The House of the Spirits and Tracey Emin's unmade bed

27:58It was surreal, and we weren't being given any information. Eventually, a tannoy message was put out. As soon as we've got rid of all the injured people safely to the hospitals, we won't be able to do that if you rush out of the ground. We'll let you know, and you can leave the stadium in safety. I think it would have been just after four-ish, an announcement came that we could now leave the ground. Vans were pouring off the Leppings Lane terraces, and they all seemed very angry and upset and distressed. They were shouting to the police, calling them murderers. Eventually, the crowds thinned, and finally nobody came.

28:42Jenny didn't know what to do. She had no way of contacting her family, no money and no car keys. She went to the nearby Hamilton Road police station, where she was advised to go to the Hillsborough Boys Club, where friends and relatives of missing people were being told to wait. There she met a social worker who suggested they go to the Northern General Hospital to look for Trevor, Vicky and Sarah. They told me that they'd had a Victoria Hicks. By had, I thought they meant that they'd had her, treated her, and she'd been discharged. That meant she was OK, so my spirits lifted. I was then asked if I'd go to this side room and wait and somebody would come and speak to me.

29:23a doctor arrived and he just said to me, are you the mother of Victoria Hicks? And before he could say any more, I said, you're going to tell me she's dead, aren't you? And he said, yes. And at that point, the bottom just started to drop out of my world.

29:49Meanwhile, Trevor arrived after having been to the Royal Hallamshire Hospital to look for Sarah. Trevor told me that he'd managed to get out of the Leppingthain Terrace onto the pitch where he'd found Sarah and Vicky lying side by side, unconscious. He tried to resuscitate both of them. He was going from one to the other. Trevor had gone in an ambulance with Vicky to the Northern General Hospital. So he'd had to leave Sarah on the pitch because there was no room for Sarah in the ambulance and that Trevor had been told that Sarah would be brought to the hospital in the next ambulance. So Trevor had had this horrendous decision and how anybody ever makes a choice like that, I will never know.

30:40In order to find Sarah, Jenny and Trevor were advised to return to the football ground where a temporary mortuary had been set up. Where we were led to a huge green base board and it had 80-odd Polaroid photographs. And I can remember saying, have all these people died? And the police officers said, it's worse than that, love. We haven't got the photographs up yet. And I can remember the first time I looked, I couldn't see her. And I just said, she's not there. and this police officer said, look again, love. And when I looked the second time, I saw her. I saw Sarah. All we wanted to do was go home.

31:28I don't remember an awful lot about the journey at all. I do remember arriving home and getting out of the car and couldn't wait to get into the house and going straight upstairs into the girls' bedroom to check if they were there. The hospital had given me a white bag with Vicky's clothing and her watch and things. And I can remember being very concerned about the grass stains on Vicky's jeans. Neither of us slept. And then I had one phone call at very early in the morning, and it was from the mother of one of Vicky's friends. Her words to me is, oh, thank goodness you're all safe. And I can remember saying to him, well, Trevor and I are.

32:14and just bluntly said, but the girls are dead. 94 fans died that day. Three more died from their injuries in the days and years that followed. In January 1990, nine months after the crush, the official report into the disaster recommended a move to All-Seater Stadia, which led to a ban on standing at football matches. This was eventually imposed on all clubs in the top two divisions in England and Wales in 1994. In 1991, the inquests returned verdicts of accidental death, which was hugely controversial. But in 2012, after an independent panel report, the High Court quashed the verdicts, and in 2014, the new Hillsborough inquests opened.

32:55In 2016, 27 years after the tragedy, they concluded that all victims had been unlawfully killed and that there was no behaviour on the part of the fans which contributed to the situation. In 2025, the Independent Office for Police Conduct report found that there were fundamental failures and concerted efforts to blame fans Little did we know on that Saturday that A, we'd be involved in one of the biggest football disasters in this country B, one of the biggest state cover-ups in this country and that it would take 24 years before we would find out the real truth about our daughter's deaths. Jenny Hicks was talking to Rachel Naylor about her memories of one of the most tragic moments in British sporting history, the Hillsborough disaster of 1989.

33:50Our next reflection on the past takes us into the world of avant-garde art. For this, we go back to 1999, when a British artist's most famous work, depicting an unmade bed, was nominated for a prestigious prize. Natasha Fernandez has been going through the archives. This is art. Well, to be honest, it's not, actually. It's an unmade bed, but a very similar one, slept in by Tracey Emin, has turned out to be the star attraction at the Tate Gallery, and she's a hot favourite for the Turner Prize tonight. That's BBC television presenter Nick Ross hosting a debate about conceptual and modern art on the day the winner of the prestigious Turner Art Prize was announced.

