BBC World Service panel show tracing the global history behind jewellery, robots, and education.
The Forum brings patient discussion to large subjects: domestic robots, jewellery, portable music, women’s education, and the Green Revolution. Each episode gathers specialists and World Service listeners into a careful conversation about how everyday objects, ideas, and institutions acquire meaning over time.
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The Forum is a panel-discussion program produced by BBC World Service, structured around a single object, institution, or technology each episode and examined through a global historical lens. Each episode assembles three guest experts — typically historians, museum curators, or scientists — who unpack the topic's origins and its varied development across countries and eras. Hosts Izzy Lawrence and Rajan Dattar open with a concrete hook, often a listener-submitted memory or object, before widening into comparative history across regions. Guests featured in the sample include museum curators Dr. Emily Storer (Boston Museum of Fine Arts) and Emma Foucault (Victoria and Albert Museum), education historians Jane Martin and Parimala Rao, and roboticist Usman Roshan of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The recurring guest profile is academic and institutional — university professors, museum specialists, and subject researchers — rather than celebrities, journalists, or industry figures. World Service listener contributions are a structural constant: voice messages and emails supply personal anecdotes and regional perspective from places including India, Zambia, and Norway. Episodes regularly set the UK and India side by side to show how the same practice or technology took different paths, with colonial history, gender, and social class as frequent throughlines. Production is a straightforward studio panel with listener audio edited in, rather than field recording, narrative sound design, or one-on-one interview. Listeners drawn to world history, social history, or the history of science and technology, and who prefer multi-expert discussion over single-guest interviews, are the show's core fit. The pace and structure repeat episode to episode: hook, panel discussion, listener interjection, comparative wrap-up.
Made for: Listeners interested in world and social history who prefer multi-expert panel discussions over single-guest interviews.
What sets it apart: Pairs a three-expert international panel with listener voice messages from across the World Service's global audience on a single theme per episode, rather than one host interviewing one guest.
The programme that explains the present by exploring the past.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
The Forum connects expert history with listener experience, showing how social change enters daily life through technology, education, food, and cherished objects.
The Forum starts with something tangible, then widens the frame. A portable radio becomes a history of public listening; household robots prompt questions about labor, art, and human experience.
A robot does the dishes; The Forum asks what that convenience might cost you.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A thoughtful discussion of domestic robots, machine-made art, and the uneasy comforts of convenience.
The Forum's "Robots and reality" begins with a practical fantasy: a robot that can take over the chores people avoid, from washing up to dusting and cleaning awkward corners.
A thoughtful BBC conversation on jewellery as craft, memory, value and self-expression.
Jewellery is treated here as more than ornament: a portable record of memory, taste, craft and private attachment. Izzy Lawrence opens with listeners describing pieces they wear every day, then the conversation moves through museum collections, old family jewellery, auction…
A warm social history of portable music, from beach romance to cricket streets and New York boom boxes.
Portable music gets treated as social history here, beginning with a century-old beach photograph and a 1968 Jersey Shore romance sparked by a battery-operated record player.
A clear BBC history of women's education, from pioneering schools to the costs and assumptions that still shape who gets to study.
The Forum treats women's education as a history of permission: who granted it, who withheld it, and how girls and women pushed past both. Izzy Lawrence opens with listeners remembering the old refusals, from being told to marry instead of study to hearing that girls could not…
A clear, human-scaled account of how the Green Revolution depended on better seeds, local adaptation, and the systems that move food.
Feeding the world and the Green Revolution brings a huge agricultural story down to the scale of ordinary lives, opening with listeners who grow peppers, avocados, and other crops before moving into wheat yields, plant research, fertilizer, irrigation, machinery, storage, and…
Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins dissect Oscar races, new releases, and Hollywood news.
Layered audio documentaries on hidden histories, with some episodes hosted by Frances McDormand.
Journalists Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb riff on TV, books, and celebrity culture between themselves.
Abbi Jacobson tours specific MoMA artworks with curators and guests like RuPaul.
Tyler Green interviews artists and curators about specific artworks, one exhibition at a time.
MJ Dorian's solo deep dives trace genius through Blake, McQueen, da Vinci, and Jung's Red Book.
A robotic voice gives the game away.
BBC World Service host Izzy Lawrence convenes Dr.
1923 already had portable radio.
Girls were told no.
Avocados open the question.