the headlines: the australian prime minister, scott morrison, has cut short a family holiday in hawaii after he'd been heavily criticised for leaving the country in the middle of a bushfire emergency. fires are burning across three states and are expected to get worse. the president of france, emmanuel macron, and ivory coast president, alassane ouattara, have announced the establishment of a common west african currency to replace the colonial—era cfa franc. the eco, which will remain pegged to the euro, is due to launch next year. the death toll from a storm that battered spain, portugal and france has risen to eight people, with the affected areas bracing for the arrival of more violent weather. a strengthening storm, given the name fabien, is expected to bring downpours and strong winds to parts of western europe. one of itv‘s most popular shows,

dancing on ice, is to feature a same—sex couple as contestants when it starts its latest series this evening. the steps singer ian h watkins is teaming up with professional dancer matt evers. our correspondent lizo mzimba reports. dancing on ice is one of tv‘s most popular shows, often producing memorable moments of all different kinds. ian "h" watkins and matt evers have been rehearsing for weeks and when the programme returns tomorrow night, they'll be the first same—sex couple seen competing on a prime—time british show like this. it's about time. if we had something like this when we were children, maybe i wouldn't have felt so isolated. i wouldn't have run away from home. you know, in everyday life we see gay couples and we see same—sex couples. so it should be no different with what we are trying to do. it something that has already been embraced in other countries on similar shows.

israel's dancing with the stars featured a same—sex celebrity couple back in 2009. last month's strictly here saw two male professionals dancing together. it prompted around 200 complaints. 200 people complained, but there were millions of people that stood up and applauded. ten million. ten million viewers and there was 200 complained. perhaps the strongest message so far has come from denmark's dancing with the stars. last month, a celebrity same—sex couple won — with the public deciding the vote. something that h and matt will be hoping to repeat here in the uk. lizo mzimba, bbc news. coming up at 6 o'clock breakfast with rogerjohnson and nina warhurst, but now on bbc news, a special programme featuring five women photographers who have offered glimpses into rarely seen lives in through the lens.

photography has the ability to shine a spotlight, giving us an insight into people and places we would never otherwise have seen. in this programme, i'm going to introduce you to five remarkable female photographers working today who have ca ptu red photographers working today who have captured well is rarely documented, exploring hidden lives around the globe. coming up, a photography who befriended saudi women offering a glimpse behind their homes, and a jordanian american whose images reveal the lives of palestinians in gaza and the west bank through moments of dark humour. first, let's meet alina. but first, let's meet elina shenshoiva. she looked at how residents of norilsk adapted to living in one of the world's most isolated cities, 400 kilometres north of the arctic circle, where each winter the sun does not

rise for two months. you have a feeling that they will appear, and norilsk is a city -it — it will appear, but it never comes. norilsk is a city situated above the polar circle in russian siberia. it is one of the most northern cities in the world. with a population of 180,000 people. my mother, she lived above the polar circle during her youth and she told me lots of stories about it, and i was really interested to explore, to understand how it is to live with the polar or polar day. and how it is actually the life, in these latitudes. i chose norilsk because it has

an interesting history. it is situated in a kind of installation that isolation, — situated in isolation. because it has no ground links with other cities of russia. it is a very extreme place. for me, the main idea was to talk about the adaptation of this environment, to this climate. almost in every building we can find a solarium and people go quite often there. it is not a luxury, it is needed. when there are stronger snowstorms, columns of buses are organised twice a day and workers are brought to the mines or the plants by these buses. polar night, it comes very slowly.