34:33The camera pans to him lying down on a recreation of an art installation called My Bed surrounded by empty bottles and dishevelled books on a bedside table. Like this one, it's got all sorts of dirty knickers and condoms and I'm not going to look for those. He's lifting up items he finds on the bed. Then he asks the audience if they can take the art seriously. Are they taking the mick out of us or are we, at least many of us, rather ignorant, even philistine about things like this?

35:05The original bed was created by one of that year's Turner Prize nominees, Tracy Emin. And when I was younger, people thought I made very narcissistic work and very self-indulgent and very vain work because it was like me, me, me. But now, now times have changed. people realise that making work about rape, abortion, teenage sex, all of these subjects are really important because they have to be discussed.

35:35That's Tracey Emin speaking to the BBC in 2025, roughly 25 years after she rose to fame for that Turner Prize nomination. The late 90s was an interesting time for the world of art in the UK. Yeah, the 90s. Cool Britannia. I think there was this feeling of optimism and this feeling that we were taking things in our control and doing things and that we gave ourselves our own power. Tracy was part of a group called the Young British Artists along with other artists like Damien Hirst. They were known for breaking away from and challenging traditional artistic techniques of the time and, in Tracy's case, she stood out because she came from a different background to other artists.

36:19Coming from a very dysfunctional, broken family, anybody will tell you it's incredibly different. And also if you have come from a state of poverty, through circumstances which unfold, it's really difficult. Tracy grew up in Margate, a seaside town on the southeast coast of England. When my dad came to England in 1948, and then a lot of his Cypriot friends, the Greek Cypriots, were in Margate. and they said, Enver, come to Margate. It's just like Cyprus. It's just like the Mediterranean. And so my dad come to Margate and opened a hotel and that's how we ended up in Margate. But my dad had 23 children and so I grew up only seeing my dad a couple of times a week or maybe every now and then.

37:04Tracy grew up with her twin brother and was raised by a single mum. And at 13 years old, her life changed forever. I was raped, but I was also having sex with men that were 25, 22 years old. You know, it wasn't like a fumble behind a bus shed. It wasn't like somebody grabbed my breast or something. I was having full-blown sex at the age of 13 and 14, which is with men, which is on another level. It's on another league. She immediately dropped out of school, but a year later, she had to go back. If you don't go to school, the social services will come and get you. So when I went to school, the art teachers just said, let her just sit here at the table making art.

37:47It meant that it was drummed into my mind. Tracey moved to London and took her passion for art with her.

37:56Because I never thought I could go to university because I didn't have any qualifications, but I got in. I had a full scholarship at the Royal College of Art. When she graduated in 1989, she started hanging out with the young British artists. We weren't waiting for someone to say, oh, I'll give you a show. We just opened up our own galleries, had our own shows. You know, me and Sarah Lucas had a shop, for example. Nobody was networking, for example. Everybody was just busy doing. In the mid-90s, she found herself producing autobiographical work, including a tent adorned with the names of all the people she had slept with.

38:31Everyone just thought it was about sex or some roasting prowess of how many people I'd slept with. and I said when I made that tent each name that I sewed on that tent was like carving out tombstones or gravestones. And four years later in 1999 she made the piece for which she is most famous. It's the star exhibit of the Turner Prize exhibition at London's Tate Gallery. My Bed by Tracey Emin has grabbed more headlines than her fellow nominees. It's meant to represent the artist at a moment of despair. Here she is talking about it with the Tate Gallery in a series titled Tate Shots in 2015. In 1998 I had a complete absolute breakdown and I spent four days in bed.

39:15I was asleep and semi-unconscious. When I eventually did get out of bed, had some water, went back, looked at the bedroom and couldn't believe what I could see. This absolute mess and decay of my life and then I saw the bed out of that context of this tiny tiny bedroom and I saw it in just like a big white space. I realised that I had to move the bed and everything into a gallery space. Here's what the public thought about the art of the time. This whole thing about, well I could do that, it's not about the final product, it's about the thought behind it. No, no, no, but it's not a work of art because it's in an art gallery.

