The priest behind a new airport and Agatha Christie

25:45Find out more at BBC.com slash unlimited. I am Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union in 1962. And I'm Max Kennedy, the nephew of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. We explore what was a terrifying moment in history. The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. How close the world came to nuclear war. And what they had to do to pull it back from the brink. The bomb, Kennedy and Khrushchev. All episodes available now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

26:22Still to come in the History Hour, the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran, sparking the Islamic Revolution. And we remember the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie. What are you doing? Why don't you turn down the lights?

26:40No! But first, we're recalling a catastrophic disaster in the history of the US space programme from the 1980s. The mid-air disintegration of the Challenger space shuttle. The mission was unique at the time because a member of the public had been chosen to join the experienced astronaut crew. In 2012, Chloe Hedgimotheo spoke to Barbara Morgan. We have main engine start, four, three, two, one, and liftoff, liftoff of the 25th Space Shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower. It's January 28th, 1986, and Mission 51L has just launched from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. On board are six astronauts and the first civilian to be chosen to go into space, a 37-year-old social studies teacher, Krista McAuliffe.

27:32Good role, program control. Bye, Krista, bye, crew! At the Space Centre, friends and family are watching the launch, including a group of 100 children from Krista's school in New Hampshire. Also watching is Krista's standby, Barbara Morgan, a teacher from Idaho. I remember saying, bye Krista, bye crew, and waving, and Godspeed, and I'm so excited for you. I remember thinking, gosh, I wish I were with you. Challenger now heading down range. Seconds after takeoff, a small component on one of the solid rocket boosters fails. No one on board or at the control centre notices. And even if they had, there was nothing they could have done.

28:13There were no ejector seats and no way to switch off the shuttle's powerful engines. Engines at 65%, three engines running normally, three good fuel cells. Just over a minute into the flight, hot gas begins jetting out of a hole less than a centimetre in diameter. But it's enough to have a devastating effect. Challenger, go with throttle up. Challenger, go with throttle up.

28:38The launch just didn't look right. I know I was probably not understanding everything right away, but looking and thinking, this just doesn't look right, as basically pieces are falling.

28:53As the shuttle explodes, television cameras broadcasting the event to the entire nation catch the expressions on the faces of the families as they turn from excitement to confusion. and then devastation. Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. The crew compartment, which was built to withstand the heat of re-entry, is hurled out of the explosion intact, and it's thought the crew may have been conscious during their four-minute plunge from the sky, but there was no way for them to survive the impact as they hit the sea at 140 miles an hour. Obviously a major malfunction.

29:31We have no downlink. Krista and Barbara's experience with NASA began in August 1984. With ten shuttle launches a year, the missions were beginning to feel routine. But then President Ronald Reagan came on television to make an extraordinary announcement. Today I'm directing NASA to begin a search in all of our elementary and secondary schools and to choose as the first citizen passenger in the history of our space program one of America's finest, a teacher. I was sitting on the sofa with my husband watching the news. He's a writer. He jumped up and outblurted, why a teacher? Why not a writer? You know, I said I thought a teacher would be just the perfect choice.

30:14Barbara Morgan was teaching maths to seven-year-olds in a small town in rural Idaho when she became one of 11 ,000 teachers to send an application to NASA. After she was shortlisted, she travelled to Washington for the next stage of the selection process. 214 of us met and that included Krista. We all clicked immediately. What was Krista like when you first met her? Krista was like the girl next door. She had a very engaging smile. She was quiet and friendly and just soaking it all in. And we were there for a week of workshops and training sessions and a whole litany of interviews. The 10 finalists were asked a series of interview questions about how they would spend their time in space.

31:00The answers were all videotaped, including Barbara's. I plan on doing my best to make this not just my experience, but everyone's experience. And the way I'm going to do that is to collect everybody's questions. And while I'm on the space shuttle, I hope they don't allow too much sleeping time because I plan on trying to get the answers to all the questions. Krista was chosen as the first civilian who would go into space. Barbara would be her backup in case Krista couldn't make the launch. In November that year, the two women moved to the Johnson Space Centre to undergo the rigorous NASA training programme together.

