Dispatches

Peter Oborne, political editor of The Spectator, hits the campaign trail to find out what the politicians are talking about. Are the subjects they address really relevant to the electorate? And how do they keep the debate on issues they think will win them votes?

Fourteen months after the original Royal Mail undercover investigation, Dispatches returns to secretly film and establish whether the service, as they claim, has dramatically improved. Has Chief Exec Adam Crozier taken control of untrained staff, outdated machinery, ineffective managers and poor industrial relations as he promised?

The school siege at Beslan on September 1st, 2004 left 334 dead and a small town in shock, having to come to terms with the loss of so many of its people.

Reporters Mariusz Pilis and Marcin Mamon travel to Chechnya, one of the most dangerous places on earth, to report on what life is like after more than a decade of Chechen terrorism and Russian repression. Filmed over the course of nine months, the film reveals that what started as a separatist movement in 1994 has now become synonymous with terrorism.

Using a combination of undercover filming and scientific analysis, Supermarket Secrets investigates whether the food on supermarket shelves is really as good as it looks, whether prices are as good as they seem and what happens behind the scenes in the production of supermarket food.

Using a combination of undercover filming and scientific analysis, Supermarket Secrets investigates whether the food on supermarket shelves is really as good as it looks, whether prices are as good as they seem and what happens behind the scenes in the production of supermarket food.

Dispatches examines the staggering scale of shoplifting which costs retailers and ultimately consumers billions of pounds every year. While the general public largely consider shoplifting a trivial and 'victimless' crime, theft from stores is increasingly lining the pockets of drug addicts and gangs of organised criminals who are stealing to order.

This heartbreaking film is like a bad dream: there's a sense of bleakness and you can't see anything clearly. Its saddest sections are filmed undercover in the closed world of North Korea where we discover, with a lurching stomach, that it's not uncommon to see people lying dead in the street. Reporter Kim Jung Eun tracks down dissidents who have fled the country and builds a picture of the makeshift underground: a big force for change is smuggled videos of foreign soap operas; one man who managed to paste up a defiant poster and film it has become a hunted hero. It becomes unbearably moving to glimpse the plight of a whole nation through snatches of secretly filmed footage, but by the end you feel the very least we can do is watch.

In the wake of the London bombings Navid Akhtar, a British Pakistani Muslim, explores the deep-rooted tensions and alienation within his community and asks how this has contributed to the terror attacks.

Peter Oborne, political editor of the Spectator, reports on the West's exit strategy for Iraq. He believes the invasion of Iraq is proving to be the greatest foreign policy failure since Munich. Oborne argues that the plan to transform Iraq into a unified liberal democracy, a beacon of hope in the Middle East, is pure fantasy. Reporting on location with US troops in Sadr City, and through interviews with leading figures in Britain and the US, Oborne argues that the coalition and its forces on the ground are increasingly irrelevant in determining the future of Iraq - a future that's unlikely to be either unified, liberal or democratic.

President Bush's decision to declare war on Iraq has now cost the lives of more than 2,000 American troops and injured another 30,000. With such substantial loss of life and appalling numbers of injured, reporter Deborah Davies investigates how the Bush administration has attempted to suppress the scale of the casualties and so minimise this public relations disaster.

As Tony Blair unveils his tough new line on deporting foreign terror subjects following the July bombings, journalist Andrew Gilligan investigates whether these new rules will mean suspects, who have never been found guilty by a jury, will be delivered into the hands of torturers. Gilligan examines the evidence that Britain's support for America's War on Terror has extended to alleged complicity in the practice of 'extraordinary rendition' - the abduction of terror suspects and their removal to regimes with poor human rights records.

Following her investigation into supermarket foods in Dispatches: Supermarket Secrets, journalist Jane Moore turns her attention to the once-a-year belt-busting extravaganza that is our Christmas dinner.