Panorama | All stories

Thousands of Czech women are registered as being married to Germans, Americans, Brits and Italians. But finding a westerner married to a Czech male is nigh on impossible. Only 29 Americans, and 19 Brits were wedded to a real-life Czech male in the last figures for 2003; making them an extremely rare breed.

It has been over a year since the internationally successful reality-based TV contest known as "Pop Idol" first aired in the Czech Republic. Known here as Cesko hleda superstar the programme brought instant fame to singers, with most of last year's finalists releasing albums since. In this Panorama we'll be looking at arguably the three best singers to emerge from the first series: Aneta Langerova, who won, along with Samer Issa and Martina Balogova - who were among the top finalists.

The Czech children's program "Vecernicek" is practically a national institution at the age of 40. The program, which has consistently combined the talents of excellent Czech illustrators, writers, animators and directors, is by now a part of the Czech cultural heritage. Kate Barrette finds out more about the show which has helped make animated fairy tales a part of this nation's identity.

The 150-member Boston Gay Men's Chorus (BGMC) is one of New England's largest and most successful choirs. It has broken ground in affirming the positive image of the gay community in the United States, and is now on a tour of Europe. In Prague, the BGMC held a gala concert at one of the city's great concert venues last week. Radio Prague's David Vaughan met up with the chorus's executive director, Steven Smith, before the performance.

This week we treat our loyal listeners—especially the beer-lovers among you—to a special edition of Panorama. Now beer has been measured in the Czech lands with degrees, according to a method devised by one Professor Balling in the 17th century. But calibrating the strength of a poem, essay or story about beer is less of an exact science, and our staffers had a hard time choosing a winner for the 2005 Radio Prague listeners' competition. This year the topic was, "What Czech beer means to me" a weighty question to which the English section alone

Dozens of alumni of the Czechoslovak state schools set up in the United Kingdom by the wartime government in exile arrived in Prague this week—along with file boxes stuffed full of treasured keepsakes from those childhood days in perilous times. The former refugees came to donate their class photographs, report cards, school newspapers, diaries and other mementos to the Czech National Archives' collection.

A good many Czechs in the Toronto would no doubt recognise her in the street, either because they've met her before at local events or because they've seen her on TV. She's Marketa Slepcikova, the hard-working producer and host of 'Novy Zaber' - a half-hour weekly programme in Czech - serving Ontario's Czech and Slovak communities. Novy Zaber means "New Focus" and it is that show that is the focus of our programme today.

Czechoslovak participation in the first weeks of "Operation Overlord"—the invasion of Normandy that began on June 6, 1944—was almost exclusively limited to the air, as soldiers from occupied Czechoslovakia's 1st Armoured Brigade only deployed to France weeks after the Allied landing. But hundreds more Czech fighting men took part in the D-Day landings doing battle under the flags of other Allied nations.

Miroslav Jakes is most likely the most experienced Czech polar explorer. He crossed Greenland in 1984 for the first time, and then went back twelve years later, this time without any help. He climbed the highest mountain in South America - Aconcagua where he nearly died. He was the first Czech to reach the North Pole in 1993. Now in his mid fifties he says he can't stay put and can't help going back again and again - before he gets too old.

The exact nature of a Czech-run camp where hundreds of Roma—mainly children—died from disease, hunger or abuse during the German occupation has long been a polarising issue for the nation's politicians. But the stench of the pig farm built above the mass graves of the Lety u Pisku "concentration camp" back in the 1970s has now, metaphorically speaking, travelled all the way to Brussels. The Czech Republic has been singled out in a European Parliament resolution for failing to remove the pig farm and create "a graceful memorial" to honour victims