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Antonia Quirke goes behind the scenes of Bookish, the murder mystery series written by Matthew Sweet and Mark Gatiss, who plays an amateur detective and bookshop owner called Book. Antonia hears from Matthew as he works on the script, crafting a cliff-hanger and deciding just how many red herrings there should be in one episode. He reveals the secrets of his working relationship with Mark, and we join them as they travel to their place of work, a film studio in Belgium, where they discuss which character they are going to murder that day - and how the crime will be committed. Clue: it involves a box of chocolates.When it comes to murder mysteries, Mark has form. He is the co-creator of the hit TV series Sherlock, where he plays Holmes’ brother Mycroft. He has also starred in Game of Thrones, Dr Who and cult comedy series The League of Gentlemen, which he also co-wrote. Matthew Sweet is a broadcaster and expert in Victorian literature, and author of Shepperton Babylon, a best-selling book about the darker sides of British cinema. The pair have been friends for more than a decade, and Bookish is the first TV series they have written together.

In 2025, Voice of America was thrust into the spotlight when the bulk of its funding was taken away. But in an era shaped by the internet and social media revolutions and with the West's funding priorities changing, it was not the first international broadcaster to go quiet. The soft power war of the airwaves has now moved to a decisive phase.Josephine McDermott traces the start of international radio and its heyday through World War Two and the Cold War as a tool of soft power. Hear the hosts of shortwave radio, from the Nazi propagandists Lord Haw Haw and Mildred Gillars to Doris Maxina, the presenter of Soviet radio's Moscow Mailbag, plus June Taylor, the New Zealander who became the global voice of communist Albania.Tune in to the sounds lost to time from Radio Netherlands' Happy Station Show to Radio Berlin International, and the Russian version of the British institution, The Archers, which came about following the collapse of the USSR.Featuring Thomas Witherspoon, creator of the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive; Jamie Shea, Nato spokesperson from 1993 to 2000; Sir John Tusa, managing director of the BBC World Service from 1986 to 1992; Ivana Stradner, research fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies in the United States and Nic Newman, senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, UK. With archive from the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive, including recordings from Thomas Witherspoon, Paul Watson, Greg Shoom, Mark Hirst, Tom Gavaras and Keith Perron. Moscow Mailbag recording from KSN's Tech Topics on YouTube.

More than four years after Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, the war continues to shape almost every aspect of life in both countries, including the challenge of finding enough people to serve on the front line. In Ukraine, videos showing violent confrontations between recruitment officers and members of the public have sparked angry debate about how the country's draught system is working. In Russia meanwhile, the authorities have tightened conscription rules and introduced new digital tools aimed at successfully recruiting more young Russians. With BBC Monitoring's Vitaly Shevchenko and BBC Russian's Yaroslava Kiryukhina. A new kind of spirit, very similar to tequila, is gaining popularity across India, thanks to the unassuming-looking agave plant. Unlike in Mexico, where agave is grown on a commercial scale for tequila production, in India, it grows wild and until recently, its only use was for farmers to make fences from its thorny trunk. But it is slowly transforming the lives of farmers across the country, as Priti Gupta, reporting for BBC Gujarati, has been finding out.This episode of The Documentary comes to you from The Fifth Floor, the show at the heart of global storytelling, with BBC journalists from all around the world. Presented by Faranak Amidi. Produced by Laura Thomas, Caroline Ferguson and Hannah Dean.