Lockdown's Legacy: Five years on from the UK's first lockdown, BBC Radio 4 and 5 Live explore long term impact on children and young people

BBC News

27-02-2025

On 23rd March 2020, the Prime Minister announced the first lockdown in the UK, ordering people to "stay at home". In a series of special programming across Radio 4 and 5 Live this March, the BBC will mark five years since the first covid lockdown, exploring the profound, long-lasting impact on the children and young people who faced extraordinary circumstances at a transformative age.
On Monday 17th March, three documentaries presented by Catherine Carr, will hear directly from three distinct groups - children, teachers and medics - about their own personal experiences of encountering lockdown. Catherine will speak to children and young people about their lockdown memories, to the teachers and school workers on what they saw of the effects of the restrictions and hear the views of medics and nurses on how things changed for the children and young people they were treating.
Across the Radio 4 schedule, there will be an extended edition of More Or Less, asking what we know about the effects of lockdown on children and young people. Woman's Hour will look at the biggest covid legacy for the younger generation, considering the impact on physical and mental development of young people and look ahead to potential solutions. For Start the Week, Tom Sutcliffe is joined by guests to discuss how such a monumental event could have had affected brain cognition, and whether there have been lasting effects on young people.
More widely, the season will consider the wider implications across society with Farming Today hearing how lockdown changed the long-term trajectory for one farming couple for the better. Archive on 4: Waiting for Covid will recall the period between the early reports of Covid and the start of lockdown, and asking how the decision to lock down was made. Inside Health will examine how Covid changed scientific research and for the Food Programme, Dan Saladino will explore crisis and resilience.
Front Row will be broadcasting one of Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafasson's magical live performances from the stage of the empty Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, which he did every week during the first lockdown, and will also look at the different ways that the lockdown changed art and culture. Radio 4 will also broadcast Waiting for Waiting for Godot, Adrian Edmondson's drama about a group of actors whose performance of Beckett's famous play is put on hold when the UK goes into lockdown.
Radio 5 Live is marking the fifth anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic with special content throughout the week reflecting on ways the lockdowns changed our world. Presenters will be hearing stories from families, carers, workers and young people whose lives were turned upside down, and asking what has been the long term impact on businesses, the NHS and our schools. They'll be exploring the origins of Covid with the Naked Scientist podcaster Dr Chris Smith, and assessing how ready are we for the next pandemic? And Rachel Burden and Rick Edwards will be talking to people on 5 Live Breakfast who are still experiencing health problems five years on.
Director of Speech and Controller of BBC Radio 4 and 4 Extra Mohit Bakaya says "Five years after this global crisis, it's crucial that, as well as reflecting on the lives lost during the pandemic, we explore the impact lockdown had on young people in the UK. Many were at pivotal stages of their educational journey, and the repercussions are still felt in our homes, schools, universities, and within wider society today. Through this special season of programming across Radio 4, Radio 5 Live, and BBC Sounds, I hope we can gain a deeper understanding of the long-lasting effects and perhaps discover new ways to mitigate them."
Programming across BBC, more details to be announced:
Saturday 15th March
Archive on 4
Lockdown's Legacy: Waiting for Covid
8pm – 9pm
Monday 17th March
Farming Today
5:45am - 6:00am
More or Less
9am - 9:45am
Woman's Hour
10am – 11am
Lockdown's Legacy: The Children
3:30pm – 4pm
Lockdown's Legacy: The Teachers
4pm – 4:40pm
Front Row
7:15pm – 8pm
Front Row will be broadcasting one of Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafasson's magical live performances from the stage of the empty Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, which he did every week during the first Lockdown exclusively on Front Row, as music venues across the world were shut down and completely silent. Plus Front Row will look at the different ways that the lockdown changed art and culture.
Lockdown's Legacy: The Medics
8pm – 8:30pm
Start the Week
9pm – 9:45pm
Five years ago, in response to the Covid pandemic, the government mandated a series of lockdowns, with the closure of schools and businesses and social distancing. Tom Sutcliffe is joined by guests to discuss how such a monumental event could have had affected brain cognition, and whether there have been lasting effects on young people. But he also hears tales of resilience among neurodiverse communities.
The neuroscientist Daniel Yon looks at the cognitive impact of unprecedented events in his forthcoming book, A Trick of the Mind - How the Brain Invents Your Reality (published, June 2025). He explains how times of instability and uncertainty upset the brain's ability to understand the world, and make people more susceptible to conspiracy theories.
The Covid-19 Social Study was the largest study exploring the psychological and social effects of the pandemic on the UK population. Dr Daisy Fancourt, Associate Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London explains what they learnt about the impact of social isolation. The developmental psychologist at Cambridge University, Professor Claire Hughes, has looked more closely at families with young children, across six different countries, with very different lockdown policies. Although there was a link between family stress related to the pandemic and child problem behaviours, more recent work questions whether the lockdown has had longer term effects.
The artist and zinemaker Dr Lea Cooper has co-curated a new exhibition at the Wellcome Trust, Zines Forever! DIY Publications and Disability Justice (until 14th September). Zines are self-published works, and Dr Cooper says several on display were created during lockdown, and showcase personal stories of resistance and self-expression.
Tuesday 18th March
Inside Health
9:30am – 10am
Waiting for Waiting for Godot
2:15pm - 3pm
On 16th March 2020 the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, gave a press conference in Downing Street to bring the public up to date with 'the national fight back against the new Coronavirus.' As part of a series of measures 'to delay and flatten the peak of the epidemic' was the recommendation that the public should avoid going to social venues such as pubs, clubs and theatres.
The next day, 17th March, a group of actors are waiting on stage. They are half way through a run of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Will the show go on? Will it close? Will they ever get paid? Will they ever work again? So many questions - but the person who can answer them still hasn't turned up.
This is a new play for audio by the actor, writer and comedian Adrian Edmondson. He has been obsessed with Waiting For Godot since his school days - he freely admits he and Rik Mayall borrowed heavily from it for their award winning television comedy series Bottom. And in 1991 he was Estragon to Mayall's Vladimir, in a West End production of Beckett's masterpiece.
Adrian's other writing credits include two series of essays, Adrian Edmondson – Signs of Life, for BBC Radio 3 (still available on BBC Sounds), his Sunday Times Bestseller autobiography Berserker!, and several children's books.
Cast:
The Sofa Surfer Adrian Edmondson
The Equity Dep Kiell Smith-Bynoe
The Hoarder Simon Callow
Unlucky Jim Christopher Ryan
Voice on Tannoy Madeleine Paulson
Writer: Adrian Edmondson
Producer and Director: Caroline Raphael
Executive Producer: Celia de Wolff
Sound: David Thomas
A Dora production for BBC Radio 4
Friday 21st March
The Food Programme
11am – 11:45am
RB2