Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Andrews" in All Categories

Alfred Lord Tennyson is one of Britain’s greatest and most popular poets. Even during his lifetime, he was considered a national institution: Queen Victoria appointed him Poet Laureate in 1850, a position he held for 42 years, and in 1884 he became the first writer to be granted a baronetcy. In a long and fruitful career, he penned numerous classic works, and this BBC Radio collection showcases some of the very best. We begin with two of his masterpieces, dramatised by award-winning poet Michael Symmons Roberts.

Welcome to the Arcadia. Once a luxurious cruise ship, it became a refugee camp after being driven from Europe by an apocalyptic war. Now it floats near the coastline of the Federated States—a leftover piece of a fractured USA. For 40 years, residents of the Arcadia have been prohibited from making landfall. It is a world of extreme haves and have-nots, gangs and make-shift shelters.

Before he was producing the musical hits of our generation, Jeffrey was just a kid coming to terms with his adoption, trying to understand his sexuality, and determined to escape his dysfunctional household in a poor neighborhood just outside Detroit. We see him find his voice through musical theater and move to New York, where he is determined to shed his past and make a name for himself on Broadway. But moving to the big city is never easy—especially not at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis—and Jeffrey learns to survive and thrive in the colorful and cutthroat world of commercial theatre.

BRADLEY GRAEME is pretty much perfect: he's a star football player, manages his OCD well (enough) and comes out on top in all his classes...except the ones he shares with CELINE BANGURA. They used to be best friends, until Brad decided he was too cool for conspiracy-theory-obsessed Celine and abandoned her for the popular kids' table. (At least, that's how Celine sees it.) These days, there's nothing between them but insults and academic rivalry.

As a successful social media journalist with half a million followers, 17-year-old Cal is used to sharing his life online. But when his pilot father is selected for a highly publicized NASA mission to Mars, Cal and his family relocate from Brooklyn to Houston and are thrust into a media circus. Amidst the chaos, Cal meets sensitive and mysterious Leon, another "Astrokid", and finds himself falling head over heels - fast. As the frenzy around the mission grows, so does their connection.

Long ago, the Katophranes of the city of Shadespire dared to defy their god. But in the Realm of Death, the ruler of the underworlds does not permit treachery, for Nagash rules all. To punish their attempts to cheat death, Nagash cursed Shadespire to an eternal halflife. Now, centuries later, brave warriors enter the shattered remains of the Mirrored City in search of secrets and riches...and for other, darker purposes.

After the war to save Ultramar from the traitor hosts of Horus ended, formerly disgraced Ultramarines Sergeant Aenoid Thiel believes that enemies still linger within the borders of the empire. Finding other men of purpose, fellow Space Marines known as the ‘Red-Marked’, Thiel wages a guerrilla war to root out these enemies and vanquish them for good. Following the threads of a previous mission, the Red-Marked arrive on the moon of Bael. There they find an underwater rigging station that has seemingly been abandoned.

An award-wining poet, short story writer and novelist, Walter de la Mare is probably best known for his works for children and his perennially popular poem ‘The Listeners’. His ghost stories were much admired by H. P. Lovecraft and inspired subsequent authors of supernatural horror such as Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell. In 1921, his novel Memoirs of a Midget won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, and this haunting, surrealistic tale is the opening tale in our anthology.

From the echo of the first line ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ to the final ‘It is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done’, Dickens’ classic novel of the French revolution tells a story of the redemptive powers of love in the face of cruelty, violence and neglect.

Immi thought she had found the perfect new home in Central London: a shared warehouse with luxury accommodation, a rooftop terrace and daily yoga, all with a surprisingly affordable price tag. The Dye Factory is a 'co-living' community, designed to combat the loneliness of big city life. But soon after she moves into her new haven, Immi realises that it's not quite as idyllic as it appears. No one seems to know who is behind this multi-million pound urban experiment. And her housemates may be hiding a dangerous secret.

