Episodes

Broadcaster Anita Rani's story is of a long-hidden family secret, one rooted in India’s Partition in 1947. A secret that changed not just everything Anita thought she knew about Britain’s legacy in India... but rocked her own sense of identity.

When British-Somali writer Nadifa Mohamed sought to draw on her father’s life as a colonial subject for her first novel, she never dreamed he would unravel the tale of a modern-day Odysseus - and lift the lid on parts of the British Empire the history books often forget.

The story of a tiny, forgotten island in a West African river delta - and a proud community in the Eastern USA - reveals new and shocking insights into Britain’s involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade.

Star of stage and screen Dame Diana Rigg tells the story of her childhood in 1940s colonial India - as her working-class family attempted to scale the social ladder and make a better life for themselves in the final, turbulent days of the British Raj.

Poet Benjamin Zephaniah’s mother Valerie was a member of the "Windrush generation" of British subjects who were invited to the UK from the Caribbean in the 1950s.

He talks to Afua about how his own generation sought to forge a new sense of British identity - and how those political and cultural values brought him into conflict with not just the British Establishment - but his own beloved Mum.

What happens when Empire leaves a country - and its people - behind? Singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss left Hong Kong as a teenager, shortly before the UK handed the colony over to China in 1997. She unpicks the story of one of the last embers of the once-mighty British Empire - presenting a uniquely different relationship between a colonial government and its people.