39:50The fact that it's in an art gallery is because someone like you has put it there. I would like to have a definition of modern art. Because if you take that as an example of art, then, and people are paying for that, then they ought to come to my bedroom. And if you remove the sheet and take away the blonde... And in 1999, she defended it. The first thing that makes it art is because I say that it is. I mean, people have totally misunderstood this piece of work. For me, this piece of work is about all things to do with living, like waking up, feeling lonely. And also the bed, you can see it's like a place of maybe some kind of like wild sex and something really passionate has happened there something really emotional and there is my actual bed that is my actual sheets there are my actual possessions i've edited and i've contrived how i think it looks because for me it had to be aesthetic it had to look beautiful and just one month before the winner of the turner prize was announced tracy's installation had to be rescued cnn reported on the event the exhibit My Bed by Tracey Emin at the Tate Gallery, a filthy unmade bed in which Emin supposedly lay whilst contemplating suicide, had to undergo emergency repair work after two performance artists used it to stage a pillow fight.

41:05Tracey was devastated. And then, to add to it all, she lost out on the much-anticipated Turner Prize. She did sell her installation to owner of the Saatchi Art Gallery, Charles Saatchi, for about$200 ,000 a few months later. And over 25 years later, what are her thoughts on that seminal piece of work?

41:29I love it. I love the bed. Still stand by it, still defend it, still love it. I think also now it's become that. The bed itself has become a national treasure of sorts. the Tate are custodians for it at the moment. It's like a time capsule of a woman from the 90s. In 2024, Tracey Emin was awarded a damehood for her services to British art by King Charles III. She returned to Margate where she set up an art foundation for students as a way of making art more accessible to people from all backgrounds. I don't want to be remembered as just being a 1990s mediocre artist. I've got to do something. I've got to make things better and so that's all I've been doing.

42:11Natasha Fernandez, recalling the controversy generated back in 1999 by Dame Tracey Emin's art installation, My Bed. We're dipping our toes into the world of sporting history next, and for this we're going all high tech. Imagine creating a swimsuit, so good it had to be banned. That's what Jason Rance and his team did ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games in August 2008. Josephine McDermott tells us the secret stages that led to the controversial design. The world's elite swimmers describe the Speedo Laser Racer suits as out of this world. It really feels like part of your body when you put it on.

42:51It feels so streamlined through the water, you feel like you're just cutting through the water. When you put that big suit on, it's fantastic to know that I'm wearing the best suit in the world. It's sleek, it's snug and it's swimming's new secret weapon. The Speedo LZ racer sounds like a luxury supercar, but in fact it's the world's fastest swimsuit, taking the swim world by storm. It's all very dramatic. That's what you heard at the time, the promotional launch, the media's response, but we're going to delve into the secrets that led to this historic sporting creation. 20 years ago, all those involved in the Speedo Laser Racer, including the athletes, were sworn to secrecy.

43:32But now Jason can reveal what they didn't want the world to see, and it starts at a centre for elite athletes in Australia's capital, after a quick trip to a DIY store to buy some tape and black sheeting. That was the day the world's fastest swimmer, Michael Phelps, got to wear the world's fastest swimsuit for the first time. We all trundled off to the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra and all kind of secret squirrel had all the windows of the 50 metre pool blacked out with black tarpauling so the press couldn't sneak a peek. I distinctly remember him diving in and then seeing him streamline under the water with some of the bubbles kind of coming off his body in the suit.

44:21and then popping up and had a massive smile on his face. And he just said, oh, look, this feels amazing. And I remember him saying, I feel like a rocket off the wall when he did his turns. I felt like a rocket. Right when I hit the water, I felt like a rocket. So I felt unreal. Can't wait to race in it. Athletes wearing the swimsuit would shatter 30 world records in the space of three months. But the man behind the global research and development didn't have the experience you might expect. I was probably a bit of a left field candidate because I didn't have a background in swimsuit design or, you know, as an athlete.

44:56I can swim, but I'm not a serious athlete. But yeah, I was lucky enough to get a job and ended up starting with Speedo in May 2005 up in Nottingham, which is in the East Midlands of the UK. The Olympic Games punctuate life in the swimwear industry, the occasion where new products can be launched in front of a global audience. Jason started just after the 2004 Athens Games, and Speedo's swimsuit, the FS2, hadn't exactly made a splash. The FS2, I think I can say, wasn't the same bang that the Farskina 2000 made, and so it really was a kind of race from when I started in May 2005 to have a suit fully developed and ready for the Olympics in August 2008.

45:41And in fact, the trials began at the beginning of 2008. So you really, it was a kind of sprint for two and a half years to get something completely developed by them. Time to get more people on board then. And they came from unusual places, including a space agency. Once we were clear about what it was we were trying to achieve, we then built up a great global team of partners. A key element was, can we help reduce the level of skin friction drag, so surface drag on the body of the swimmer through the design of the right kind of fabrics? We ended up working with NASA in the States. We were using their flat plate testing machine to test different kind of fabrics because the rules of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics are fairly similar.

