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 Hemans.

In 1989, Britain's most successful and longest running black sitcom was first broadcast. The show which ran on Channel 4 was

called Desmans. It was set in a barber shop run by working-class Afro-Caribbean

family in South London. It was created by a young writer called Tricks Whorl.

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

light and there's a barber shop called Fair Deal on the Queens 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

walk pass and in the background... So they were chatting up the girls? They were chatting up the girls.

But in the background there were guys with half lovered faces half

shaved half waiting for their haircut that was the German of the 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 seemed like the perfect setting.

What it was also was a drop-in, you know, that's the wonderful thing about barber shops. It was like a social gathering.

You know, people came there not just to cut their hair, but to shoot the breeze, bet on horses,

talk sport, talk nonsense, eat some food and then go.

...