31:35Basically, you're poke-proded and probed, and we took a battery of psychological tests. What was the training like? Was it very tough? We spent a lot of time in the simulators to simulate weightlessness. We fly in an aircraft that flies up and down and up and down in a series of parabolas. What was it like the first time you and Krista felt that? You know, you get instructions ahead of time, so you're very well prepared. You will slowly lift off the floor, and you'll be floating. So that's what I was expecting, and we went into that first parabola, and I literally shot to the ceiling, and I don't think Krista and I quit laughing the entire flight.

32:19We also spent time in what NASA calls familiarization flights in the Air Force jet trainers. They go about 500 miles an hour. And Commander Dick Scobie and her pilot, Mike Smith, took Chris and me out flying, learning how to handle G-force, learning how to stay oriented in the plane. So after demonstrating these different kinds of maneuvers, I remember saying something like, gosh, Mike, this is an incredible view. and he said here's a better view for you and before he even finished getting those words out we were flying upside down and here I was looking up at our earth and it flipped that whole perspective for me.

32:58Meanwhile Krista began preparing the lessons she would teach from the shuttle that would be beamed to thousands of children down on earth. Okay good morning This is Kristen McAuliffe, live from the Challenger, and I'm going to be taking you through a field trip. Finally, after a series of problems delayed the launch, the crew got the green light for January the 28th. The day of launch was a very, very, very cold morning, and the crew was excited and ready to go. They'd been training and training and training, and everybody was ready to fly. Good evening. There's been a disaster at Cape Canaveral.

33:35the American Space Shuttle Challenger exploded only a minute into its flight. The Americans watched it live on television. When you saw there'd been this awful accident, was there still a lot of hope that they would have survived within their capsule? I don't think any of us really believed that there could be any hope of survival. And when we got to crew quarters, we had families in a terrible situation. You know, it was a terrible, terrible time and everybody felt really, really bad. You came so close to being the one on that flight. That must have crossed your mind that you ended up being very lucky in the end.

34:10I can honestly tell you that that thought never crossed my mind. I wanted to be there. The disaster shook America and the country entered a week of mourning. Flags flew at half-mast and Wall Street stopped trading for a minute's silence. President Reagan postponed his State of the Union address to make an emotional speech. The crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger honoured us for the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.

34:49The shuttle programme was grounded while an investigation took place. It concluded that poor communications and decision-making had been at fault. Engineers came forward to say they knew of the weakness in the rocket system, and some later admitted they'd held their breath for every take-off. But Barbara Morgan didn't give up on her dream. She left teaching to become a full-time astronaut, and finally, in 2007, more than 21 years after the Challenger disaster, she joined the crew of the Endeavour as it made its successful journey into space. Chloe Hagematheo was speaking to Barbara Morgan in 2012.

35:28Next, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the author known as the Queen of Crime Fiction, Agatha Christie. Louise Hidalgo spoke to the author's grandson in 2015. The dining room at Wallingford, which is where she died, had a moderate-sized circular dining room table, and my grandfather put all the letters that we all received in the middle of the dining room table. By the time of the funeral, there was a sort of huge pile of these letters. I mean, it wasn't just sort of filled in one layer. And I remember him looking sort of slightly desperately at me and saying, look at those, Matthew, he said, and not an unkind word.

36:13Matthew Pritchard was Agatha Christie's only grandchild. She was just a loving and very attentive grandmother. I mean, my mother was an only child and so am I. And so, you know, we were, I think, very much both of us the apple of my grandmother's eye. It must have been deeply moving for all of you to have seen how much affection she was held in. Yes, and, you know, there genuinely aren't, I think, in any era, many people who can genuinely say that they never made an enemy in the world. But I think she was genuinely one of them. I know you've been quoted as saying that she was also a great listener.

36:48She was a great listener and I remember going to lunch with her at Wallingford when she wasn't writing. I took my friends either from school or Oxford where I was and I don't think they were expecting somebody to take such an interest in whatever it was that they were reading at Oxford or what they were doing or what they intended to do and how much knowledge between them my grandparents had of so many subjects. but the main thing that she was always interested in whenever you took anybody to meet them was what they were doing and I can't remember hardly any of them persuading her to talk of what she did.

37:32And of course what she did was extraordinary. By the time Agatha Christie died peacefully at her home in Oxfordshire she had written more than 80 books most of them detective novels but also romances written under a pseudonym short stories, poetry and, of course, plays. Her most famous play, The Mousetrap, opened in 1952 and is the longest-running show in history. What are you doing? Why don't you turn down the lights?

