Showing titles in Literature & Fiction

The complete 21st series of the award-winning BBC Radio 4 impressions show - plus three Christmas specials. The award-winning topical satire show returns with an online audience to serve up more mimicry, mockery and mordant wit. Series 21 brings us exclusive footage from Boris and Carrie's secret wedding, the truth behind the historic summit between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin and the real secret of Andy Murray's success.

In the bar-parlour of the Angler’s Rest, Mr Mulliner tells his amazing tales, which hold the assembled company of Pints of Stout and Whiskies and Splash in the palm of his expressive hand. Here you can discover what happened to The Man Who Gave Up Smoking, share a frisson when the butler delivers Something Squishy on a silver salver (‘your serpent, Sir,’ said the voice of Simmons) – and experience the dreadful Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court.

One of the very best in the popular Blandings series, set in that idyllic Shropshire countryside, where the sun always shines. Comedy centres around Clarence, the dotty ninth Earl of Emsworth, doting on his prize pig: The Empress. His brother Galahad fears her fate is under threat with Clarence's rival Sir Gregory Parsloe. Parsloe is aiming to prevent her taking the County Prize. He lives in fear of Galahad publishing his memoirs and revealing their wild younger days.

Lucy Sullivan is 26 and living it up (and occasionally down) in London. Hers is a life of quiet, undisciplined desperation. But when she and three friends visit a psychic for a bit of fun and the woman's predictions start coming true, Lucy is horrified. For the fortune-teller insisted she'd soon be married - within the year, in fact. Not only does Lucy not have a boyfriend, but the chances of getting one are looking slim. Between the bottles of wine, antidepressants and her addiction to self-help books, she's not quite ready to walk, or even stumble, down the aisle sober.

All four series of the hilarious historical sitcom set just before and during the American Revolution. Baltimore, 1770, and shopkeeper Samuel Oliphant has much to worry about. Storm clouds are gathering, business is bad and to make matters worse, he’s been forced to play host to two British soldiers. Hapless officer Captain Brimshaw is decent enough, but his fellow redcoat - the one-eyed, one-eared, one-armed and one-legged Sergeant McGurk - is a shameless rascal obsessed with money and sex.

In Espresso Tales, Alexander McCall Smith returns home to Edinburgh and the glorious cast of his own tales of the city, the residents of 44 Scotland Street, with a new set of challenges for each one of them. Bruce, the intolerably vain and perpetually deluded ex-surveyor, is about to embark on a new career as a wine merchant, while his long-suffering flatmate Pat MacGregor, set up by matchmaking Domenica Macdonald, finds herself invited to a nudist picnic in Moray Place in the pursuit of true love.

The Navy Lark gang are back for more seafaring shenanigans, as they leave the island behind for high jinks on the high seas - and get drummed out of the service, only to switch to some brand new roles. Collected here are the complete Series 3, 4 and 5, plus two Specials. Additionally, Troutbridge's crew disembark and drop anchor at at television studio in all nine existing episodes of spin-off series The TV Lark.

Is it possible to write a sidesplitting novel about the breakup of the perfect marriage? If the writer is Nora Ephron, the answer is a resounding yes. For in this inspired confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast, the creator of Sleepless in Seattle reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as a proper gravy depends on flour and butter.

An irresistible mix of of sketches, songs, puns and double entendres, Beyond Our Ken kept the nation laughing over seven series and 123 episodes between 1958 and 1964. With its witty wordplay, zany humour and comic catchphrases, it remains every bit as hilarious and entertaining today. Featuring larger-than-life characters like Rodney and Charles, roving reporter Cecil Snaith and doddery duo Ambrose and Felicity - not to mention avuncular host Kenneth Horne himself - this 'sort of radio show' is full of classic comedy moments.

Have you ever walked home at night, keys in hand, ready to throw a punch in self-defence? That’s how it all started. The killing spree, I mean. I sort of tripped into this role. Literally. The first one was following me. That guy from the nightclub who wouldn’t leave me alone. I pushed him, he stumbled, and fell onto his own broken wine bottle. Oops. It was such a waste of a good house white. But now I can’t seem to stop and nor do I want to. I’ve got a taste for revenge and quite frankly, I’m killing it.

