The Number 1 Ladies' Opera House

Novelist Alexander McCall Smith has converted a disused garage in Gaborone, Botswana, into an opera house and is training local people to sing in its opening production, a new opera he has written about baboons. Pauline McLean charts the progress of this wacky project with McCall Smith himself, Botswana's ex-minster of health and the country's only semi-professional baritone, a schoolteacher named Gape Motswaledi, who believes that there is a career to be made from the venture.