Broken Records

Greg James explores the BBC Archives using overlooked anniversaries, the big stories of the week and your suggestions to guide him to extraordinary audio.

What are those strange sounds emanating from the depths of the BBC Archives? Squelching footsteps, creaking coffin lids and lightning...with horror films having a spectacular year at the UK box office, Greg braves the gusty corridors of the archives to find a host of horrors. There's Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho star Janet Leigh, and her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis.

And Greg reveals an extraordinary controversy from 1977 when the BBC released a record called Sound Effects Vol. 13: Death and Horror. It featured dozens of sounds effects, some quite gruesome...and famous campaigner Mary Whitehouse immediately demanded that the record be removed from sale. Greg listens to those eerie effects and uncovers those letters between Whitehouse and the BBC.

After a world record dancing attempt this week, Greg looks back at the origin of the TV series Record Breakers, including legendary presenter Roy Castle's attempts to tap dance a million times in 24 hours and play 40 instruments in 4 minutes.

It's 80 years since the launch of The Third Programme, the radio station that would eventually become Radio 3. It was dedicated to arts, culture, talks, poetry and music - and had a radical idea behind it: no fixed points in the schedule. No news bulletins, no fixed lengths of programmes. If a programme needed to be five hours long, it could be!

And 20 years on from one of the greatest pieces of television ever made, The Queen of Sheba episode of The Royle Family, Greg looks at the life of its brilliant co-creator Caroline Aherne.

Producer: Tim Bano