46:29We then wanted to reduce the total drag created by the body of an athlete in a swimsuit. So much as a car firm might use a wind tunnel to do that, we wanted a, let's call it a water tunnel, what they call a water flume, and we found out that the largest water flume in the world was at that stage in Otago University in New Zealand. To reduce drag caused by seams, joins were ultrasonically welded by specialists from Portugal. In the design process, the bodies of 400 athletes around the world were scanned. So what did all these parts look like when they were together? You've basically got straps around your shoulder and then covering your full body down to your ankles.

47:10And the base colour was a very black, tightly woven fabric. Within that core, we then built in what we call an internal core all around your torso and your hips, which was engineered to help keep your hips high in the water. So we knew the hot spots where drag builds up in a swimmer's body, so chest, buttocks, thighs. and therefore if you looked at the suit you'd have what we called laser panels which is this very very thin polyurethane material akin to what you have in a swim cap which we then placed a very thin laminate on those areas of the body. So some people said it looked a little bit like a stormtrooper.

47:50FINA, the sports governing body, approved the design for use and on the 9th of August 2008 in the National Aquatic Centre or Watercube the world got to see the stormtrooper suits in action. I remember getting to Beijing and it was hugely exciting. There was an area by the pool where we could go and help the swimmers if they needed our help. We were sitting up in the stand and we were pretty near Michael Phelps. His mother was there and I think his sister. Everyone was just hugely excited. Obviously, you know, for Michael, his Olympics expectations were very high. You know, as an athlete, leaving aside the whole question of suits.

48:28So I was excited but a bit nervous because swimmers are putting their trust in us as an R &D team. When Michael Phelps won his first gold, it was amazing. Well, swimming's new speedo racer swimsuit is causing a stir worldwide after 10 world records were broken wearing the space age costume. The US's Michael Phelps made sporting history winning each one of his eight swimming events. Athletes in the swimsuit went on to win 94 % of the golds on offer and broke 23 of the 25 records set in the water cube. We had a big kind of speedo athletes party and that was great. So one of the few times literally they could let their hair down now that their races were over.

49:14I actually remember meeting Ian Thorpe, who'd been the kind of star of the 2000 Olympics, wearing an Adidas suit. So I remember kind of having increasingly lively debate It would be around the merits of the different suits, etc. On Sky News in Australia, former champion Mark Tonelli had this to add. They're supposed to be the latest technology, but some of the older consumers have been having a bit of a laugh and we're wondering when they're going to legalise flippers, as a matter of fact, because those suits make them go pretty fast. What happened after Beijing was a lot of copycat suits very quickly were brought to market.

49:49And in my view, unfortunately, the rules went out the window and it was a free-for-all. Some of the materials used, in my view, weren't compliant because there was neoprene being used, which is inherently buoyant. And so I think the genie was out of the bottle and unfortunately what should have happened was the same level of rigour should have been applied to all the new suits coming to market, instead of which the floodgates were opened. The sports governing body decided enough was enough and banned the high-tech suits. We have to consider that the industry and the developments are there, the technology is there.

50:26Our goal is to control it as much as we can. Some describe the laser racer as a form of technological doping. What was your response to that? Oh, look, I think it's a great quote. If you look at any sport, you know, tennis, Wimbledon, you know, everyone's using, I'm out of date, but everyone's using carbon graphite rackets versus, you know, 100 years ago they were using bamboo. You know, the runners used to use Dunlop volleys, and now they're using step-enhancing, carbon-fibre-enforced running shoes. So technology for me is part of a sport, but the fundamental thing is, I think, as long as the rules are clear and you play within the rules, it's not an issue.

51:07Jason Rance was talking to Josephine McDermott and recording the Speedo Laser Racer swimsuit, which was banned in 2009. In 2010, new rules were introduced for competitive swimming, which limited the fabrics that can be used and how much of the body they can cover. Finally this week, we're delving into the curious world of Japanese animation. This is the story of the world's longest-running animated TV series. Vicky Farncombe has the story.

51:42This is a theme tune for Sazai-san, one of Japan's most beloved programmes. The cartoon about a traditional family living in Tokyo premiered on Fuji TV in October 1969 and Shinichi Yokeimoro was one of the first writers.

52:07I never imagined it would run this long. I was thinking maybe one or two years. Mr. Matsumoto, the first producer, was the only person who was fired up about it. He said, we will do this for 10 years. But everybody else was like, what is he talking about? However, it has gone on not only for 10 years, but for 50, 55 years.

