Combining intimate storytelling, immersive sound design, candid interviews, science and a large dose of compassion, Room 5 is a gripping portrait of extraordinary people at a moment when everything changes.
Helena Merriman (Image: Robert Shiret)
Room 5 is a collection of stories about lives changed and the process of recovery. I hope listeners find them as inspiring as I do.
— Helena Merriman
There’s always a room where it happens - where a doctor solves a medical mystery by
providing a diagnosis, leaving the patient changed forever. For Helena Merriman, that room was Room 5.In her new radio series and podcast for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds, Helena - the award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster behind the global hit BBC podcast Tunnel 29 – brings us eight such stories. They are intimate, unexpected and hopeful, and they all speak to deeper themes: our shared physical and mental fragility – and our resilience.
Combining intimate storytelling, immersive sound design, candid interviews, science and a large dose of compassion, Room 5 is a gripping portrait of extraordinary people at a moment when everything changes.
The series will explore, amongst other stories:
A young woman starts to experience anxiety and hallucinations and comes close to being sectioned. Her eventual diagnosis shines a light on a recently discovered condition that affects many more women than men.
A boy grows up feeling different to everyone else – when he sees other people, he feels the sensations that they experience and he can’t understand why. Through his search for diagnosis, we hear how research into his condition has advanced our understanding of empathy.
A teenaged girl grows up feeling unbearable pain in her stomach. As an adult, she finds out why and the answer raises important questions about funding for medical research.
Helena Merriman says: “Three years ago, on a hot August day, I walked into Room 5 at a doctor’s surgery. The consultant gave me a diagnosis that would change my life. Ten minutes later, I left the room, a slightly different person to the one who’d come in. On the bus home, I found myself reaching for my phone, reading story after story, about others - like me - who’d walked into a room, been given a diagnosis, and who’d been spun back out into the world, forever changed. Room 5 is a collection of stories about lives changed and the process of recovery. I hope listeners find them as inspiring as I do.”
Richard Knight, Commissioning Editor for Factual at BBC Radio 4, says: “This gripping series takes us into the fascinating world of medicine and into the lives of some remarkable people at a moment of profound change. The result is full of insight and drama. I hope listeners will find these beautifully-crafted programmes not just absorbing but illuminating and perhaps helpful too. Room 5 tells us something about medicine. It tells us a great deal about how we handle uncertainty and adversity.”
Room 5 (8x30’) is a new Radio 4 series and podcast series produced and presented by Helena Merriman. Composer: Jeremy Warmsley. Sound designers: Eloise Whitmore and Steve Bond. It is a BBC Long Form Audio production for BBC Radio 4. The editor is Emma Rippon. It was commissioned for Radio 4 by Richard Knight.
It will be broadcast every Tuesday at 9pm on Radio 4 and is available on-demand only on BBC Sounds from Tuesday 11 January 2022.
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