The first lesbian couple to get married and World Laughter Day
The History Hour13 Jan 2024

The first lesbian couple to get married and World Laughter Day

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

In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country to legalise gay marriage. Four couples were chosen to take part in a collective wedding at midnight which was broadcast on TV. Hélène Faasen and Anne-Marie Thus talk about the wedding they thought they'd never have.

Our guest Lauren Moss, the LGBT & Identity Correspondent at BBC News tells us about the history of gay marriage. Also, the man who risked his life to make the audio recordings which blew open one of the biggest corruption scandals in Spain's recent history.

Then we hear the story of the 1970s defection from the Soviet Union of a world-famous ballerina. Plus, the mystery surrounding the fate of the last king of France's son and the man who really does believe that laughter is the best medicine.

Contributors: Hélène Faasen & Anne-Marie Thus - the first lesbian couple to get married legally. Lauren Moss - LGBT & Identity Correspondent at BBC News. José Luis Peñas - the man that made secret recordings that revealed the Gurtel scandal. Prof Jean Jacques Cassiman - Belgian geneticist. Deborah Cadbury - historian. Dr Madan Kataria – founder of World Laughter Day.

(Photo: The couple arrive to be married at the Amsterdam City Hall. Credit: Marcel Antonisse/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)

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When Animals Make History

When Animals Make History

Five remarkable stories of animals in recent history - from the guide dog who led her owner out of the World Trade Center on 9/11 to a ferocious shark attack to the locust swarm that flew more than 5000 miles across the Atlantic ocean.Photo: a Great White Shark - Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

24 Sep 201749min

The Collapse of Northern Rock

The Collapse of Northern Rock

The run on a British bank which signalled the coming global financial crisis, a schoolboy arrested in East Germany for writing a letter, a doctor remembers the Sabra Shatila massacre in Beirut, and a Nigerian archaeological treasure trove.Photo: Northern Rock customers queuing outside the Kingston branch, in order to take their money out on September 17th 2007. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

16 Sep 201750min

The Fairy Photos

The Fairy Photos

The search for a spirit world after WW1 that led people to believe that photographs of fairies were real. Plus Jamaica's worst train crash, France's last execution by guillotine, the man who saved the Proms and life in a giant greenhouse in Arizona - Biosphere 2.Photo: Frances Griffiths and the "Cottingley Fairies" in a photograph made in 1917 by her cousin Elsie Wright with paper cut-outs and hatpins. Credit: Alamy

9 Sep 201750min

The Death of Princess Diana

The Death of Princess Diana

Princess Diana's brother remembers the passionate speech he gave at her funeral, and one of the doctors who treated her at the scene of her fatal car crash remembers her death.Plus, how George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, the development of a revolutionary new 3D medical scanning technique, and the birth of the online auction site eBay.Picture: Earl Spencer and Prince William at Princess Diana's funeral. Credit: Getty/AFP

2 Sep 201749min

Medicine in World War One

Medicine in World War One

In BBC archive recordings, veterans tell the story of how medical care dealt with the horrors of WW1. Plus when Germany put Nazis on trial, race riots in London's Notting Hill in 1958, and in East Germany in 1992. And the inventors of Botox.Photo: Australian wounded on the Menin Road on the Western Front, 1917 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

26 Aug 201749min

Nike and the Sweatshop Problem

Nike and the Sweatshop Problem

On this week's programme, how campaigners took on Nike in the 1990s, plus the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the newspaper which defied Argentine's military dictatorship. We also find out more about nudism in East Germany and the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.PHOTO: Nike worker Cicih Sukaesih telling her story in America in 1996 (courtesy of Jeff Ballinger)

19 Aug 201750min

Reagan's Bombing Joke

Reagan's Bombing Joke

Ronald Reagan's joke about bombing Russia in the 1980s, the murder of a Palestinian cartoonist in London, communal violence in India a year before partition, the man who discovered the Great Pacific Garbage patch, and Florence Nightingale, in her own words and those of people who knew her.Photo: American president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s at his desk in the White House, Washington DC. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

11 Aug 201752min

When Homosexuality Was a Crime

When Homosexuality Was a Crime

Comedian and broadcaster Pete Price speaks about being subjected to horrific aversion therapy to "cure" him of his homosexuality in 1960s Britain. Plus the 99-year-old former aide to the Chinese nationalist leader, Chiang Kai Shek, a radical new approach to housing in the former USSR, the perils of deep sea commercial diving in the North Sea and how the Welsh fought for recognition of their language. Photo: Pete Price (private collection)

29 Juli 201750min

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