38:02No! And the night of her death, St Martin's Theatre in London, where the mousetrap still plays, dimmed its lights in her honour. When they heard of her death today, the management considered whether to cancel tonight's performance. But they decided that probably Agatha Christie would have been the last person to want such a thing. So what was the secret of Agatha Christie's enduring appeal? She herself put her success down to a lack of education. People often ask me what made me take up writing. You see, I put it all down to the fact that I never had any education. Perhaps I'd better qualify that by admitting I did eventually go to school in Paris when I was 16.

38:40but until then, apart from being taught a little arithmetic, I'd had no lessons to speak of at all. Although I was gloriously idle, I found myself making up stories and acting in different parts, and there's nothing like boredom to make you write. So by the time I was 16 or 17, I'd written quite a number of short stories and one long, dreary novel. By the time I was 21, I'd finished the first book of mine ever to be published, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as the Stiles case has now somewhat subsided. She was always brought up by her own mother, to whom she was devoted, to be independent and to do things her own way.

39:29And I think that she sort of felt her way almost into writing books. The first one, Mysterious Affair at Stiles, was turned down by more than one publisher. We have a wonderful letter in our archive from a publisher rather pompously refusing to publish her book. But I think that one of the things she would have been very worried about the world we live in nowadays is the constant pursuit of fame. If anything, my grandmother was the reverse of that. She would like to do anything with her life other than being famous. and of course that wasn't to be granted to her. Success was swift. After that first novel published in 1920 and still in print today, others quickly followed.

40:16Readers loved these genteel murder mysteries with their twists and turns and red herrings. By 1926, Agatha Christie was already an established author. But that year something happened that still puzzles her fans. Agatha Christie briefly disappeared. disappeared. A national manhunt was launched after her car was found abandoned. The entry in her autobiography is not forthcoming. After illness came sorrow, despair and heartbreak. There is no need to dwell on it. Her mother had just died, her first marriage was collapsing and she disappeared for 11 days, didn't she? I've never really understood that.

40:55I mean, I do very strongly believe that what she suffered from, I mean, I don't know what its medical name is, but But it is rooted in deep unhappiness. All this happened at a time when, you know, not only was her husband in the process of leaving her, but her mother died and suddenly her whole world crashed from beneath her. And I think it can provide unexpected effects on your health and your ability to memorize things and maybe an unconscious desire to go away somewhere and wish you weren't there. And, you know, she never talked about it, nor did my mother. One thing I am convinced about is that there wasn't anything artificial about it.

41:32Whatever it was she felt, she couldn't help it. And her grandson says she would have hated all the attention. Agatha Christie was deeply shy. She hated public speaking and rarely gave interviews. She did give one, however, to the BBC in 1955. I do find one's friends are curious about the way one works. What is your method, they want to know. Well, the disappointing truth is that I haven't much method. I type my own drafts on an ancient faithful machine I've owned for years, and I find a dictaphone useful for short stories or for recasting an act of a play, but not for the more complicated business of working out a novel.

42:12No, I think the real work is done in thinking out the development of your story and worrying about it until it comes right.

42:26I think she liked challenging herself. The one thing that she was never short of was ideas, and even now we possess 60 or 70 of her notebooks, in which, in appalling handwriting, she used to write down odd scraps of ideas and things and then join them up together. Her first book had the character of Hercule Poirot in it, didn't it? And then, of course, we got Jane Marple as well. Who were the inspirations for those two characters? Hercule Poirot was always supposed to have stepped off a bus in Torquay in company with a number of other Belgian refugees. And there was one of them who had this sort of egg-shaped head and fairly small moustache and all that kind of thing.

43:04And that occurred at a moment when she was trying to think of a detective who would be distinctive and nothing like Sherlock Holmes or any other detectives that were around at that moment. And that seemed to fit. and Jane Marple, I think, was a mixture of her mother and I forget whether she was her aunt or her great-aunt and obviously was sort of the epitome of Englishness and I think she had perhaps one or two characteristics of my grandmother herself.

