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Ed's note: This week, Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio Asian Network has been reporting on Bangladesh as the country commemorates 40 years of independence. Interactive Producer, Mintu Rahman returned to Bangladesh and retraced his childhood journey during War of Liberation. - PM.

On Friday 16 December, Bangladesh marked the 40th Anniversary of its independence, and I was fortunate enough to be part of a team covering the event for the Ö÷²¥´óÐã.

I've had mixed emotions about returning to Bangladesh for this event as this where I was born and had witnessed the brutal events of 1971.

Revisiting these old sites, have brought back many memories. When things took a turn for the worse I was only thirteen with six other siblings and only my mother to look after us. My mum was adamant and strong minded and wanted to save us from the grips of a war that eventually claimed millions of people's lives.

When the war started on 25 March, my older brother and I had to flee our boarding school to our village home. Within weeks the war escalated to take in the rest of the countryside which meant no place was safe.

It wasn't long before we heard news that Pakistani soldiers were on their way. We waited till the last minute before moving out. My mum dug a hole at the back of our house and hid our gold, taking only the very basics things that we could carry. Within a few days of that I saw soldiers come to our neighbour's house and tried to abuse his daughter. When her father tried to intervene he was shot dead.

Our houses were burned down and my beloved pet dog was killed. We were made homeless with nowhere to go. Nobody wanted to put us up because some of my cousins had joined the liberation movement and this would put anyone who helped us at risk.

My mum carried us from village to village, through wet muddy bogs and paddy fields. We were robbed of the small possessions we had by collaborators of Pakistan.

After what seemed a life time pleading for a place to stay, hope came in an unlikely form. One of the poorest women in our local area, a former servant in fact, took us into her home. My mother had to handle everything on her own as my father was by this time in the UK. She was prepared to do anything to save us.

Solders were now only targetting young men and boys. Despite this my cousins all decided to join the Liberation Army that was now forming in India. I too wanted to go with them but my mum wouldn't agree. Eventually she gave in on the condition that I didn't actually become a freedom fighter, and that I would go to India and contact my father.

The night of my departure finally came on a dark night. There was a knock on the door, it was my turn. It was a very emotional goodbye between my mother and myself. I remember the tight grip she gave me. It took us three days and nights, crossing three rivers, sewers and canals to make it to the Indian border.

Once I got to India I was in a training camp and I kept in mind at all times my promise to my mother to not become a fighter. I spent my time helping injured soldiers. Now seeing these same places, I often feel that I had been fortunate enough to survive where many of my friends perished, including my roommate, Illiayas.

Bangladesh has come a long way since those days of liberation. Many people associate Bangladesh with poverty and floods, but Bangladesh has indeed prospered in its short history.

I felt privileged to be able to share some of my childhood memories with Sonia Deol. I have had so many heartfelt responses to my appearance on the show. I have never even shared these stories with my own wife and children. After hearing me on the show they were surprised and curious to know why I had neglected to tell them. I explained to my children that this was a deeply upsetting stage in my life, that until now I hadn't wanted to revisit.

Today I went to visit the Geneva Camp in Dhaka, also known as the Camp for the Stranded Pakistanis. It made me very sad to hear stories that were as gruesome and frightening as mine. This made me realise the value of my freedom. I feel very proud to have had a hand in the making of Bangladesh.

Mintu Rahman is interactive producer, Ö÷²¥´óÐã Asian Network

• More on the Asian Network's Bangladesh at 40 coverage
• Listen to live broadcasts on Sunday 18 December
• Read more at the Editors Blog

Starting today 'One Billion Downloads: A Selection Box' features a different presenter each day, introducing their favourite Ö÷²¥´óÐã podcast.

It's been just over a year since I joined the Audio Visual Team in Audio and Music Interactive and was given what I think of as one of the best jobs at the Ö÷²¥´óÐã - looking after the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's Podcast Service.

There are currently around 300 podcasts on the site, from Annie Mac's Mini Mix on Radio 1 to Graham Norton on Radio 2 and The Infinite Monkey Cage on Radio 4. We've been offering podcasts of many of our programmes since 2007. We know from our research that for many of you it's a great way to listen on the go.

It's been a year of celebrations and a few firsts for the team.

We released the Desert Island Discs archive and currently there are almost one thousand episodes of this classic available to download and keep. There was the first pan-Ö÷²¥´óÐã podcast marking the Royal Wedding, which pulled together all the best bits across Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio in one daily podcast.

We've now have 15 million downloads a month in the UK and recently passed one billion downloads worldwide since we started.

According to industry body 8.5 million adults in the UK have downloaded a podcast in 2011 compared to 4.3 million in 2007. This is good news for the industry as a whole as nearly a third of people who download podcasts listen to new radio programmes they hadn't previously heard as a result.

In order to celebrate this momentous milestone (apart from a group high-five in the office) we've decided to do what we do best and to make a podcast of it.

We love podcasts and so do lots of our presenters so we asked them to introduce you to their favourites through our new pop-up podcast: One Billion Downloads: A Selection Box.

Starting today One Billion Downloads: A Selection Box features a different presenter each day, introducing their favourite Ö÷²¥´óÐã podcast.

Kicking the whole thing off is the amazing Lauren Laverne from Ö÷²¥´óÐã 6 Music. Lauren has often tweeted and commented about her favourite podcasts so she was top of our list but which podcast did she pick? Download it and find out!

