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The Czech Republic is marking 25 years since the start of the Velvet Revolution which toppled the communist regime. The country has since undergone a dramatic transformation from totalitarianism to a free-market democracy, affecting virtually all areas of life. The changes have been especially marked in Prague and other big cities but in the regions, the transformation has been less smooth and often more painful. In our special programme today, we look at how two historic Czech towns, Mikulov and Stříbro, have changed over the last 25 years.

Gary Keith Griffin is currently in Prague presenting his new Czech-language movie Listopad (November), which explores the Velvet Revolution from the perspective of young participants in the street demonstrations of that time. Griffin also had personal experience to draw on, having himself been in the city as those historic events were unfolding at the end of 1989. When we met on Národní St., where the revolution began on November 17 that year, I asked the Oscar-winning cameraman what he had found when he arrived in Prague on an NBC news

A couple of generations ago, certain young Czechs opposed to the communist regime’s re-writing of history engaged in the smuggling of books and other materials, determined to thwart official acts of revisionism and the suppression of information. Today, Petr Harmáček, a 26-year-old English teacher from the city of Pilsen, is engaged in a somewhat similar fight, albeit related to American film history. Going by the Internet nickname “Harmy” he has devoted hundreds of hours to trying to restore the original Star Wars trilogy – namely “Star Wars”,

In the profile on her blog site, Victoria Dougherty writes that she comes from “the ultimate Cold War family”, a description it would be hard to disagree with. In this special programme, the author, who lived in Prague in the early 1990s, discusses their dramatic, sometime heart-wrenching stories – and how her grandparents’ experiences helped inform her novel The Bone Church.

Five-year-old British brain cancer patient Ashya King has just completed a six week stint at the Proton Therapy Centre in Prague. His case caught the attention of the world, with stories of parental abduction, imprisonment and finally, a promising new kind of radiotherapy undertaken in the Czech Republic. Doctors say the treatment has been successful, and now the boy has returned to Spain for further medical procedures.

In a special programme to mark Czech Statehood Day, I am joined in the studio by Ondřej Matějka, who is the Deputy Director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. He has agreed to help me explore some issues related to heraldry, meaning national symbols and the iconography of the Czech people.

The US ambassador to the Czech Republic, Norman Eisen, is set to leave Prague later this month, after three and a half years in office. In our special programme, Ambassador Eisen discusses the state of the Czech-US relations, his involvement in Czech anti-corruption battle and human rights efforts, as well as his personal reflections of his time in Prague. I sat down with Norman Eisen at the US ambassador’s residence, and first asked him what he thought his biggest accomplishments were.

On July 5, the Karlovy Vary Film Festival screened a fresh copy of the New Wave classic Ostře Sledované Vlaky (Closely Watched Trains, 1966). This is the latest Czech film to have undergone a major restoration. At the same time, the Czech National Film Archive is waiting to see if funding is made available for the restoration of a further ten films from its renowned collection. In this special programme, Dominik Jůn visits the archive to discuss issues related to restoration, digitisation - and the difference between the two.

This spring I worked on a project to explore the Czech Radio archives with a group of international undergraduate students, studying at the Anglo-American University in Prague. This followed up on a similar project last year to mark the radio’s 90th birthday. Czech Radio has one of the biggest radio archives anywhere in the world, going way back to the late 1920s and it includes several hundred recordings in English, most of them from the radio’s international broadcasts. Working in groups, the students spent time delving into the archives and they

In the second of our series looking at the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One, we follow the continuing Bohemian connections on the eve of the fateful Sarajevo assassination and afterwards. These include the fateful wrong turn in the city by the archduke’s driver, the sentence served by the assassin, and the bullet that soon caused so many deaths and injuries.