In these 22 episodes, the team ponders how to revamp tea to make it more dangerous and exciting, wonders why so many men went to ‘mow a meadow’, practises the dark arts with a lightly tossed salad and makes latex representations of a spaniel with the help of children's entertainer Jeremy Lion. Plus, Demis Roussos and Napoleon Bonaparte enter a witness protection scheme in Swanage, a 'ladies man' sings about his suspect personal hygiene, and two travellers stumble upon a very unusual pub quiz....

It's 1997. Adrian, 30, is a chef at an up-market restaurant, selling down-market food for ridiculous prices. There, the only person who seems to notice he can't cook is AA Gill. But problems abound when, in a fit of madness, he agrees to become a TV chef on the show Offally Good.

Harry Silver has it all. A successful job in TV, a gorgeous wife, a lovely child. But in one moment of madness, he chucks it all away. A modern classic, Man and Boy is a hilarious and touching novel about how Harry comes to terms with his life, brings up his son alone and, gradually, learns what words like love and family really mean.

With her hotly anticipated third instalment, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Fielding introduces us to a whole new enticing phase of Bridget's life set in contemporary London, including the challenges of maintaining sex appeal as the years roll by and the nightmare of drunken texting, the skinny jean, the disastrous email CC, total lack of twitter followers, and TVs that need 90 buttons and three remotes to simply turn on. An uproariously funny novel of modern life, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a triumphant return of our favourite Everywoman.

With his characteristic warmth, inventiveness and brilliant wit, Alexander McCall Smith gives us more of the gloriously entertaining comings and goings at 44 Scotland Street, the Edinburgh townhouse. Six-year-old prodigy Bertie perseveres in his heroic struggle for truth and balanced good sense against his insufferable mother and her crony, the psychotherapist Dr Fairbairn, going as far as to make a short-lived bid for freedom on a trip to Paris with the Edinburgh youth orchestra.

Maria and Richard Reynolds are happily married, but broke. With debts piling up and their house falling down, there’s only one thing for it: they have to start taking in lodgers. Their new housemates are two equally cash-strapped students - Ruby, who’s conscientious and dedicated, and Paul, who finds academic pursuits more of a challenge.

In this radio reboot, Pete Baikie, Morwenna Banks, Moray Hunter, Gordon Kennedy, John Sparkes and Gus Beattie revisit some of their much-loved comic creations, and introduce some hilarious newcomers. We listen in on the meetings of the highly confused Stoneybridge Town Council; hear pearls of nonsense from Calum Gilhooley, Edinburgh's most boring man; and the Little Girl gives us her take on topics including Tonsils, Teenagers, The Truth and Time's Up.

Sir John Woodstock (James Fleet) is the Lord of the Castle and basically in charge of keeping order in the ramshackle medieval village. Although he hates all that torturing and usually lets the peasants off with a bit of community service. He lives in his huge but slightly falling down castle (but then it was built by the French, so what can one expect) with his daughter Anne (Martha Howe-Douglas) and very teenage son Henry (Steven Kynman). Anne’s best friend Charlotte (Ingrid Oliver) nearly always joins Anne on her constant quest to find fit men in the village.

The doughnut is a thing of beauty, a circle of fried, doughy perfection - a source of comfort in trying times, perhaps. For Theo Bernstein it is far, far more. An accident at work lost Theo his job (and his work involved preventing a Very, Very Large Hadron Collider from blowing up, so he's unlikely to get it back). His wife has left him; he doesn't have any money; and news arrives that his good friend, Professor Pieter van Goyen, renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, has died.

Eve, Justin, Susie and Ed have been friends since they were 18. Now in their 30s, the four are still as close as ever, Thursday pub quiz night is still sacred and Eve is still secretly in love with Ed. Maybe Eve should have moved on by now, but she can’t stop thinking about what could have been. And she knows Ed sometimes thinks about it, too. Then one night, in an instant, all their lives change forever. And, as Eve learns she didn’t know her friends as well as she thought, she also discovers she isn’t the only person keeping secrets.