Showing results by publisher "BBC Audio" in All Categories

Based on his own experiences as a medic, Richard Gordon's hospital comedy Doctor in the House was a huge hit when first published in 1952. In these 13 episodes, we follow the misadventures of hapless medical student Simon Oliver Sparrow. Having moved to London from Bradford, he decides to follow his father's footsteps and become a doctor - but, embarking on his studies at St Swithin's Hospital, he's thrown in at the deep end and finds himself floundering.

In this wonderful, fraught, witty, real comedy about a middle-aged mother desperate to begin her post-children life, Stella is wondering why those grown-up children are all still in her house. Dreaming of retiring to a life in the countryside with her husband, instead she's dealing with four extra people in the house, rooms that urgently need de-junking, surprise pregnancy tests, difficult neighbours and a mother who really isn't helping anything. When she attempts to clear the useless clutter from the house, Stella realises it's her children who really need to go.

Kenneth Horne, Kenneth Williams, Betty Marsden and Hugh Paddick star in 20 episodes of the anarchic 1960s radio comedy. Round the Horne arrived on BBC radio in 1965, bringing laughter to Sunday lunchtimes throughout the land. It carved a niche in the history of broadcast comedy, a sketch show which prodded the boundaries of propriety and innuendo.

Join sad pervie Richard Richard and his masochistic flatmate Eddie Hitler (a.k.a. Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson) for some disgusting toilet humour, caustic merriment and charming English pleasantries in these four pungent classic TV episodes of anarchic sitcom Bottom. In addition, we join charismatic ace investigative reporter Kevin Turvey (Mayall) as he combs the back of his mind to bring us exclusives on such soul-searching subjects as death, sex and the supernatural in Kevin Turvey Investigates.

Jazz-loving Policeman Charlie Resnick is one of the most popular characters in contemporary crime fiction. This thrilling collection brings together three dramatisations and two original radio stories starring the Nottingham-based detective, all scripted by his creator, award-winning author John Harvey.

40 of Aesop's tales, specially adapted for young children. Read by Richard Briers, Jane Horrocks, Jonathan Pryce, Alison Steadman, Richard E. Grant, Lindsay Duncan and Brenda Blethyn.

The original ‘Yes Minister’, The Men from the Ministry was a radio comedy phenomenon, running for 15 years and 13 series between 1962 and 1977, with a final fourteenth series broadcast internationally in 1980. In this second volume, featuring 35 specially chosen episodes from Series 4-7, bumbling bowler-hatted bureaucrats Deryck Lennox-Brown and Richard Lamb (aka ‘Number One’ and ‘Number Two’) cause confusion in the corridors of power as they attempt to tackle the many and varied challenges of the General Assistance Department.

It's 2116, and Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson are token rebels in an irretrievably corrupted society where promiscuity is the norm, eugenics a respectable science, and morality turned upside down. There is no poverty, crime or sickness - but no creativity, art or culture either. Human beings are merely docile citizens: divided into castes, brainwashed and controlled by the state and dependent on the drug soma for superficial gratification.

Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Ian Lavender, and Bill Pertwee star in the radio sequel sitcom to Dad’s Army.

London, England, 1952. Meet the mercurial genius Professor Quanderhorn (James Fleet) - a maverick scientist with absolutely no moral compass. Join him and his rag-tag crew on their frontal-lobe-knotting escapades as they battle insane hybrid creatures: the Gorrirrel and the Squirrilla, to the death; become gods to a Stone-Age tribe; are engulfed in a Martian invasion of Earth; escape shipwreck on the Moon in a spacecraft powered by anger; and evade multiple fiendish traps in the Alien Ziggurat of Death. Will our crew of Brave Boffins survive?

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.

There's more fun on the ocean waves in these 33 hilarious episodes, as the hapless Captain Povey and his reluctant subordinates are caught up in more comic capers. Contained here are the complete Series Eight and Nine of the popular show, which sees Murray courting Heather, Phillips pursuing the new Wren and Pertwee planning some special commemorative gifts for Troutbridge's 25th anniversary. Plus, the crew embark on a top secret mission, participate in a joint forces exercise and prepare to take two VIPs from The Embassy Lark to Tratvia for a trade festival.

Written by veteran radio producer Charles Chilton, Journey into Space kept Light Programme listeners enraptured between 1953 and 1958. Almost eight million people tuned in to the interstellar adventures of Jet Morgan and his intrepid crew, making it the last UK radio drama serial to beat television in the ratings. This audio collection contains the complete Series 1 and 2 of the groundbreaking trilogy, complete with extra-terrestrial sound effects and atmospheric music.

The acclaimed BBC Radio 4 space drama arrives in its entirety for the very first time, with a bonus introduction by creator and writer James Follett. The starship Challenger has been on a 115-year-long mission, exploring other galaxies for suitable Earth-like planets to colonise. The present crew of four were born on the ship and have never left it. But when the Challenger attempts to return to the crew's home planet, it discovers that the Earth has vanished!

Here's Dicken's Christmas classic of Ebenezer Scrooge and his encounter with the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Originally published in 1843, A Christmas Carol has continued to be one of the most popular and enduring Christmas stories of all time.

Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s deceptively mild spinster sleuth, is being treated to a few days’ holiday by her niece, staying at Bertram’s Hotel, a dignified, unostentatious establishment tucked away in a back street of busy Mayfair. Here is a place where sedate upper class ladies, retired military gentlemen and the higher echelons of the clergy can indulge in the comforts of a bygone age. But Miss Marple begins to feel uneasy. Something sinister lurks beneath the polished veneer.

Maurice Denham stars as John Mortimer's famous comic creation Rumpole of the Bailey. Defender of the underdog, friend of South London villains and scourge of QCs, much-loved barrister Horace Rumpole was first brought to life on television, and in 1980 BBC Radio 4 introduced him to the airwaves for a 13-episode series.

Twenty-four sensational docu-dramas based on real-life historical murder cases, presented by Nick Ross. In these four series, Nick Ross introduces two dozen true tales of murder from days gone by - complete with gory details. As he recounts infamous crimes from the 1900s to the 1960s, he transports us to a time when police cars had bells and the men from the Yard wore Trilby hats.

Hidden in the midst of a remote Surrey village (at the top of the hill, opposite Budgens) is top-secret scientific research institute Clayton Grange. There, a team of bumbling boffins, led by the keen but hopeless Professor Linden Saunders, try to fulfil their government brief to solve the global fuel crisis, cheer people up and make war just a bit more gentle. Sadly, they're as rubbish at science as they are at life—but they're not going to let mere incompetence stop them from pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.

A millionaire strikes a deal on the seedier side of Paris and a priceless cache of rubies becomes destined for his beloved daughter Rachel. Two days later Rachel is dead - murdered on a train on her way to the Riviera to meet her scoundrel lover: a mysterious, dark man. The suspects line up... only master slueth Hercule Poirot can unravel the mystery and find the truth. Maurice Denhham stars as the great Belgian detective in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation.