The third play from 'Nick Mohammed in Bits', the BBC Radio 4 series of comic plays showcasing the best of Nick Mohammed's idiosyncratic characters. Originally broadcast 14 September 2010. In 'Daniel Thornthwaite', Nick plays a wildlife expert on the edge of sanity in this fly-on-the-wall look at the making of a major new documentary series. Anna Cr...

The first play from 'Nick Mohammed in Bits', the BBC Radio 4 series of comic plays showcasing the best of Nick Mohammed's idiosyncratic characters. Originally broadcast 31 August 2010. In 'Witness Statement', there's been a robbery and character comedian Nick Mohammed ('Reggie Perrin', 'Sorry I've Got No Head') dons a police helmet and takes statem...

A BBC Radio 4 comedy drama series with a stunning cast including Sheila Hancock, Mackenzie Crook, Penelope Wilton, Felicity Montagu and Kevin Eldon about a small town in the middle of Northamptonshire as it prepares for a talent night. North by Northamptonshire was originally broadcast weekly from 16 June 2010 - 7 July 2010. In each episode we catc...

A BBC Radio 4 play by Nigel Planer about some of the people involved in the decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. On the Ceiling was originally broadcast as the Afternoon Play on 7 February 2009 and repeated on 11 December 2010. High up on the wooden scaffolding tower of the Sistine Chapel, two fresco plasterers get on with the day's wor...

A BBC Radio 3 full-cast drama by Stephen Wakelam on a period in the life of Shakespeare, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, originally broadcast in the Drama on 3 slot on 23 November 2008 and repeated on 25 April 2010. Business is going well, but the playwright urgently needs a collaborator for his latest play. His daughter is getting married. His...

A BBC Radio 4 'Saturday Play' investigating how domestic and international politics were about to combine in 1973, to change the Middle East forever. Starring Henry Goodman and Peter Marinker, Payback was originally broadcast on 22 January 2011. 6th October 1973. Golda Meir has become Prime Minister of Israel in her seventies. Syrian and Egyptian t...

A BBC Radio 3 Sci-Fi drama by Melissa Murray set in the very-near future. When William Hellier dies, his wife creates an avatar of him and has it uploaded onto a cyberspace memorial site. But is he software? Or is his soul trapped in the machine? Perpetual Light was originally broadcast in the Drama on 3 slot on 5 December 2010. A new way to rememb...

A BBC Radio 4 bittersweet romantic drama by award-winning writer Lou Ramsden, starring Kathryn Hunt and Nicholas Boulton, originally broadcast as the 'Afternoon Play' on 15 April 2011. Hazel (Kathryn Hunt) spends her life describing plays for visually impaired people. But when she starts to describe the real world to her new friend Davy (Nicholas B...

A BBC Radio 4 drama looking at the impact on a divorcing couple of recent changes to British prenuptial law. Originally broadcast as the 'Afternoon Play' on 21 January 2011. Two academics, British Paul (Sam Dale) and American Amy (Sally Orrock), have married in the US with a prenuptial agreement. They did so because Paul's previous marriage ended i...

Madame de Lafayette's classic tale of intrigue and love, La Princesse de ClŠves, dramatised for BBC Radio 3 and originally broadcast in the Drama on 3 slot on 28 February 2010. Set in the 16th Century, the play follows the life of a beautiful young lady newly presented to Court. It's the reign of Henri II and Mary Queen of Scots is safely en...

Martin Sixsmith continues his history of Russia, from the tumultuous events of 1917 to the country's re-emergence as one of the world's most powerful nations. After the whirlwind of the revolution, the Bolsheviks struggled to consolidate their victory. To rescue the economy and save the regime, Lenin made concessions to the people. But after his d...

When a new concept or product comes along, how does it get its name? Making up new words for new things or ideas isn't new. New words-linguists call them "coinages"-are as old as the English language itself. Melvyn Bragg explores the history of linguistic innovation from the Middle Ages, through the inventiveness of the Industrial Revolution, to th...

Melvyn has fun and games with puns, wordplay and tongue twisters. Twisting, manipulation and stretching of the English language is an integral part of everyday communication. This language play exists in many forms, as puns, double entendres, word games and verse exercises, and we have been playing with English for centuries.

"By your vowels, your station shall be known." How accents and social class are entwined. For at least 400 years, the way we speak has been one of the fundamental measures by which we've judged our fellow men on the scale of social acceptability. To so many, "talking proper" matters, and "rough talk is not quality talk." But such attitudes are begi...

Bad language is not new. We've been swearing for centuries, and those in power have been trying to censor us for just as long. Nowadays, many people are quite relaxed about swearing and will be careful about the context-although we still try to avoid bad language in front of the children, or in polite society.

Melvyn travels west in search of the increasingly elusive Cornish dialect. Cornwall is an evocative place. A Celtic land with a rich mythology, a land of caves and coves, of cream teas and country lanes. At least that's the image that has long attracted travellers and settlers. Yet it's also a land that has, over the last century, faced dramatic so...

Melvyn visits Brixton to discover the most imitated, influential form of spoken English today. It's a dialect determined not by geography or profession, but by age, fashion and aspiration. Pulsing through music culture, spread by television and radio, it can be found throughout the UK. Sometimes subversive, often secretive, it is arguably the most...

Tom Baker stars as the Fourth Doctor in the first of five thrilling brand new adventures, with Susan Jameson as Mrs Wibbsey. In a distant galaxy, the Tsar and Tsarina rule over the Robotov Empire from the safety of their palace, whilst human workers tend the power plants on satellite moons. When the Doctor arrives with Mrs Wibbsey, his identity is...

Melvyn Bragg follows his long historical exploration of the Routes of English with Voices of the Powerless, the BBC Radio 4 series in which he explores the lives of the ordinary working men and women of Britain at critical moments across the last 1,000 years. The Norman Conquest is his starting point, a time when William the Conqueror's 'harrying...

Here, Melvyn visits Oswestry. Just five miles from the Welsh border, this is a frontier town whose name means "boundary". It's where Offa's Dyke and countless crumbling castles bear witness to centuries of shifting political allegiances. Language too, has been a battleground. Welsh and English have waxed and waned, woven and unravelled. Visit the t...

The final programme in the series considers the future of English dialects. In the last programme in the series Melvyn looks at Standard English. He is joined by Lynda Mugglestone, Fellow of English Language at Pembroke College, Oxford and John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at the University of London. Together they attempt to answer some of the qu...