one moment you understand that there is no more daylight. for me, it is very important to see sun for a good mood. so for me, one moment, it started to be very hard and heavy, i felt psychologically not good. after two months i even started to have, like, this feeling, kind of a panic that the sun will never come back. polar days are very beautiful times. people are so happy. they work, often until late, just enjoying this warm weather and beautiful golden light. it is hard, sometimes, to sleep. because lots of people are not used to sleeping when there is daylight. it is quite contradictory, because the conditions of climate are quite extreme, but people are so friendly and so joyful, they have very wonderful

sense of humour. i was surprised to meet several young people who told me that for them, norilsk, it is their zone of comfort, because they have everything, actually. they have long vacations. good salaries. regular salaries. but from the other side there are lots of people who are dreaming to go away from norilsk and to live in a more comfortable region. for me, photography is like a tool, like a key to go to some places, to meet certain people, and without being a photographer i could not actually be there. elena chernyshova, whose images show

what it is like to live in one of the coldest cities on earth. sometimes culture, rather than geography, can mean certain groups are harder to reach. during 2009 and 2010, olivia arthur spent time in saudi arabia, photographing scenes at parties and in a beach town, away from the eyes of the religious police. they have this very strong conservative islamic influence, as well as what has come with, you know, obviously the oil money. originally i went to saudi arabia to teach a workshop for young women. women i met there invited me to do houses to meet their families. isaid, can i make a picture of you in your house, at your home? something you are comfortable with. for some of them that they would be totally covered, others were ok to be photographed if i didn't show their faces.

i started making friends. i hung out with them and threw them at other girls. i stayed in a women's hostel one night, which is kind of a fascinating place, a whole apartment block for women who study or work in the city but his family are not there. so we hung out together, i showed them my work, they saw the sort of thing i was doing. they said, that's great, we would like to be in your pictures, but you cannot photograph us unless we are wearing our abayas. so i said, ok. it must have been one o'clock in the morning, they all put on their abayas and niqabs. they sat around and started making a pretend tea party. i haven't asked them to do that but in a way, we were just playing. it was fun. i took these pictures and they started playing around, this one, there is this little girl who has got a black goldfish. she stands there with her goldfish bowl and she says, look, my goldfish has an abaya. they kind of laughed. they were not laughing at themselves, we were just having fun. and at the end they said to me, thanks for that, that was great. that was a great honour that they

would trust me and let me into their world, and i took that very seriously and try to understand the desire for privacy and what that meant, what they were ok with me showing and what they were not ok. sometimes i take pictures and sometimes the girl asked me not to ta ke sometimes the girl asked me not to take their pictures and show their faces. that's great, people say, but then people say can't you show me more of her eyes? it's a curious place, a beach town a little bit out of the capital, a lot of people go there on the weekend, it is privately owned which means the rules of saudi society somehow don't exist, and that for me was very confusing. you can wear what you like, women can drive cars, ride bikes, you can swim in a bikini, some people were swimming in a abaya, so this place captured a lot of the contradictions of. i didn't really wa nt of the contradictions of. i didn't really want to say life in the

country was this way all this way, one particular thing because i realise that it is way more complicated than that and i didn't really have a proper insight, or only had some glimpses of. what i tried to do was really give people my experience, just to try to explain the stuff that was hidden and also the contradictory nature of it all. she comes up to us in a cafe, do you want to come to a dj party? no, my friend tells me, it is one of those all girls parties, they are legal. the parties click on every five minutes to make sure no—one is misbehaving. in away laughing at myself and not being able to make sense of what was going on me, it breathed a likeness into is what in parts, quite a heavy story. that was not my experience, it wasn't about women complaining about our lives, it was about we are having fun, making the most of our lives in this space that we are given. photography is intrusive and

these people are desperately private, but at the same time there we re private, but at the same time there were girls simply show our lives, show they are not as bad they think. olivia arthur, who friendships with young saudi women granted her access to private species where cameras are usually shunned — spaces. teller was born in jordan, usually shunned — spaces. teller was born injordan, but was raised in texas. she gives us new photos in occupied territories, giving us unique entry points from one of the most contested places on the planet. don't replicate what is happening in the news, find your way in that no—one else can tell. and go deeper. i am working on a place that is one of the most hyper narrated places on earth. you look at the coverage there versus anywhere else, the coverage is vast.

