John Waite explores the career of one of Britain's finest but least remembered tenors. Born to poverty in a Lancashire mining community,
Tom Burke sold tripe in pubs to pay for singing lessons, escaping the pit to become principal tenor at Covent Garden. Encouraged by Caruso and feted by Puccini, he was the darling of society on both sides of the Atlantic for over a decade. But Burke loved wine and women as much as song, and the man once hailed as "The Lancashire
Caruso" ended up in working men's clubs singing for a pound or two a night. Producer Graham Ellis