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A businessman in trouble, a scandal about racist slurs recorded in secret: Greg Jenner seeks the help of Professor Steven Fielding and Sathnam Sanghera to navigate his way around a short news item from 1977.

Marking the centenary of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, Past Forward uses a random date generator to alight somewhere in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s vast archive over the past 100 years. Public historian Greg Jenner hears an archive clip for the first time at the top of the programme, and uses it as a starting point in a journey towards the present day. The archive captures a century of British life in a unique way - a history of ordinary people’s lives, as well as news of the great events. Greg uncovers connections through people, places and ideas that link the archive fragment to Britain in 2022, pulling in help from experts and those who remember the time – and sometimes the speakers themselves, decades later - along the way. What he discovers are stories, big and small, that reveal how the people we were have shaped the people we have become.

Producer: Martin Williams