One on One | All stories

“I’m always a potential killer,” says “Lauri”, the unseen narrator of the Finnish film White Rage, one of the highlights of this year’s One World festival of human rights documentaries. The term white rage refers to the mind-set behind the cold planning of atrocities and the narrator recounts how he himself plotted a massacre at his school after being bullied for many years. Fortunately Lauri – who wrote an anonymous article about his experiences in a top Finnish magazine – didn’t carry through his bloody plans. From his narration it appears he

Charlotte Fairman – nicknamed Charlie One – is an English vocalist who has been living here in Prague for the last two decades. The singer moved to the city after appearing on Petal, a classic UK house track by mid-1990s dance outfit Wubble-U. But here she is best known as the front-woman of Ohm Square, who have been a fixture on the local dance scene for many years. When Charlie came into our studios recently, I asked what had first brought her to the city she now calls home.

Last month Jan Hubík became one of the first people in the Czech Republic to have a microchip inserted in his body, specifically his left hand. Indeed the 20-something student was the organiser of a group implantation at Paralelní polis, a futuristic Prague institution where all transactions are in the Bitcoin virtual currency. When we spoke at the café at Paralelní polis, I asked Hubík what kind of chip he had in his body.

The organisation Liga otevřených mužů, League of Open Men, are currently running Dry February, a campaign aimed at encouraging Czech men to abstain from alcohol for the month. To find out why, I spoke to the group’s Lukáš Talpa. Our conversation also took in a wide range of other gender issues, including stay-at-home fatherhood and the lack of male teachers in Czech schools. To begin, I asked Talpa to characterise Czech men in general.

One of the most thought-provoking documentaries to hit local cinema screens in recent months has been Czechs Against Czechs by Tomáš Kratochvíl. In the highly personal film, the young director – a member of the majority population – goes to live in a desperately poor Romany ghetto in north Bohemia. Along the way, he also encounters far-right activists who organise anti-Roma demonstrations, as well as members of the public who don’t hide their hatred of the ethnic minority. When we spoke, I asked Kratochvíl what had first led him to set up home in

Jana Kománková runs Proti šedi (which translates as “against the grey”), a highly useful one-stop website for anybody interested in arts events in Prague. She has been a well-known name in local alternative music circles since the early 1990s, as a deejay with Radio 1 and a critic with numerous magazines and newspapers. Remarkably the Prague-born Kománková began reviewing concerts for Rock & Pop at only 17. When we met at a café, I asked her how she’d managed to launch her career at such an early age.

During WWII, the London-based Czechoslovak government in exile had only one method of communicating regularly with its people at home: over the airwaves of the BBC. To discuss the content of these programmes, ministers’ broadcasting skills, coded messages to the resistance and much more, I recently caught up with academic Erica Harrison, who has conducted ground-breaking research into the subject. My first question: How much broadcasting did the exile government actually do?

Dr. Irena Edwards is the head of the Czech National Trust, a UK-based organisation that supports conservation in the Czech Republic. Dr. Edwards left Prague at a young age and continued her law career in Britain, where she became a high flier in the corporate world. Her dual qualification meant she was much in demand when the Iron Curtain came down and she spent much of the 1990s helping UK firms get a foothold in her now democratic native country.

As Czech Radio’s correspondent in London, Jiří Hošek is for many of his compatriots one of their main sources of news from Great Britain. When we met recently at the bustling St Pancras train station, our conversation took in everything from listeners’ perceptions of the UK to the challenges of working alone. But I first asked Hošek – who has been in London for three years – what kind of stories his editors in Prague were typically interested in.

Jantar Publishing is a London-based press that brings translated titles from Central and Eastern Europe to a broader international audience. So far all of its releases have been Czech, ranging from Karel Jaromir Erben’s classic 19th century poem Kytice (The Bouquet) to a novel by Michal Viewegh that was a huge hit in the original. The man behind Jantar Publishing is Michael Tate, an Englishman who has in the past lived in Prague. When we met at the British Library last month, I asked Tate what had led him to launch the company five or six years