Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

telly we share what we've been watching

Cladie Aide.

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

searching and a lot more watching. Listen on BBC Sounds.

Hello and welcome to the Witness Podcast from the BBC World Service history as told by the people who were there.

I'm August Mernova. Today we're going back to November 1957 when the first living creature was sent into orbit around the

Earth.

That space pioneer was a Russian stray dog called Lika. like her.

She was a very patient dog, very affectionate.

She was easy to train.

She was considered very clever. She had very expressive dark eyes. Professor Victor Yasdovsky was nine in 1957. His father, Vladimir Yasdovsky, was a doctor and an engineer in charge

of the medical side of the Soviet space programme. Everybody was very worried for her.

There were no systems at the time capable of returning living creatures from the Earth's

orbit.

Everyone treated her as a hero.

And just before the flight, Victor Heizdovsky's father gave Lika a special treat. My father brought her to my Granny's house not far from Moscow and my sisters and I played with her. Dad thought that she

needed this experience of being at home before the flight.

Soviet scientists had started thinking about sending dogs into space in 1948, and the

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