Fascinating article. I also really enjoyed the presentation - the mix of writing, video and images worked well together. This is the first time I've seen the "BBC Magazine", and the experience is great.
on mobile (android), it was absolutely awful, every few scrolls it took over my screen and started automatically playing a video. if i wanted to watch the video in your article, i would press play, don't force it upon me
Are you using the stock Android browser? I found it presented well on Firefox for Android. And I didn't have trouble with the videos playing automatically, something which I also hate.
More than the article, I enjoyed the presentation. The whole design is very intricately woven together with various media elements. I loved the style but at the same time I was slightly annoyed by not being in control (probably the auto changing images with scroll was slightly over the top). I wonder how's the user experience with others.
I had the opposite experience; usually I can't stand when a website tries to do something novel with my scrolling, but here all they did was update to a more relevant map alongside the text, for example. I was a bit too ecstatic to see that.