but i am bored by the majority of it and it doesn't represent the place but i know. and so i try to find the intimate. i try to find a unique entry point into any story, and i always try to go under, over, side door, around the corner. because i am not interested in reproducing what has already been done and said, because what is the point? it needs to be something that has more than one dimension. i married a palestinian and had children. suddenly i was not a journalist coming in and out. palestine was home and i was the one sitting at checkpoints and experiencing this reality, watching sometimes operatic scenes of ridiculousness and humour, to bypass orjust survive these situations. i started to look differently and think, what story do i want to tell? and that was occupied pleasures. there had been a wedding, there was a woman who had come

in in a wedding dress and had the wedding party because she had not been given permission to access gaza because of the blockade. and so i went and found her. she was not there. the husband was. he started telling me about his love story. he described finding her in the tunnel, i ran to her, i kissed her, it was like a bollywood movie. and then he paused and he said the most sobering, sombre thing. he said, you know, no matter what they do to us, we will always find a way to live, to love, to laugh. we didn't make it in time, they were going to their favourite spot, there were some roman ruins, it is an area settlers often try to come to discourage them. and they say that they love to go specifically to that spot for that reason, and that they looked at yoga as in a resistance. the parkour boys, they lived in one of the refugee camps and the things that they could do, it was beautiful. flying, deftly using these walls

ugly as a springboard of freedom. it was his mark on absurdity in this place. he lit a cigarette and turned. he knew the joke that was being implied and he was playing at it. and it's wonderful. humour in the middle east, it's just as prevalent, it allows you surprising places. whether you are dealing withjews, armenians, lebanese, black humour is very endemic to the region as a survival coping mechanism. so i succeed if i made you curious, left you just slightly doubting your assumptions. i was born injordan and raised in texas. that is where my critique of mainstream journalism came from. going betweenjordan and texas. i went from going from how do you survive this,

what is your take on it? whether it was black humour or something more obvious, i wanted something more personal, and how it occupies their minds to circumvent this reality and also simultaneously refused to let suffering be the definition of their existence. tania, who found that dark humour allowed her into surprising places. in 1973, paz eraserus was a teacher when general augusto pinochet overthrew the chilean government and established a dictatorship. although targeted by the police, she defied the curfew to document marginalised communities persecuted by the regime. this brutal military way of acting, you know.

you can work in metaphors, you work differently, and a way to avoid them, you know? at the end of the regime, with the coup, i had to stop my teaching at schools which was my work at the time. i had to work like a freelance photographer. in those days there weren't many women photographers. you had to be very brave to do that. things were complicated because of the curfew. in work, i had very young children, and a baby. the only way to do my things was to start investigating the street by myself. it was a way also to do sort of political resistance,

but it was very scary because the police was always after hours. —— after us. and that experience helped me a lot to move around and do sort out places to work, sort of, alibis, you know? and confronting the police that was heavy on us, you know, photographers in the street. of course my house had been searched. so a new what you had to hide and how, you know. it was a long essay, it took me four years to finish it. i was very interested in prostitution in general. i met a male prostitute, you know, transvestites. they were extremely keen on photography. they loved it. and that was fantastic, how they received me.

in the first thing i did was meet the mother of two of them. i got very close to her, in fact i dedicate the whole work to her. we made a book, you know after four years, a book that of course was censored. the subject was like the underground, you know, my friend claudia, we went with them south to escape persecution. we stayed with them in the brothel they were working, in a city called talca. that's what we recorded, constantly, you know? their lives, their experience in the beginning of the dictatorship and how badly they were treated, the ones that survived, even. so, we — i felt very close to them

and we were really good friends. you know, i been in touch with the survivors of this project. which in fact is a very tragic situation, since of them died of aids. —— most of them. it was a very tragic experience for the whole community. you know, i have to show people or make people learn how to look. the margin is where power looks differently. paz eraseris, for whom geography was a form of political resistance. —— photography. magnum photographer diana's work is intensely personal.

after the fall of the ussr her mother took her to the us without telling her father. diana found him in armenia 20 years later capturing the reunion in picture. my mum woke me up and everything was packed. we had a tiny suitcase with us, my brother and i. and my mother said take all of your important things and we left. i never said goodbye to my father. my mom's solution to forget him was simple. she cut his image out of every photograph in ourfamily album. those holes made it harder for me to forget him. i often wondered what it would have been like to have a father. i still do. my work is often about my own family, about the past, about memory.

