A matter of life and death | 11 July 2019

One of the advantages that podcasts have over the scheduled array of programmes is the space that can be given to a subject, turning what would have been a one-off into a whole series sometimes three or four hours long. This can be offputting. Who has the time to give so much to one programme? Even more so now when there’s so much else on offer to distract and entertain. But in the case of the new podcast ‘dropped’ this week by the Beyond Today team those three hours (in six half-hour episodes) have been used to best effect, allowing the story to build, the voices to become clearer, the families and the horror of what they have experienced to become more real.

Claire Read’s series, Deadliest Day (produced by Heidi Pett), takes us back to 2009 and the war in Afghanistan and to one day in particular on which five members of a single platoon of infantrymen were killed and several badly injured.