Afternoons for Wednesday 25 December 2013

3:10 PM.For 75 minutes, in 94 countries around the world: millions and millions of fans simultaneous enjoyed a special 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who. Generations of fans have grown up with the Doctor… Read more Audio

3:08 PM.Fifty-three thousand Americans who fought in the Pacific during the Second World War are still listed as 'missing in action'. Journalist and author Wil S Hylton was with one of the J-PAC dive teams… Read more Audio

3:09 PM.Jacob Tomsky reveals what hotel staff really think about their guests and some of the tips that will get you what you want in his new book, 'Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles and… Read more Audio

3:11 PM.Sophie Pascoe, winner of 10 Paralympic medals, talks about the battles she's fought in and out of the pool, and the legacy she would like to create for other disabled athletes. It's all in her new… Read more Audio

3:10 PM.What your surname says about you is in part a social history of surnames in general, in part a digressive meditation on their meanings (in local politics, in social hierarchy, in fiction), and in part… Read more Audio

3:10 PM.Fly screens, cotton, those dots on the highway that make you stay in your lane. We talk to the health editor of Slate.com about some of the underappreciated people, innovations, and ideas that have… Read more Audio

3:08 PM.Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman is talking about the book he's co-authored, 'Empty Mansions', about the life of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark and the fight over her $300 million… Read more Audio

3:09 PM.Eugene Allen was a butler for 34 years in the White House, for every president from Truman to Reagan. His story had never been told until 2008 when Washington Post reporter Wil Haygood went in search… Read more Audio

3:10 PM.New York Times Magazine's ethicist, culture critic Chuck Klosterman has written 'I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined)'; He's saying we regard villains differently now, and… Read more Audio

3:09 PM.Grayson Schaffer is a senior editor of Outside magazine and he's written a piece called 'The Disposable Man: A Western History of Sherpas on Everest' about the simmering tensions between the people… Read more Audio

3:08 PM.Author Lesley Adkins talks to us about 'Jane Austen's England', which looks beyond the romance of 'Pride and Prejudice' at what England was really like in Austen's time. Audio

3:10 PM.On a summer morning in 2001, Mandy Retzlaff and her husband Pat were told they had four hours to abandon their farm in Zimbabwe. They would not go without their horses. Other fleeing farmers asked… Read more Audio

3:10 PM.Comedian Ruby Wax on her private battle with depression, which became so bad she was hospitalised three times. Ruby Wax is through all that and she has written a book 'Sane New World: Taming the… Read more Audio

3:08 PM.How many superpowers correspond, or could do in future, to the real world? Superheroes have to obey the laws of physics to a certain extent, and maybe to a greater extent than we think. That's where… Read more Audio

3:09 PM.Two Harvard sociologists are challenging the 'deadbeat dad' stereotype - the father deserting the mother of their children, leaving her to bear the burden of raising them alone. Kathryn Edin and… Read more Audio