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, I'm Vincent Dowd.

The British artist Francis Bacon died in 1992.

Some people found his paintings uniquely disturbing, but they're now widely considered

one of the great achievements of post-war art.

The BBC Archives contain interviews with Bacon talking about his work and giving a glimpse of his bohemian

hard drinking ways. Francis Bacon was born in Ireland in 2009 to wealthy English parents. In later life

his spiritual home was London's Sojo.

Its blend in those days of jazz, sex, scandal and endless alcohol often consumed at the now disappeared colony room club

was Bacon's idea of a perfect evening.

Journalist Geoffrey Bernard made a program about that scene.

The colony room is at its best when Francis Bacon descends on it.

I'm not one of those made up of us.

It's a very old passion jitter.

Before he struck a richer vein, he, years ago, was tantamount to a host in the club.

I never use makeup. Keep your makeup to yourself, you old cow. In the daytime, Bacon, now sober and focused, worked hard at his studio in South Kensington in London.

His reputation was for nightmarish images featuring semi-human forms, swollen torsos, strained and twisting. In 1963, Francis Bacon agreed to record a

radio interview for the BBC. He said he adored the old masters such as Rembrandt, but they had lived in a world given purpose by a belief in God.

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