The science-fiction series Doctor Who, which has now become a multimedia sensation and has run for nearly 900 episodes, with a new season on the way once Jodie Whittaker's Doctor is recast.

However, before this long history on the airwaves even began, the BBC began airing its very first programs on the radio. One of the most iconic broadcasts it ever made was on May 19, 1924, just two years after the company was founded. Beatrice Harrison, who was an expert cellist, performed in her garden in a live outside broadcast, one of the first of its kind on BBC. Her cello was accompanied by the tuneful tweeting of a nightingale — or so people were led to believe during the broadcast and the many re-runs that were played on the BBC for the next two decades.

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Per The Guardian, BBC has just revealed a shocking revelation about that legendary performance. The nightingale was not, as audiences thought, an actual bird. The tuneful performance was delivered by a skilled human mimic, recreating the sounds that an actual nightingale might make if it was so compelled to launch into an impromptu duet. The intention was to get a nightingale to sing, but in the event that one didn't (which did indeed occur), they had the imitator on hand, most likely a performer named Maude Gould.

BBC Cello and Nightingale

The BBC is never afraid to indulge in a spectacle, so this ission likely won't be the last that audiences hear of the fateful performance. The true story of the infamous 1924 cellist-nightingale duet is finally coming to the radio airwaves on an program. Private ions, which is a series about the music that resounds with people hosted by Michael Berkeley, will be airing an interview with bird expert Professor Tim Birkhead on April 17, 2022, in which they will discuss the faux nightingale and whether or not this might have been considered a scandal at the time.

The element that is perhaps most shocking about this incident is not the fact that it was faked. Rather, it's the fact that the network saw fit to keep it a secret for so many decades. This sort of deception or "fudging" of reality was quite common on television programs of the era, and the BBC actually has a long history of ing off fictional programming as real, all the way down to the 1992 Halloween broadcast Ghostwatch, in which BBC1 terrified the nation by putting on a fake haunting. It may be that this latest ission simply serves to draw attention to the new Private ions series, but either way, the truth has come out.

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Source: The Guardian