The Patch: BBC radio show's postcode lottery unearths stories in random places

A vigor presenter has spent 5 years visiting places successful the UK astatine random - virtually - and uncovering fascinating, unexpected and moving stories.

Each occurrence of Polly Weston's BBC Radio 4 bid The Patch starts with a random postcode generator. An existent postcode lottery to determine wherever she indispensable go.

She has nary accidental successful wherever she ends up, but erstwhile determination it's up to her to excavation retired compelling characters, secrets and stories.

"It's ever truly scary, particularly if you've made nary interaction astatine each and past you conscionable locomotion into a place," the shaper and presenter says.

"There's a infinitesimal wherever you get determination and you think, each right, I'm going to bash this. It's similar jumping disconnected the precocious committee astatine the swimming pool.

"You spell successful and go, 'Hi I'm Polly, I'm from the BBC and this is going to dependable precise odd, but I get fixed random postcodes and I've conscionable been fixed this one. And truthful I'm here!

"And past they look astatine you and go, 'Right… what bash you privation to know?'

"And you go, 'I don't know!'"

These leaps into the chartless go journeys of discovery. It turns retired determination truly are stories everyplace if you scratch beneath the surface. And the stories, similar the locations, alteration wildly.

So far, her destinations person ranged from the City of London to a distant portion of the Scottish Highlands and a mysterious RAF basal successful Norfolk.

For the archetypal occurrence of the caller series, which starts connected Thursday, the postcode generator plucked retired the code of the UK's lone dedicated airdrome for backstage jets - successful Farnborough, Hampshire.

That led Weston to delve into the realm of backstage pitchy charter brokers. "It's decidedly taken maine into a satellite that I knew perfectly thing about. And it's precise interesting."

The 2nd episode's Lincolnshire postcode contained a World War Two depository and an unfastened prison.

"Someone was captured connected the time that I was there. He'd been connected the tally for 5 months and helium was caught erstwhile I was connected that archetypal visit."

Sometimes the communicative successful her spot is evident from the outset. Mostly, she starts astatine the champion spot to enactment her receptor to the crushed - usually a pub oregon a café.

"One clip I went to a favored shop. That was a fluke but it did really crook retired to beryllium a truly bully stake due to the fact that it's not what you'd expect to beryllium the hub of the community."

She continues: "The archetypal happening is looking for the setting. And past it's the characters you're drawn to. So often, you locomotion into a spot and you think, I've ne'er been anyplace similar this before. And you think, OK, I'll enactment present then."

Armed with quiescent compassion and journalistic tenacity, the Bristol-based programme-maker invariably wins implicit the radical she meets and seldom fails to get to the bottommost of what's going on.

There are often astonishing twists, and she tin extremity up a agelong mode from wherever she started out.

A boatyard successful Lowestoft, Suffolk, hid the unthinkable communicative of super-fast boats that were archetypal built determination and are inactive utilized by cause runners to evade authorities disconnected the seashore of Spain.

"If I'd person tried to person recovered that story, I couldn't have," she says. "There's nary mode you could person fabricated that. It's the superb happening astir existent life, that you don't cognize wherever it's going to instrumentality you."

It's besides taken her to a pristine but unused "ghost play course" successful Perthshire, and an interrogation with a subordinate of the antecedently media-shy billionaire household who ain it.

And it's taken her to an RAF basal with unusual elephantine domes, and yet to the erstwhile caput of the US Space Force, who revealed what they are for.

They are illuminating insights into absorbing corners of our country. But the astir memorable episodes are those successful which Weston draws america into mean lives.

On a distant peninsula successful Lancashire, we met Margaret and Trevor, who were forced to determination distant from their beloved assemblage and section oversea shanty radical aft Trevor had a stroke.

He could nary longer sing the shanties helium had written, and astir had ne'er been recorded - until Weston captured Trevor's dependable erstwhile his dependable had recovered.

Elsewhere, successful the favored shop, she heard astir a spate of deaths caused by fake medicine drugs successful Aberdeen. As the occurrence went on, the absorption narrowed to travel Stuart, a canine proprietor who was utilizing them.

"The ones that that instrumentality [with me] are the ones wherever you've met individuals who you've warmed to oregon got to understand, and past thing successful their acquisition tells you thing bigger astir the world," Weston says.

"It's the other of going successful and going, 'Here's the story, who americium I going to find to archer it?' It's saying, 'Here's a idiosyncratic I privation to perceive to, here's a idiosyncratic I privation to walk clip with, and here's what their communicative is teaching maine astir the world.'"

Many of the random places she's visited aren't often represented successful the media. Or if they are, it's by journalists who deliberation they already cognize the story.

So what has she learned astir the country?

"One happening is, we're an island," Weston replies. "You would not judge however often I extremity up determination that is h2o based. I cognize that's not what you meant!" Not really.

"The different happening is... I effort not to marque excessively galore assumptions astir anyplace now. Because radical and places are ever surprising, wherever you are."

She recalls signaling an aboriginal occurrence successful south-west Wales and "suddenly grasping the mode that this state is divided successful a mode that I hadn't [before]".

Weston pauses to take her words carefully. "There is simply a tendency, successful the mode that we speech astir the divisions successful this country, to sometimes speech astir places arsenic though they don't recognize things successful a way, oregon they're misguided, and that's the crushed that they clasp the views that they do.

"And my idiosyncratic acquisition has been that it's the opposite. Actually, the perspectives that radical person connected the satellite and the mode it is... determination are reasons for them that are important to understand."

A random approach, it turns out, is not a atrocious mode to bash that.

The caller bid of The Patch is connected Radio 4 astatine 09:00 and 21:30 BST connected Thursdays and on BBC Sounds.