43:32Louise Hidalgo was speaking to Matthew Pritchard in 2015 and remembering his grandmother, the great Agatha Christie, whose books continue to sell by the millions of copies each year. Next, we're heading to London in 1948, when the city hosted the first Olympic Games after the end of the Second World War. When it came to the hockey final, it was newly independent India who won gold, beating Great Britain. In 2014, Ashley Byrne spoke to one of the stars of the Indian team, Balbir Singh, about their triumph at what became known as the Austerity Games. All through the night, the flame was carried by relays of Englishmen.

44:12And by Thursday morning, still accompanied by television newsreel, it had reached the outskirts of London, crowds thronging the route to cheer the torchbearer with his police escort and attended runners on their way to Wembley. And here, quite at home in the blazing heat of this glorious afternoon, are the Indian athletes. The Indian athletes attending the 1948 Games in London were the first to do so since the country gained independence from Britain a year earlier. They'd won medals at previous games, but this would be the first time they'd competed under their own flag. Then, aged 23, Belbier Singh was in the hockey team selected to represent his country, which meant travelling thousands of miles from home to the country which had, until just months before, ruled India.

44:59Of course it was exciting to go to the capital city of the ex-masters. We were afraid of them when they were the rulers, but when I went there they were very cordial. It was really strange for us because the Britishers as rulers they were very strict. The 1948 Olympic Games in London were nicknamed the Austerity Games. Britain was struggling to rebuild itself after the Second World War and food rationing was still in place but Balbir remembers no such shortages for the athletes. Although the entire Europe or especially England. They were very austere. As far as the Olympic kitchen was concerned, everything was available from all parts of the world.

45:47In the pastoral beauty of Richmond Park, with its ancient trees and its herds of grazing deer, a temporary home is being provided for over 1 ,500 visitors from overseas for this year's Olympic Games. And finishing touches are now being given to what is in effect a self-contained Olympic Games town, Facilities for the preparation and cooking of a varied assortment of national dishes are provided in the spacious kitchens. Although the food was OK, the sheer size of London took some getting used to for Balbir and his teammates. Most of us was born in villages and saw a big city for the first time.

46:25Although we had gone to Madras, Bombay and the backlog, etc. Delhi. But London in those days was known as one of the biggest cities in the world. So going there it was something strange. It was all a world away from rural India where Balbir Singh's passion for hockey had started at a very young age. I was born at a village Haripur near Filor. To my good fortune the hockey ground of the school was only three, four yards in front of that house. That is why I started at age five, started watching hockey players of the school playing the game. That is how hockey became my childhood love. Belbier soon took up the challenge himself and found a real talent for it, eventually being selected to represent his country at the Games in London.

47:20And Belbier made quite an impact on his Olympic debut. They played me in two matches and one was against Argentina, India won by 9-1. I scored six goals. It was enough to help India to a place in the semi-finals against the Netherlands. They beat the Dutch 2-1, while in the other semi, Britain beat Pakistan, who were also competing in their first Olympics as an independent country. So the stage was set for a showdown between hosts Great Britain and India on the 12th of August 1948 25 ,000 people packed into the Empire Stadium at Wembley Including, in the VIP box, the then Queen Who until just a few months earlier had been Empress of India It wasn't long before the Indian team were overpowering the home side Balbir remembers his coach telling him not to wait for the ball but to chase it.

48:17He heeded that advice and it paid off. I scored the first two goals in seventh and fifteenth minute and that is a part of the history. But it was a tough, rough and dirty game because the rain just wouldn't stop. The pitch became waterlogged and to the shock of the home supporters, some of Belbeer's teammates even took off their shoes. Playing on wet and slippery ground, it was difficult to control the ball there but the standard of the team was so good that we managed to play well on that ground. As the Indian side bettered Great Britain, Balbir remembers how the home crowd gradually turned their support to the visitors.

48:56We scored the third and fourth. Then most of the spectators there who belonged to that country, they started saying, come on India, make it half a dozen. So since then I have been saying that very, very sporting nation, although they were losing they were trying to encourage and back Indian team. It finished 4-0 to India. The former colony had beaten their former rulers on the hockey pitch to clinch the gold medal in their first Olympics as an independent country and for Belbia that meant victory was all the sweeter.

