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 auction listen on BBC sounds Hello and

the BBC World Service with me Alex Last

and today we tell the story of a remarkable scientific institution

Britain's Common Cold Unit which closed in 1989 and where over four decades

some 20,000 people went on holiday to catch a cold.

The unique aspect of the Common Cold unit was the volunteer set up.

They've come to catch a cold.

It's a crazy thing really, but people did.

Let's have you back on the bed.

So this is the virus then, and we're going to put it into your nose.

It did give us the ability to study a virus in its natural host and this is still a very rare thing.

The imminent virologist Professor Nigel Dimock of Warwick University worked at the Common Cold Unit from 1961 to 1965.

The Common Cold Unit was set up by the Medical Research Council after the Second World War, to try and discover the cause of the common

cold because the number of working hours lost through people catching colds and taking time off was enormous in terms of the

productivity of the nation as a whole.

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