this project is one of the first projects that really inspired me to look inwards. to start exploring my own family history. my parents met in university in armenia. my mother had just turned 21. it's strange to look at images of them together. they llook so happy. so in love. all i ever knew was her disappointment. i was born in russia at a time when the soviet union collapsed and my family, like a lot of russians, became desperate overnight. my mom wanted something more for my life. she always did. she didn't have a relationship, she didn't have a family beyond my brother and i. and we left. i never thought we wouldn't see my dad again, never thought we wouldn't see my friends again, wejust left.

and it took me two decades to go back. so this is a suitcase that my grandfather put together of things that he had collected over the last 20 years while we were missing. so there's a shirt from my brother's future wedding. dozens of returned letters. a newspaper clipping. it's called missing point, and it's as we were taken to america by our mum and he doesn't know where, and if there is anyone who knows anything, to come forward to him. i wanted to find my father, and i was separated from him when i was seven. almost 20 years later i wanted as an adult to know who this man was. ijust happens to be in armenia, my brother was with me and i rememberfinding his house. and we said, we were his kids and he said he didn't believe us. this was one of those days where i felt really lucky to be

around my dad. we were on a boat and we were paddling together, he was teaching me. he feels close but then all of a sudden he's gone. collaborative photography gives way to better storytelling. i learned this with my father. the collaboration started not so much that he is going to take pictures, he's going to write, it's more like he's going to think with me. not everything was one story or one truth. and you have two parents, it's the basic, isn't it? when you are not given out outcome you are always trying to make up for it. when i look at my dad, i think that he is the exact person i needed in my life or relationship has really become one of love.

diana markosian on finding her father and really finding their relationship. and that's all from through the lens from london. to see the rest of the series, go to bbc.com/throughthelens. hello. fog is again a concern throughout the rest of the night and into sunday morning, lingering for some all morning. and the flood warnings are numerous across england and wales with weather warnings out that you can get on the website and it has been so wet this december as the rain makes its way into the river systems we expect those flood warnings to increase. certainly spray and standing water. look at this area of cloud. that heavy rain easing away through sunday. but this area of low pressure to the north—west still driving in showers. it is likely we will have fog issues as i said earlier,

particularly northern ireland, but some of the south as well around this area of rain and ice on the north because temperatures are below freezing here. fog could be just about anywhere. the rain really drags its heels in clearing and once it clears away, brighter spells to come through, sunshine once the fog lifts and there will be a scattering of showers around that risk westerly wind continuing in the south taking the edge of this temperature here. decent spells of sunshine around through the second half of sunday. however, as we go through sunday night, it will continue to blow this westerly wind in, that area of low pressure close by so nothing too mild over the christmas period and nothing too chilly either. but with the westerly wind the showers continue. as i mentioned, we will see many of them gathering across northern ireland and scotland and a wintry element to them, hail and wonder through the day ahead in the showers and certainly so through the night and into monday. that continuation of heavy showers, particularly in the north. the south will he's off ahead of that next area of rain. the timing on that are still uncertain but likely to come in, we think, through monday night and into tuesday. so that gives us another period, wet period of 5—10, possibly 15 millimetres of rain. again on the saturated ground, nowhere else for it to go. further north, fog with lighter wind

as well and it mayjust linger on christmas eve, that tailback of cloud and patchy rain but we are hopeful it will be a decent day for christmas eve with a lot of dry weather to be found as well. not especially warm. as we get into christmas day, the next area of low pressure starts to wind itself up and later in the day and into boxing day it could potentially bring more rain, hill snow and strong wind as well. stay tuned.

good morning, welcome to breakfast with rogerjohnson and nina warhurst. our headlines today: wild fires in three australian states continue to cause devastation, as the country's prime minister is forced to apologise for holidaying in hawaii during the crisis. tributes are paid to the world cup winner and west ham legend, martin peters, who's died at the age of 76. we'll speak to two of his former team—mates. liverpool are world champions — they win the club world cup for the first time in their history, becoming the first english side to complete the international treble. and the queen of the palace does it again —