49:35Honour to represent an independent India Whatever was very, very pleasant and striking when we won the final, when the national anthem was played there, Indian national anthem, and the national flag, the tricolour, went high up above all other flags, I was feeling that I was also flying along with the flag moving upwards in the sky. And when Belbir and his teammates got home, they received a hero's welcome. Garlands, garlands, garlands all around. Then we landed at Bombay and red carpet, the entire city all rejoicing. And then from Bombay, we came to Punjab. All railway stations, jam-packed crowds and people garlanding everywhere.

50:27Belbier says that Olympic victory in 1948 changed his life. Because India won the Olympic Games in 1928, 1932, 1936, it became a national sort of a national sport. Whatever I was in my life later, it was because of hockey. Hockey took me to different cities in the world. And even today, I am honored wherever I go as a former hockey player, as former chief coach and manager of the Indian team. They respect me for that. But in recent years, the Indian hockey team has not lived up to the standards set 64 years ago. It is down these days, but I feel and wish, I always say it's my last wish, before I die, I would like the Indian team to win the Olympic gold medal once again.

51:21I proclaim the closing of the Games of the 14th Olympiad. And in accordance with tradition, I call upon the youth of every country in the world to assemble in four years at Helsinki, there to celebrate with us the Games of the 15th Olympiad. Balbir Singh's success in London in 1948 was merely just the beginning of a long and glorious sporting career. In Helsinki, four years later, India mounted a successful defence of their title, defeating the Netherlands 6-1. Balbir scoring five of the goals, an individual scoring record in an Olympic Games hockey final which has never been beaten. He captained India to a third consecutive gold at the Melbourne Games in 1956 with a 1-0 victory over Pakistan.

52:08And he continued playing until the early 1960s before turning his talents to coaching.

52:18Balbir Singh died in 2020. He was speaking there to Ashley Byrne in 2014. Finally this week, with Iran's recent unrest focusing world attention on the Islamic Republic, we're looking back at the beginnings of the theocratic government. For this, we go back to 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini flew back to Tehran from Paris after being exiled. Mohsen Sazegara, who worked for the Ayatollah, spoke to Luis Hidalgo in 2011. This is a man they call the father of the revolution. and this is the moment that millions in Iran have been waiting for. After long years in exile, Ayatollah Khomeini is finally returning home.

53:00Just weeks before, the Ayatollah had given an interview in Paris, calling on Iran's ruler of the past 37 years, Mohammad Reza Shah Palavi, to give up power.

53:15We are opposed to the Shah. He has both offended religion and betrayed his country. during his rule. For this reason, all Iranians are against him.

53:27Iranians had been showing how much they opposed the Shah on the streets for months.

53:38But still, the end came fast. On January the 16th, the Shah flew out of Iran for the last time. When Shah left the country, Ayatollah Khomeini, he said, I should return to Iran immediately. Mohsen Sazegara was a young student working for the Ayatollah in Paris. The plan had been to return only when the revolution inside Iran was certain. The Shah had left a prime minister in charge, Dr. Shapur Bakhtiar. Mohsen was worried about what he would do if Ayatollah Khomeini went back. I remember one night we had a tough discussion with him that it might be dangerous. Bakhtiar is still powerful enough to arrest Ayatollah if he goes back to Iran, or we don't know what will happen.

54:25But the Ayatollah would not be deterred. In the early hours of February 1st, he and his supporters, accompanied by a group of Western journalists, were on board an Air France jumbo jet bound for Tehran. In the aeroplane, all the night I was awake, It was wonderful for me that he said to his son who sat down besides him that the name of his son was Ahmed. He said that, Ahmed, watch that our passports not to be lost. When I heard that sentence, I said to myself that Aytullah Khomeini still has no feeling that he will be the leader of the country. I think that none of us, of course, had the experience of a revolution and taking over a country.

55:12But that was what they were about to do. First, though, they had to land. When it reached Tehran, the plane circled over the city for 20 minutes. On board, it seemed an eternity. Would they be allowed to land? But at last, the moment came that they'd all been waiting for. After his long years in exile, the first hesitant steps of Ayatollah Khomeini on Iranian soil. It was a homecoming to end all homecomings. A moment of triumph that had finally been forced on a reluctant government by the stubbornness of this man.

55:52There were chaotic scenes. A crush of photographers and journalists greeted the Ayatollah, who was then bundled into a car which sped across the tarmac chased by cheering airport workers. Inside the airport terminal, a huge crowd was waiting. Outside was an even more extraordinary sight. Nobody could possibly know how many millions lined the route of his 20-mile drive through Tehran, but it could not have been less than three. They'd come from all over the country to see the man they acknowledge as the only true leader of Iran, and nothing was going to stop them getting even the briefest of glimpses.

