Home  >  The Documentary Podcast  >  Assignment: The village that came back from the dead
The Documentary Podcast
Assignment: The village that came back from the dead
The Documentary Podcast
Feb 18, 2025

In Germany some 300 villages have been destroyed since the Second World War because of the coal that lay beneath them. Villagers have grown up in the knowledge that one day their house will be torn down and generally they’ve accepted the deal on offer: the mine buys their house and they build a new one in a brand-new village. But the demands of climate change and the need to curb CO2 emissions has changed attitudes to fossil fuels. In one region west of Cologne all mining activity will cease by 2030, 15 years earlier than planned. Which means that villages designated for demolition are now going to survive. That news isn’t always welcome. Tim Mansel has visited one of them.

More Episodes


Jun 13, 2026
Ground zero: reporting an epidemic

Ebola is a frightening and deadly disease, killing on average one half of people infected and spreading rapidly without containment measures. So how do BBC journalists report from the centre of an epidemic? BBC West Africa journalist Emery Makumeno has been reporting from Kinshasa in DR Congo on the Ebola outbreak; Musa Sangarie, Country Director for Sierra Leone for BBC Media Action, led public information campaigns in Sierra Leone in the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic; Camilla Mota, journalist with BBC News Brasil, has reported on the fall-out from the country’s Zika virus outbreak in 2015 and 2016; and Mattias Zibell Garcia, producer at BBC Mundo, reported on the recent Hantavirus outbreak in Ushuaia, Argentina.

The Fifth Floor is at the heart of global storytelling on the BBC World Service, bringing you the best stories from journalists in the BBC's 43 language services. We're here to help you make sense of the stories making headlines around the world; to excite your curiosity and to get to grips with the facts. Recent episodes have investigated Russia’s youth armies and how they make soldiers of Ukrainian children; featured the BBC team who were the first journalists to the site of the Nigerian school kidnappings and reflected the effects of internet blackouts in Iran, Uganda and India. If you want to know more about Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, and the legacy of Hugo Chavez; or how Vladimir Putin’s network of deep cover spies operates; or why Donald Trump signed an executive order granting white South Africans asylum in the US, we have all those stories and more.

Presented by Faranak Amidi.

Produced by Laura Thomas, Caroline Ferguson and Hannah Dean.

(Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich)


26min 37sec


Assignment: The village that came back from the dead

--:--
--:--