Literary hoaxes and an underground cathedral

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.

Our guest is literature lecturer Dr Hetta Howes on major literary hoaxes around the world.

We hear about Howard Hughes' fake autobiography, the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá in Colombia and how the Indian musician Ravi Shankar taught George Harrison the sitar.

Plus, the Indian woman who led her country's first delegation to the United Nations, the Premier League's first female photographer and how Toy Story revolutionised animation.

Contributors: Clifford Irving - American author who faked an autobiography of Howard Hughes. Dr Hetta Howes - a senior lecturer in English Literature at City St George’s, at the University of London. Jorge Enrique Castelblanco - Colombian engineer behind the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá. Ravi Shankar - Indian sitar maestro. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit - led India's first delegation to the United Nations in 1946. Magi Haroun - the Premier League's first female photographer. Doug Sweetland - animator on Toy Story.

(Photo: Clifford Irving leaving the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, followed by news crews in 1972. Credit: Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:07.0	Hello, I'm Emma Barnett. For most of my career, I've been on live radio, and I love it.
0:13.3	But I've always wondered, what if we'd had more time? How much deeper does the story go?
0:19.2	I remember having this very sharp thought
0:21.7	that what you do right now,
0:23.6	this is it, this defines your life.
0:26.0	I'm ready to talk and ready to listen.
0:28.3	I'm insulted by how little the medical community is ever bothered with this.
0:33.9	Ready to talk with me, Emma Barnard, is my new podcast.
0:37.0	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	From the brilliant and bizarre. It was really surreal. It was a surreal kind of atmosphere there.
0:45.6	You couldn't really see anybody. To the shocking and unexpected. I'm just wondering,
0:49.8	what are we going to do now? This was really my worst fear. He found 100% horse meat that was labelled as beef.
0:56.3	Witness the stories that have shaped our world, told by the people who were there.
1:02.0	When he led to the factory, the poodle went in front of him, so the work was only all of the bosses here.
1:07.1	Many people had many things to lose by our victory. The future was not so bright.
1:14.1	Witness history. We had a designer. He bought in a fully storyboarded idea about how the queen would
1:21.4	arrive by jumping out of a helicopter. And we all said, that's brilliant, but it's never going to
1:26.6	happen. Witness history at BBCworldservice.com slash witness history or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:39.5	Hello and welcome to The History Hour featuring stories from witness history from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson, the past, brought to life by those who were there.
1:49.2	This week, the construction 30 years ago of a huge underground cathedral in Colombia.
1:54.7	Our desire is to invite the whole world to learn about our wonderful work.
	...

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