Alan Bennett's new, award-winning play as heard on BBC Radio 3 features the National Theatre cast. Richard Griffiths, Clive Merrison and Frances de la Tour star. At a boys' grammar school in Sheffield, eight boys are being coached for the Oxbridge entrance exams. It is the mid-eighties, and the main concern of the unruly bunch of bright sixth-forme...

Tolkien's famous saga, the prelude to 'The Lord of the Rings', has all the ingredients of fantasy and adventure: dwarves, elves, goblins and trolls, a fearsome dragon, a great wizard, a perilous quest and a dramatic climax. At the centre is the unsuspecting hero Bilbo Baggins, a home-loving, unambitious Hobbit who is suddenly thrust into the bigges...

Four Maeve Binchy short stories, exclusively written for BBC Radio 4. Maeve Binchy is one of Britain's most popular storytellers, and these four tales demonstrate the warmth and compassion that have made her many novels bestsellers. In 'Homecoming', read by Sean Campion, the Brennans run Quentin's restaurant in Dublin for the owner, who lives abroa...

A cBBC Radio 4 dramatisation of John le Carr‚'s fourth novel, starring Simon Russell Beale as Smiley and Piotr Baumann as Fred Leiser. When word reaches 'The Department' - an ailing section of British intelligence - that Soviet missiles are being installed close to the West German border, it seems the perfect opportunity to show Control and S...

The Making of Modern Medicine covers over 2000 years of medical history and draws on a vast range of original sources from diaries, medical journals and stage satires to shed light on the experiences of physicians, surgeons, nurses and patients. From classical beliefs about illness that would dominate medical thinking for centuries, through to the...

It's San Francisco, 1928, and Sam Spade is a wisecracking, womanising Private Investigator. Missing husbands and unfaithful wives are his usual stock-in-trade, but when the beautifully distressed Miss Wonderley calls he gets involved in a dangerous caper most people would run a mile from. Miss Wonderley asks Sam's partner, Miles Archer, to shadow F...

In this BBC full-cast production of The Merchant of Venice, love, bigotry, greed, and justice are entwined.Shakespeare's classic play explores the eternal themes of love and hate, mercy and justice, with parallel stories centred on the moneylender, Shylock, and the lovers, Portia and Bassanio. Shylock's angry insistence on the repayment of his...

The Mighty Boosh is unlike any show you are ever likely to see, and one that defies description. The closest you could get to the unique style of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding would be in the early days of Reeves and Mortimer, with their cardboard props and men with sticks. But unlike Reeves and Mortimer, the Boosh zookeepers turned postmen Howa...

A Special Edition of the original radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1978. Starring Peter Jones, Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, Mark Wing-Davey, Susan Sheridan and Stephen Moore, these six episodes (Fit the First to Fit the Sixth) have been remastered to modern-day standards by Dirk Maggs, and for...

The Hitchhiker's saga returns once again with a brand new full-cast dramatisation of So Long and Thanks For All the Fish, the fourth book in Douglas Adams's famous `trilogy in five parts'. The Earth has miraculously reappeared and, even more miraculously, Arthur Dent has found it. Returning to his cottage after... well... ages, he falls in love wit...

It's the last ever installment of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, with a brand new full-cast dramatisation of Mostly Harmless, the final book in Douglas Adams's famous `trilogy in five parts'. While frequent flyer Arthur Dent searches the universe for his lost love, Ford Prefect discovers a disturbing blast from the past at The Hitchhiker's G...

Reading of three of the original books written by the Rev W Awdry that the TV series was based on. The books are: Three Railway Engines, Thomas the Tank Engine & James the Red Engine.

A BBC radio full-cast dramatisation of the third book in JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Brian Sibley's famous 1981 adaptation, starring Ian Holm and Michael Hordern, has been divided into three corresponding parts, with newly-recorded beginning and end narration by Ian Holm (who plays Frodo in this and Bilbo in the feature films).

A Special Edition of the original radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1978. Starring Peter Jones, Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, Mark Wing-Davey, Susan Sheridan and Stephen Moore, these six episodes (Fit the First to Fit the Sixth) have been remastered to modern-day standards by Dirk Maggs, and for...

Simon Russell Beale stars in this BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of John le Carr‚'s novel, which introduced his most famous character, George Smiley. It is 1962: the height of the Cold War and only months after the building of the Berlin Wall. Alec Leamas is a hard-working, hard-drinking British intelligence officer whose East Berlin network is in...

The long-awaited, brand new third series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes to audio with 25 minutes of unbroadcast footage. Many of the cast of the original BBC Radio 4 series have been reunited for this new six-part dramatisation of Douglas Adams's book 'Life, the Universe and Everything'. Amongst the returning cast are Simon Jones as...

A stone circle spells danger for Sarah Jane Smith and friends, in a thrilling new adventure read by Elisabeth Sladen. Sarah Jane is helping out on a school trip with Luke, Maria and Clyde's class. On the way home, the group stop off at The Stone Whisperers, a dozen standing stones enclosed by a dome. Set apart from the circle is a thirteenth stone:...

In a nationwide poll conducted by BBC Television's Bookworm to find the nation's favourite poem, Rudyard Kipling's 'If' was voted number one. This compilation brings together over forty poems from the poll, including the top ten, read by John Nettles, Siobh…n Redmond, Greg Wise and Emma Fielding.

This original 6-part BBC Radio 4 comedy sci-fi series, written by Graham Duff and starring Mark Gatiss (League of Gentlemen) and David Warner, was first broadcast in January 2004. The year is 2099 and Professor Nebulous (Gatiss) is the director of KENT - the Key Environmental Nonjudgemental Taskforce. Nebulous runs an eco-trouble shooting organisat...

A fourth volume of highlights from recent series of The News Quiz, presented by chairman Simon Hoggart. Since 1977, BBC Radio 4's funniest and quirkiest game show has been answering questions and offering wit and wisdom on global happenings, national news and quite frankly pathetic parochial events

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of the first book in Philip Pullman's trilogy 'His Dark Materials'. Set in a world which is like, yet very unlike, our own, the story begins in Oxford. Children are disappearing from the streets, and when Lyra's friend Roger also vanishes she sets out to find him. The story mixes science, theology and magic to...