learn from professional question-askers, including barrister Melanie Simpson, detective Steve Hibbit, philosopher Lani Watson and priest Leanne Roberts? Is artificial intelligence likely to discourage us from asking deep, open-ended questions? Or could it force us to ask clearer, sharper, more precise questions?

Can Ian create his documentary entirely from questions? Or will he slip up?

A Sparklab production for BBC Radio 4

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Episoder(105)

The Grand North Atlantic Home Video Archive

Growing up in rural Derry, author Séamas O’Reilly and his siblings never needed to go to Blockbuster. Instead, they were enraptured by their father’s archive of hundreds of films recorded off the tele...

16 Aug 28min

James Hutton and The Restless Earth

Award winning Scottish folksinger, songwriter and storyteller, Karine Polwart celebrates the 300th anniversary of James Hutton’s birth, the Scottish scientist and philosopher known as the father of ge...

9 Aug 28min

Precious Stones

"Some losses feel seismic. The ground shifts, familiar landscapes tilt, and nothing is the same. Dad’s death changed our world. But it also left us with a distinctly geological conundrum. What on eart...

2 Aug 28min

Unreliable Narrator

How do you tell the story of your life when you have no memory of the events that shaped you? At 15, Stephen McAll was a promising musician with a head full of songs. He was booked into a studio to ...

26 Jul 28min

A Most Magickal Encounter

Writer Tim Dee is trying to make a most extraordinary Zoom Call that will transport him across the centuries to have a most magical encounter with a scholarly looking guy with a white beard who is his...

19 Jul 28min

Dear Gilbert, Dear Gordon

When museum curator Mark Hignett began buying WWII-era letters online, he believed he was piecing together the life of an ordinary soldier. At first glance, the letters looked like typical corresponde...

12 Jul 29min

Later Life Letter

This is a love letter to a special kind of letter, a 'later life letter' - a letter that can 'speak across the years', telling an adopted child where they come from, and helping them understand who t...

5 Jul 29min

July Morning

We're at the Black Sea coast on the last night of June. Everything is building up to the sunrise. This is Bulgaria’s ‘July Morning’ observance - somewhere between a counter-cultural musical festival...

28 Jun 28min