One Billion Downloads: A Selection Box will run for 5 days and all the programmes will be available for 7 days after that.

There are lots of big projects on the horizon for the podcast service, including another pan-Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio podcast, celebrating the run-up to the Olympics in 2012 and bringing you the best coverage from all across Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio all in one place.

Sami Qasem is a Content Producer for Audio Visual Services, Ö÷²¥´óÐã A&Mi

• Read in the Telegraph
• Radio Today:
• Broadcast:
• Ö÷²¥´óÐã Media Centre: Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio celebrates billionth download (with top ten charts for daily and weekly podcast downloads)

The Asian Network's website is starting a journey of change as of today.

We've released a new, more dynamic homepage that focuses on live radio. It takes full advantage of a widescreen format and gives us better spaces to promote Asian Network content. The long term aim is that we develop the Asian Network homepage into something more like the current Radio 1 and 1xtra homepages. These took over a year to come to fruition from concept to launch (read more here), but rather than wait another year, we've decided to strip back the site and release something now that we can develop over time.

Greater automation in this new homepage allows us to focus on producing content and building closer relationships with audiences through social media, such as and pages, rather than spending lots of time manually updating the site.

The aim is that Asian Network audiences will have more information about the show that's currently on-air as well as better access to some of the best bits of the station's output that we're beginning to clip and publish online to listen and watch.

This new version of our homepage is the first step for Asian Network on the ladder towards a new radio and music product which will launch in 2012. Some of the ideas we're using on this version of the homepage may be incorporated into the radio and music product. We'll be releasing updated versions of the homepage during the coming months. Your feedback is really important in helping us on this journey - so please do tell us what you think here.

Dharmesh Rajput is Interactive Editor, Ö÷²¥´óÐã Asian Network

• Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio have also updated their current homepage. Read Chris Kimber's post on the Internet Blog for more information.

Ed's note: Comedian Stewart Lee presents It's Got Bells On, a new documentary, part of the Dance Season on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 2. Here he writes about his love of Morris dancing. Really - PM

East Suffolk Morris men: Photo by , used under

I don't remember when I saw my first .

I think it was sometime in the early seventies. My mum was working, I wasn't yet at school, and I spent a lot of time with my grand-dad. He'd been, or maybe was still, a rep for Colman's, the Norfolk based mustard company, who had diversified into providing wine and spirits. I have memories, though they may have become semi-fictionalised, of accompanying him to rural events - hunts, fetes and festivals - in forgotten places between Birmingham and Norwich, when he was invited by virtue of some commercial connection with the booze supply.

I remember a fuzzy photograph of a brown corduroy, pre-school me with him, watching men in white on a patch of grass, leaping and dancing. I've looked for it but I can't find it. Maybe it never happened. But for me that was where the Morris was filed, for most of my life, in the seventies memories stash, in the past, something mysterious and beautiful and pastoral, and probably on the way out now, along with butterflies and wild flowers and birds that nest in hedgerows.

But, like some threatened species making a comeback, over the last decade I've noticed the Morris, and various mutated species of traditional English dance, staging a slight return.

At the folk-singer 's 60th birthday show in Oxford, ten years ago, a Morris troupe took the stage before a crowd of thousands, and again, when I saw the Carthy clan gathered at the Royal Albert Hall five year back.

A live art promoter in the village of Hovingham, on the Yorkshire moors, unexpectedly got Damian Barber's traditional dancers the to open before one of my stand-up comedy shows in the mid-noughties, stunning an initially skeptical crowd with their violent and virile performance. This year I invited the folk rock band to appear in a season of music and comedy I was curating at the South Bank center, and they brought with them the , a new all-female Morris trio.

But my fondness for The Morris was sealed six years ago.

My wife and I were married in the Forest of Dean, in her native Gloucestershire. Searching for something significant and local, she had booked the Forest Of Dean Morris Men for the reception, attended by fifty or so people, in a musky woodland cellar. We'd been married in a church that morning.

My wife's a Catholic, and I am an atheist, but nonetheless I'll happily admit that the priest gave a great service, and the ritual elements added a real significance to the ceremony. That said, the service did represent for me a compromise I suppose, of the sort one must make in a marriage. I hadn't expected it, but the appearance of the Morris men that evening somehow squared the circle, and left me feeling that the old gods, too, had been paid their due.

came out of the black November night, all in white. They were accompanied by a "beast", in their particular case a man in the costume of a bright red stag, who excited all the young ladies, and intimidated the men.

I normally hate dancing, or being the centre of attention in any way, but I felt no shame as my new wife and I were made to skip in circles round the stone walled cellar, and between and beneath sudden arches made of the Morris men's human hands, while the beast looked on approvingly and clacked its wooden hooves, draped in adoring women, scowled at by their temporarily cuckolded partners.

It's no exaggeration to say that The Morris made our day, and in the dark times of exhaustion and 3am feeds, when the romance of your first meeting seems so far away, we reach back to the symbols we laid in store to give us strength at later dates, and I see the Morris once more.

That's why, when Radio 2 asked me to narrate It's Got Bells On, I couldn't say no. I am forever in the dance's debt.

Stewart Lee is a comedian

• It's Got Bells On airs on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 2 at 10pm on Monday December 12th as part of the Dance Season
• Stewart Lee's
• Stewart is also one of the guest editors this year for Radio 4's Today, and his programme will be on air on Saturday 31st December