RNZ: Sunday Morning

Breathe is the story of British advocate for the disabled Robin Cavendish, who contracted polio in 1958, which left him paralysed from the neck down at 28, facing his final few months in hospital attached to a breathing machine. With the help of friends, including a brilliant inventor, Robin and his wife Diana changed the course of their lives. Their story has been made into a movie, Breathe, out on Boxing Day. It's directed by honorary New Zealander, Andy Serkis, the voice of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies, Caesar in War for the Planet of the Apes, and the evil emperor Snoke in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars, The Last Jedi.

What are the checks and balances with regard to US president Donald Trump and the enormous US nuclear arsenal? Dennis Jett is a founding member of the School of International affairs at Penn State, and a former career diplomat serving 28 years in the State Department. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and American Academy of Diplomacy. He explains the processes that need to occur before any button gets pushed.

The media's achievements in 2017. Also: under the influence of online marketing and ads in disguise - and taking on the trolls.

Mary Hobbs is a writer, photographer, publisher, former nurse and current business owner who lives with her husband Charlie at Aoraki Mt Cook. The pair own a guiding company, and The Old Mountaineer's Cafe and divide their time between those businesses and alpine trekking, skiing, organic farming, photography, and writing. Mary Hobbs has a new coffee-table book "The High Country Stations of Lake Tekapo" featuring the stories and stunning photos of people living in stations in the area.

Parliament's last call is the Adjournment Debate, a yule-tide send-off of one-liners and politics.

The Insight team look back over a year of programmes and revisit some to see if anything has changed.

MPs take one last swipe at the other side of the House and remind the public to be safe in the final question time for the year.

A Parliament select committee is calling for submissions on its inquiry into honey including the definition of manuka and branding in international markets.

Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson is something of a polymath. As well as a singer; he is an airline pilot, novelist, international fencer, craft brewer, public speaker and broadcaster.

There's a Lego exhibition running in Wellington at the moment at Te Papa until mid February. Despite all the digital gadgets around, Lego is a toy children still love. As well as being exhibited at museums, it pops up in artworks and also robots. Sondra Bacharach is an associate professor in philosophy at Victoria University in Wellington and wrote an interesting article on The Conversation that said Lego isn't simply child's play, it's shaping the way people think.

Is art really worth the value it reaches at auction? Take Leonardo Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi - that fetched $US450m at a Christie's auction recently. Or in NZ, a Colin McCahon work recently broke the $1 million barrier ... the same work sold for $500 in 1969. Bronwyn Coate recently wrote about what she calls "the economics of ridiculously expensive art". She's a researcher in cultural economics at RMIT university in Melbourne - her research explores different aspects of art and culture with a focus on the economics implications of art.

Award-winning British comedian Jimmy Carr is known for jokes that sail close to the wind. He says people don't choose what they laugh at - it's a reflex - but when he hears an 'ooooh' after they laugh, he knows their conscience has kicked in.

How do New Zealand companies such as Xero, Animation Research Limited and Weta Workshop compare on a global scale? Someone who's been building the innovative tech sector here for the past two decades is Rowan Simpson who helped build TradeMe and went on to help build other tech companies, including Vend, Timely and Xero. He says more NZ companies should take time to better understand what world class really means.

Manus Island and media manipulation; prime time presenters call it quits; how the media work out what we want next.

Swedish political scientist Professor Bo Rothstein says Sweden's economy is booming and it could be because of the number of refugees the country takes, more than any other per capita. This is despite the fact that many are out of work - Rothstein explains why that is. He also talks about the controversy surrounding his recent resignation as the Blavatnik chair of government and public policy at Oxford University. He quit his post on principle after discovering that Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard Blavatnik, who had given £75 million to Oxford, also donated $1m to Donald Trump's inauguration committee.