Showing results by narrator "Richard Burnip" in All Categories

The Western Front is a wasteland of barbed wire, shell craters and mud-filled trenches. Winston Churchill, searching for a solution to the stalemate, commits the Allies to a disastrous Gallipoli campaign. As men on both sides die in droves, miners and mill-workers work tirelessly for the war effort while families confront the broken bodies of returning soldiers. Nurses, soldiers, politicians, factory-workers and children - all are torn apart by war, and for husbands and sons, mothers and wives, the old way of life is vanishing.

Autumn, 1917. London is not the city that Dr. John Watson and Sherlock Holmes once bestrode like giants. Terror has come from the sky, and Londoners are scurrying underground in fear. Then a twin tragedy strikes Watson. An old friend, Staff Nurse Jennings, is on a boat-ambulance torpedoed in the Channel with no survivors. And his concert-going companion, Sir Gilbert Hardy, is kidnapped.

It's 1953. Britain and her empire are diminished. Nazi Germany controls Europe and a vast African territory. There has been no Holocaust. Instead the Jews have been exiled to Madagaskar, a tropical ghetto ruled by the SS. Returning home after a disastrous mission to Africa, ex-mercenary Burton Cole finds his lover has disappeared. Desperate to discover her, he is drawn into a conspiracy that will lead him back to the Dark Continent.

June 1914. The beginning of another long, prosperous summer for Britain. But beneath the clear skies, the chill wind of social discontent swirls around this sceptred isle. Shots ring out in a distant European land - the assassination of a foreign aristocrat. From that moment the entire world is propelled into a conflict unlike any seen before. This is the story of five British communities, their circumstances very different, but who will all share in the tragedy that is to come.

The year is 1917, and Dr. John Watson is held in a notorious POW camp deep in enemy Germany, there as medical officer for the British prisoners. With the Allied blockade, food is perilously short in the camp, and when a new prisoner is murdered, all assume the poor chap was killed for his Red Cross parcel. Watson, though, isn't so sure.

Dr. John Watson is back home, fresh from his time in the trenches of Flanders Fields. The horrors of war weigh heavy on his mind, and now his task is to help rehabilitate soldiers suffering from the crippling effects of shell-shock.

Vienna, 1939. Professor Speckstein's dog has been brutally killed and he wants to know why. When an unexpected house call leads Doctor Beer to Speckstein's apartment, he finds himself in the bedroom of Zuzka, the professor's niece. Wide-eyed, flirtatious, and not detectably ill, Zuzka leads the young doctor to her window and opens up a view of their apartment block that Beer has never known. Does one of these enigmatic neighbours have blood on their hands?

At 10.41am on a Tuesday morning in September, Mark Mason boards the number 1A bus at Land’s End in Cornwall. Forty-six buses and eleven days later he disembarks at John O’Groats in Scotland. Move Along Please is his account of that gruelling 1100-mile odyssey; a paint-by-bus-numbers portrait of Britain. Along the way he visits everywhere from the village where the internet enters Britain to the urban sprawl of Birmingham (inspiration for the Two Towers in Lord of the Rings).

On a beach in southern England a dog returns to its owner with a human hand in its mouth. The Hand belongs to Henry, the homeless eccentric who has been wandering south west England for the last 30 years. A local policeman and his colleague, in piecing together his movements prior to his death, uncover an extraordinary life. But as their investigations also shed lights on their town, the story of Henry, and those who tell it, begins to affect the policeman's own life in ways he never expected.

Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, has lived through Henry II’s reign and has witnessed the terrifying civil war between Henry II’s mother, the Empress Matilda, and her cousin, Stephen; a time so traumatic that it becomes known as the Anarchy. The greatest letter writer of the 12th Century, Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, gives an intimate account of one of England’s most troubled eras. Central to his account is the life of a knight he first met over 50 years earlier, Harold of Hereford.

Ray Greenland is an exemplary family man, a Thames River pilot who guides others to safety, while his wife Lily runs a dating agency, navigating others to happy futures. What none of those around him know, including Lily and their children, is that Ray's life is not his own. An act committed when he was twelve has meant that Ray must live under a false identity for the rest of his life.

Pavel Richter, a decommissioned GI, finds himself at odds with a rogue British Army colonel and a Soviet general when an American friend deposits a dead Russian spy in his frozen apartment. The race to take possesion of the dead spy's secert soon begins and threatens Pavel's friendship with a street orphan named Anders and his budding love for his upstairs neighbour, Sonia.

Vienna 1770: Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen unveils an amazing invention, The Mechanical Turk, an unbeatable chess playing automaton. Hailed as the greatest innovation of the century, the chess machine is really a brilliant illusion, secretly operated from inside by the Italian dwarf Tibor. But when a beautiful and seductive countess dies mysteriously in the presence of the automaton, the machine and its inventor become the target of espionage, persecution, and intrigue.

When English soldier Hal strikes up a conversation with German Lieutenant Wilhelm during the ceasefire in no-man's-land on Christmas Day 1914, he has no idea the impact this chance meeting will have. Wilhelm is in love with an English woman, Sam, and presses a photograph into Hal's hand - if he makes it home, Hal must promise to find Sam and give her this token of affection. Hal does make it home, though the war rages on - but the moment he sees Sam he is in trouble....

‘I am fascinated by people turning their daft dreams into a reality. How did they do it and why?’ Driven by his own passion for collecting Hunter Davies has packed his notepad and set off in search of Britain’s maddest museums. As he explores these hidden gems he soon discovers that they are everywhere and that they celebrate just about everything, from lawnmowers in Southport to pencils in Keswick.

It looks like Mr Cheng has finally lost his mind! So when everything starts to spiral out of control, it's not long before Jonathon and the Fang Gang have to get involved. Enjoy more fiendishly funny stories from Jonathon the Fang Gang and the grisly neighbours of Goolish.

Life for Jonathan Leech is on the verge of taking a toe-curling turn for the worse. Or is it? He's about to discover his family's darkest secret. Grandad! But that's not all. Jonathan makes some unusual new friends who are going to teach him a few bloodcurdling things about himself, too... Meet Jonathan and the grisly neighbours of Goolish in the first of a brand new series about the Fang Gang.

For all the horrifying statistics of the number infected by COVID-19, multiply by a factor of 20 to approximate how many worldwide are suffering stress, depression, relationship breakdown, and even suicide as a direct consequence of Coronavirus. In this straight-talking, pragmatic, but hard-hitting exposé, practicing psychiatrist Raj Persaud argues for simple yet powerful mental strategies to immunize individuals against the panic of the pandemic.

When he built two shacks to see greengrocery and knitting wool to housewives in Holloway, all Bernard Lewis wanted was to make a decent living.

With the constant threats now posed by gangs, drugs turf wars and terrorism, the world of police protection has changed almost beyond recognition. But the story of these incredible officers is also the story of Britain's most dramatic and traumatic news events. In Bodyguard: The Real Story we meet individuals with first-hand recollection of these indelible events with powerful stories to tell.