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Dancing with Madonna Kept Me Alive

Salim Gauwloos became famous dancing with Madonna on her iconic Blond Ambition tour. While he was part of her message about sexual health, he was harbouring a secret.

Salim Gauwloos became famous dancing with Madonna on her iconic Blond Ambition tour. Madonna used the tour to promote freedom of sexuality and sexual health. All of this made a young Salim feel extremely uncomfortable. The reason he was so anxious was that he was harbouring a secret.

The Erasmus scheme is an exchange programme for university students in Europe. Through it, you can spend six months or a year in a different country within the European Union. It's aimed at people in their first years of college who want to learn a new language, and at older students who are planning to do research in another country. But last year, a rather unusual applicant got a place in Verona, in the north of Italy - 80-year-old student Miguel Castillo.

Leo Dittrich is a German fireman who was called to an unusual emergency - a boy locked inside an airtight safe. It was too dangerous to cut the safe open, and no one knew the code, so how would they get him out?

Jenny Lu came to the UK from Taiwan 20 years ago to study the arts, and realised that what she really wanted was to be a filmmaker. She soon tapped into an East Asian crowd living in London, and they would all get together from time to time. On one of those occasions she met a woman called Anna. Anna ended up taking her own life after working in an illegal massage parlour in London. To draw attention to this issue, Jenny decided to make a film about Anna's life.

(Photo: Blond Ambition Tour 1990. Credit: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images)

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53 minutes

Last on

Wed 25 Jul 2018 06:06GMT

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Podcast: Lives Less Ordinary

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