Explore the world of Maynard Wills, PhD, professor of folklore and fan of the podcast, Video Palace. The podcast followed a man named Mark Cambria, who along with his girlfriend Tamra Wulff, investigated the origins of a series of esoteric white video tapes. Cambria went missing in pursuit of these tapes, but not before hearing whispers of an ominous figure called the Eyeless Man.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. But war is waged in many ways. From the dark places where 10,000-year-old psychic warriors interrogate living machines from a time before man, to a treacherous assassination plot that could bring an end to a centuries-old legacy of honour, to relic hunters who want to wrest secrets from a plague-ridden traitor or cross swords with a sinister Chaplain of the Dark Angels.

Deviant. Depraved. Dangerous. Denounced for their transgressive themes and inflammatory ideas, these 20th-century classics have all been considered so seditious that they had to be suppressed. Find out what made these iconic works so threatening to governments worldwide in these superlative dramatisations, featuring stellar casts and specially composed music.

Jett Miles is a man with a simple but magnanimous purpose. He wants other men to enjoy "the bounty" of becoming an alpha male - a bounty that sent his life on an upward trajectory. Unleash and Dominate Your Alpha Male is both an account of Jett's own transformation and a handbook with easy-to-follow steps. As well as his own experience, the author draws on relevant data in the study of animal and human behavior and germane insights from the areas of human psychology and personal development.

Take your seat on the boundary as we enjoy some of the most colourful and intriguing English cricket matches in the history of the game, from the village green to the grounds of Windsor Castle, with cricket-loving vicars, Harold Wilson in Moscow and the wartime bomb that stops play at Lords. An unforgettable journey around the world, from Australia to Trinidad and the Antarctic to Cambodia, we witness both triumph and disaster during the game's unpredictable adventures abroad.

Cricket's legends play again as we join WG Grace, Jack Hobbs, Denis Compton, Geoffrey Boycott and other great cricketers. We relive Len Hutton's 13-hour stand against Australia in the summer of '38, marvel at Ian Botham's 1981 tour de force at Old Trafford, accompany Ted Dexter as he stands for Parliament and join Wilfred Rhodes, aged 49, taking 6 wickets for 79 as he saves England from defeat in 1926.

Travel around the world in the company of some of cricket's most notable personalities, from Australia to Trinidad and the Antarctic to Cambodia, as they witness both triumph and disaster during the game's unpredictable adventures abroad. We join a cricket match in a Japanese POW camp, we are with Don Bradman as England's bowlers adopt the 'fast leg theory' of bowling and we celebrate Garfield Sobers as he surpasses Hutton's record test innings, and then there is the English wicket-keeper who gets arrested in Australia.

Wisden comes to life as we relive the finest, the strangest and the most dramatic moments of cricketing history in this entertaining portrait of the English game. Take your seat on the boundary as we enjoy some of the most colourful and intriguing English cricket matches in the history of the game, as King George VI takes a hat-trick in the grounds of Windsor Castle, a cricket-loving vicar escapes death on the high seas, Denis Compton scores 18 centuries in one glorious summer and while a wartime bomb stops play at Lord's, Harold Wilson has an adventure in Moscow.

Simon Woolley is a member of the House of Lords, the first Black man to head an Oxbridge college and a policy changemaker who has the ear of prime ministers and the future king. But this is a lord who wants to shake up the establishment, an outsider who knows how important it is to bring underrepresented voices to the table. Raised by loving white foster parents on the impoverished St Matthew's Estate in Leicester, young Simon soon learnt about politics while in line at the barber's and about racism as one of the few Black children in the neighbourhood.

Twenty years of America’s Global War on Terror produced little tangible success while exacting enormous harm. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States sustained tens of thousands of casualties, expended trillions of dollars, and inflicted massive suffering on the very populations that we sought to “liberate.” Now the inclination to forget it all and move on is palpable. But there is much to be learned from the immense debacle. And those who served and fought in these wars are best positioned to teach us.