From WBEZ Chicago, it's this American Life.
I'm Eric Glass.
So a while back, Brian Reed, who at the time was the senior producer of our show, and he'd recently finished this great seven episode podcast called S Town.
He was going around giving speeches every now and then about S Town, and he was out giving a speech when a journalism student in Birmingham, England, approached him and told him a story.
Something that had been big news there, and there was still a mystery at the heart of it that nobody had ever solved.
And Brian decided to team up with this student.
And honestly, they have been like dogs with the bone, running this down through many twists and turns and officials trying to avoid them or shut them down.
The student, Hamza Syed, is now a former journalism student and somebody who was in all of our lives.
He moved here to the United States to finish the story, which became much too big to fit into one or two episodes of our program.
So our colleagues at Serial took it over to turn into a podcast series.
Sarah Koenig, the host of Serial, became their editor.
The series rolled out this week and it's spectacular.
Completely original.
I'm very excited to play you the first installment of the show today on our show so you can hear what it's like.
I defy you not to get caught up in the story the way that we all were.
And so with that, I'll hand things over to Hamza for part one of the Trojan Horse affair.
This is my first story as a journalist.
I hadn't planned for it to be my last story, but it probably will be, given what's happened in the years I've been working on this.
It's about a letter that surfaced in my city and had huge consequences for Britain.
This letter launched four government investigations, changed our national policy and ended careers.