Saturday Morning Podcast Options

8:07 AM.Finland was named the happiest country in the world this month...again!: It's the third straight year the country's come out on top of the World Happiness Report. So why are the Finns so damn happy?! 

11:05 AM.Professor Steven Taylor is an Australian academic who's been living in Canada since 1988. On the 1st December 2019, just a few weeks before the full scale of the novel coronavirus outbreak became… Read more Audio

10:35 AM.Working from home isn't exactly a new experience for phylogeneticist Dr James Hadfield. Based in Wanaka but employed by Seattle's Bedford Lab, he works on the open source Nextstrain platform: this… Read more Audio, Gallery

10:05 AM.It's proving to be an unlikely-sounding global hit. The six-part Netflix documentary series Cheer follows the US's best college cheer-leading squad, Navarro College from Texas, as they train for the… Read more Video, Audio

9:30 AM.Under the Twitter hashtag #CoReadingVirus, the nature and travel writer Robert Macfarlane is doing his bit to fight back against the boredom and increasing isolation many are experiencing as health… Read more Audio

9:05 AM.Dubbed a 'dreamlike masterpiece' and 'one of the defining British films of the decade' in a 5 star review by film critic Mark Kermode, you won't have seen many movies like Bait before. A story of… Read more Audio

8:30 AM.Consultant clinical virologist (and Naked Scientist) Dr Chris Smith returns with the latest on what we're discovering about COVID-19 and how it's spreading. This week, a team of Imperial College… Read more Audio

8:10 AM.Like other residents of Paris, journalist and science writer Laura Spinney is holed up in her home in the French capital: she's only able to venture out if she can produce an official certificate… Read more Audio

11:40 AM.Poet and writer Kate Camp returns for the latest instalment of Kate's Klassics. This week she reviews Maya Angelou's autographical work from 1969, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, a celebration of the… Read more Video, Audio

11:05 AM.The threat of Covid-19 invites us to think as communities rather than as individuals, says Irish poet and conflict mediator Pádraig Ó Tuama. Read more Audio

10:05 AM.Hilary Mantel has won two Man-Booker awards and is tipped for a third with the release of The Mirror & The Light, the final book in her "Wolf Hall" trilogy which follows the final chapters of Thomas… Read more Audio

9:40 AM.Professor Rewi Newnham (Ngapuhi) from Victoria University of Wellington studies ancient pollen for what it can tell us about our changing vegetation, and our changing climate. His early experiences… Read more Audio

9:05 AM.Dr Maysoon Salama is the manager of the An-Nur Early Childhood Centre in Wigram. Her husband was badly injured, and her son Atta Elayyan killed, in the attack on Christchurch's Al Noor Mosque on 15th… Read more Audio

8:40 AM.How will the ongoing global upheaval over the novel coronavirus outbreak shape our future lives? Bryan Walsh is TIME's former international editor and now the Future Correspondent for Axios, covering… Read more Audio

8:10 AM.Dr Chris Smith, consultant virologist at Cambridge University and one of BBC Radio 5 Live's Naked Scientists, is back, with the latest info on COVID-19, and practical advice to help us manage the… Read more Audio

11:35 AM.Actor, playwright and painter Carl Bland wrote and co-directed Mr Red Light, a comic story about a bank robbery that goes wrong (so badly wrong in fact that the would-be robber ends up taking hostages… Read more Audio

11:15 AM.Rajorshi (Raj) Chakraborti is an Indian-born novelist, essayist and short story writer. He has also lived and studied in Canada, England and Scotland, and now lives with his family in Wellington. Read more Audio

10:35 AM.Taking the conventional wedding rom com and giving it a First Nations twist, Australia's ILBIJERRI Theatre Company and New Zealand's Te Rehia Theatre Company bring cultures together in Black Ties. Read more Audio

10:05 AM.Irish director and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan (aka Micháel MacAodhagáin-O'Dobhailen) was last seen at the festival in 2018 with a production of Swan Lake. He returns with the Teac Da sa… Read more Video, Audio

9:35 AM.Oscar-winning songwriter, and one half of world-conquering comedy folk duo Flight of the Conchords, Bret McKenzie is also one of this year's Festival of The Arts' curators. He's assembled an eclectic… Read more Audio

9:05 AM.American artist and musician Laurie Anderson is one of the curators of this year's NZ Festival of the Arts. Anderson tells Kim Hill she feels unchanged by the decades that've passed since she… Read more Video, Audio

8:45 AM.Serhii Plokhy is a professor of history at Harvard University. His 2018 book Chernobyl: History of A Tragedy tells the story of the nuclear accident that occurred on Saturday 26 April 1986, at the No… Read more Audio