Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. This is the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Sharon Heemans.

All this week we've been looking back through our archive at stories from Black History in the UK.

In 1989, Britain's most successful and longest running Black TV sitcom was first broadcast.

The show, which ran on Channel 4, was called Desmints, and was set in a barber shop run by a

working-class Afro-Caribbean family. I spoke to the man who created it, the

writer Tricks Worrel. I took the bus, I'm a 36 bus up into town and on the way there I pulled up a traffic

lights and there's a barber shop called Fair Deal on the Queen's Road in Peckham.

Around the corner from the barber shop is a girls school and the sixth

form girls were just making their way in skirts hitched up and whatever and the barbers

themselves right were chirps in the girls as they walked pass and in the background...

They were chatting up the girls.

Chirpsin means chatting up the girls.

They were chatting up the girls.

But in the background there were guys with half lavoured faces, half shaved,

waiting for their haircut.

That was the German idea. Tricks had just won a writing competition and was

asked to come up with ideas for a sitcom about London's black community. The barber shops seem like the perfect setting.

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