The building of the Sydney Opera House began on 2 March 1959. But when BBC Tonight visited the construction site in 1965, it was plagued by technical problems, soaring costs, vacillating public opinion and political infighting.

In 1965, BBC reporter Trevor Philpott sat overlooking Sydney Harbour as he tried to find the right metaphor to describe the vibrant, arching structures of Jørn Utzon's roof design for the Australian city's Opera House. "It was a score of towering shells. It was a cluster of seagulls spreading concrete wings. It was a huddle of sailing boats with billowing concrete sails," said Philpott. He then added the caveat: "And it was an unmitigated bitch to build."

The fraught saga of the Sydney Opera House's construction began on 2 March 1959, 66 years ago this week. Six years after that, when BBC Tonight's Philpott went to see the building's progress, it was already years behind schedule, mired in spiralling costs, changing designs and escalating political tensions. To say it was having a difficult birth would be an understatement.

The idea to build an opera house for the city had been proposed in the late 1940s by an acclaimed English conductor, Sir Eugene Goossens. At the time, Goossens was something of a celebrity in the classical music world, having carved out a successful career in the UK and the US. After World War Two, he had been lured to Sydney to become the director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music with the promise of a salary greater than that of the Australian Prime Minister, musicologist Dr Drew Crawford told the BBC podcast A Very Australian Scandal in 2023.

The creation of a new, world-class music performance venue was the conductor's passion project. He had spied from his office window what he believed was the ideal site for it – the tram depot at Bennelong Point. Known to the local indigenous Gadigal people of the Eora nation as Tubowgule, it was a place where Aboriginal celebrations had been held for thousands of years. Throughout the 1950s, Goossens lobbied hard, trying to turn his dream into a reality. "There were very few other people who could have that vision, articulate that vision, and have the ear of the Premier [of New South Wales], have the ear of the Prime Minister, be able to talk to people to get it going," said Dr Crawford.

Goossens convinced the Premier of New South Wales, Joseph Cahill, that an opera house would reshape the world's view of Australia, that he had found the perfect site for it, and that they should launch "a grand competition, open to the architects of all the world, to decide exactly what manner of a building they should put there", said Philpott. "They made only one condition, that nothing quite so remarkable should have been ever built before."

Goossens himself would not get to see his ambition realised. In 1956, having just picked up his knighthood in the UK, he was detained upon his entry back into Australia, where his bags were searched and found to contain, among other things, smuggled pornography, compromising photographs and rubber masks. The resulting scandal, which involved affairs, erotica and witchcraft, completely scuppered the conductor's career in Sydney. He fled the country for Rome, traveling under the alias of Mr E Gray, never to return.

However, the design competition went ahead as planned, with a panel of judges evaluating some 233 submitted entries. At the start 1957, the government announced that a largely unknown Danish architect, Utzon, was the unexpected winner. Part of the surprise at Utzon's success was that his entry had largely consisted of preliminary sketches and concept drawings. "As far as building anything of any scale, he hadn't really done very much," Sir Jack Zunz, who worked on the project for the civil engineering firm Arup, told BBC Witness History in 2018.

The judges' choice of Utzon's bold and imaginative design was not without controversy. "From the first, it stirred the people of Sydney to breathless wonder and scalding abuse," said Philpott. "It was called the Sydney Harbour monster, a piece of Danish pastry, a disintegrating circus tent."

Premier Cahill, worried that the project might be derailed by adverse public opinion or political opposition, pushed for construction work to start early. This was despite the fact that Utzon was still finalising the building's actual design, and had yet to resolve critical structural issues. Although Utzon's design was thought to be one of the cheapest, there were still problems raising money for it, so a State Lottery was launched in 1957 to help fund the project.

The initial estimate of the final cost of the Sydney Opera House was put at A£3.5m or A$7m – at the time, Australia's official currency was the pound, but was replaced by the dollar in 1966. The building was set to open on 26 January 1963: Australia Day. Both of these predictions would prove to be........

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