56:31Ayatollah Khomeini was being taken to the main cemetery in Tehran where he was due to give his victory speech. Mohsen Zazegara was following behind. I was supposed to be with the journalists with some minibuses to follow the Ayatollah to the cemetery. But it didn't work because millions of people were waiting for him and people came to the street behind his car and there was no way for the other cars to follow him. And when you saw the sea of people who had come out to welcome him, did it surprise you? We expected millions of people. I remember that I said to some journalists that about 5 million people, maybe I was exaggerating, but frankly speaking, whenever I see the excitement of the people, especially when there are millions of people, I can't keep myself, I start to cry.

57:25This is what happened for me on that day too. Nobody noticed, but some people were crying. Some people were kissing each other and saying congratulations. And I started to cry in that minibus as well. In the end, there were so many people that the vehicles had to be abandoned. The Ayatollah was helicoptered to the cemetery instead. As for Mohsen and the journalists, they gave up. The journalists headed for the hotels and offices, and Mohsen decided to go home. My father was alone in the house. Everybody, my mother, my sisters, my brothers, they went out to join the other people to say welcome to Ayatollah.

58:04So my father was alone and he didn't agree the years before that. He didn't like me to be a political activist. But when he opened the door, he looked at me. That was the first time in my life, and maybe the last time, he hugged me and kissed me and said, Congratulations, my son. I didn't think that you would succeed to kick out the Shah from the country. I congratulate you and the others this victory. I didn't think that you could make it. For 23-year-old Mohsen, it was a proud moment. But the work was not over. The revolution wasn't yet won. The possibility of bloodshed was in our minds. But first of all, I was very busy in those days.

58:52Lots of jobs we had to do. That was the first time in my life that you should answer to thousands of people because the government of Bakhtiar was not able to control the country. There was no police. Strikes all around the country. Gradually, I felt on those days that we are going to be involved in running a country. Four days after returning to Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini appointed his own prime minister. Local revolutionary committees were set up. Iran had two centres of authority. It wasn't until 10 February that the endgame finally came. Prime Minister Bakhtiar had ordered a curfew. Khomeini said it should be ignored.

59:37Millions went onto the streets. They started to attack to police stations. And all that night, that long night, I can say, I was awake. Sometimes I went to the streets to watch the scenes. People started to attack, not only to police stations, but to garrisons. Took the guns out of the military bases. The next morning, the Imperial Guard sent tanks onto the streets. The day of the revolution had come.

1:00:13In a day-long orgy of violence, the people seized control from the Shah's government and all it stood for. Army barracks were plundered and guns distributed almost like confetti. They toppled statues of the Shah and sent soldiers and police running for their lives. gunmen loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini assaulted the Iranian parliament for more than two hours we ducked behind buildings and watched as a fierce gun battle raged then we saw thousands of people storm the parliament buildings they did a war dance under the chandeliers ripped up photographs of the Shah mashed bottles of liquor and tore up magazine photographs of nude women in one fell swoop it seemed Iran had become an Islamic republic Mohsen Sazegara held several senior government positions in that new Islamic Republic.

1:01:03But after Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989, he became increasingly disillusioned. He went back to academia, but called for political reform, and in 2003 he was arrested and held for almost four months. He now lives in America. Luis Hidalgo talking to Mohsen Sazegara in 2011. And with that first-hand account, We've come to the end of this edition of the History Hour. We'll be back with more stories from the past next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there.

1:01:39We weren't going to ask permission. We were just going to do it. It was such an amazing feeling. It was incredible. He started to write a story about how he came up with the idea for the red and yellow cars. I got to go. We cried a bit. We laughed a bit. It was wonderful. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:02:24Why did they do it? What drove them to it? Watch Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley on BBC.com. It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com. Find out more at BBC.com slash unlimited. I am Nina Khrushcheva, the great granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union in 1962. And I'm Max Kennedy, the nephew of US President John F. Kennedy. We explore what was a terrifying moment in history. The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. How close the world came to nuclear war. And what they had to do to pull it back from the brink. The bomb, Kennedy and Khrushchev. All episodes available now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.