Singing Dogs!
Greg James explores the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Archives. This week: he's in the pub, with Maria Callas, The Traitors and Bob Hoskins.
It’s Dry January so...Greg is bucking the trend and taking his archive search down the pub. The ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Archive is overflowing with innkeeping oddities: goat riding, phantoms lurking in an 800-year-old walls and how to play a new game called 'plasticine splat'.
With a new season of Traitors in full swing, Greg dons his black cloak and finds an early incarnation of the game the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ killed off 20 years ago. No castles, cloaks or fringes in sight, just a plain white studio - and a very young Ruth Wilson, future star of Luther and His Dark Materials, taking on a man who claims to own a four foot monitor lizard. But which of them is a traitor?
A listener request leads Greg to a weird slice of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ history as he revisits beeb.com, an internet shopping website from the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ where you could buy a WAP-enabled phone and tickets to see S Club 7.
And to mark the release of a new biopic about the great opera singer Maria Callas, Greg looks back at some archive highlights of the soprano known as La Divina, including being pelted with radishes, getting into blazing rows with opera bosses, and an extraordinary duet with her singing dog.
Producer: Tim Bano
Series archivists: Joe Schultz and Jonathan Charlton
An EcoAudio certified production.