52:35The cartoon follows the day-to-day life of Sazai, a stay-at-home mum, and her family, husband Masuo, three-year-old Son Taro, parents Namie and Hunie, cheeky little brother Katsuo, and sweet younger sister Wakame. The names are all inspired by seafood. The show is set in a more patriarchal time. The women stay at home and do the housework, while the men go to work, then come home and get drunk.

53:13It is a period drama. The characters still use rotary telephones. They don't have things like air conditioning or microwaves, so you may have a feeling of strangeness when you watch it. What people love about it is the closeness of the family.

53:39They get most envious when they watch the scenes where everybody gets together to have a meal. We don't have such scenes in current families. People eat separately these days. But in Sazai-san, the whole family get together and sit around that little round table called Chabu Dai and eat meals in a warm atmosphere. Shonichi has since written thousands of episodes of Sazai-san, but it wasn't a smooth start.

54:15In animation, directors are often so keen to have a picture moving. They hated my first scenario, saying there is not enough motion, not enough jokes. I was told that such animation was failure. My reputation was very bad. Instead, Shonichi's stories were more like soap operas.

54:42I think if there is a movement in the mind of the characters, that makes the move, even when the picture doesn't move. So I tried my very best to make it dramatic. As the viewing rate grew little by little, the directors thought, ah, this is the right way. The TV series is based on a comic strip that ran in two newspapers from 1946 to 1975. The cartoonist Machiko Hasegawa, who died in 1992, was the first woman to pen a regular comic strip in a daily Japanese newspaper and the first in Japan to have her work adapted for television.

55:30Miss Machiko Hasegawa never got married or had children. But she had niches around her, so she had an experience of children. And I think she could better observe other people's children. You get obsessed by your own children and end up having a narrow point of view.

55:56While the original comic strip had just four panels, Shaneechi's challenge was to think up stories that would sustain seven minutes. But he found the traditional setting a rich source of funny material.

56:16The best thing about their home is that they have one-story house and there is no upstairs. They can't do things like going upstairs when they feel uncomfortable. One story house is a good design of the family because it makes everybody stay together. They cannot have secrets. In that sense, it is easy to write a story about them. In fact, continually coming up with scenarios wasn't the part Shun Ichi found hardest.

56:55nowadays everybody sends their stories by email but at that time Mr. Matsumoto was such a peculiar person he insisted the scenario should be hand delivered in person and he wanted to see the face of the person who worked on it. It was especially hard after I moved to Hachioji outside of Tokyo. If I drove, I could be caught up in a traffic jam. Despite the congestion, Shonichi loved working on the programme. So he was devastated when in 1985, he was forced to quit.

57:43Mr. Matsumoto got in a situation where he had to leave, and they decided that all the writers should go to. There were three writers working at that time, so all three of us were replaced at once. But the show suffered without its original writers. Because young people tend to write some little things slightly wrong. Young writers cannot write Sazai-san world because they haven't experienced such a world. For example, a younger writer put in a scene showing Sazai asking her husband to pick up clothes from a dry cleaner. That didn't work because in the 1960s it would have been totally unacceptable for a family with two full-time housewives, Sazai and her mum, to ask a man to do such a task.

58:37After 10 years away, Shonichi was invited back on the show.

58:48It was like coming home, because I knew everyone. The director, the staff who drew the pictures, the people I worked with in the old days. However, I had mixed feelings. I sensed it wasn't going to last long.

59:19Midori Keito, who voices Sazai, is the only original cast member.

59:27This is a program which has run for such a long time. so there are people, either staff or voice actors, who have passed away. The saddest thing is that we lose those talented people one by one. That is the fate of the long-running program.

59:55Shunichi Yukimoro, one of the first writers on the Japanese animated TV show Sazai-san. And that's it for this edition of the History Hour. We'll be back with more first-hand stories of past events from around the world next week. Until then, this is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. From the pioneers. We weren't going to ask mission. We're just going to do it. And the celebrations. You feel you have, you win. I feel it. I was first. I was first. We were so proud of ourselves and Cameron was proud of us too. I still cannot believe it. It was such an amazing feeling.

1:00:34It was incredible. To the humiliations. I did cry most of the half. Oh man, I'm failing. I'm failing this sport that I love. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there. It's not just about the sport. It's about all the other things that people with disabilities learn from each other. For nine minutes, you become a fan in the stands as we take you back in time to examine memorable moments from all over the world. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history.

1:01:08Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.