The Evelyn Waugh BBC Radio Drama Collection
Decline and Fall, Brideshead Revisited and Other Full-Cast Dramatisations
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About this listen
Evelyn Waugh is one of the pre-eminent English novelists of the 20th century. This collection comprises six of his finest works, dramatised by award-winning writer Jeremy Front.
Decline and Fall
Paul Pennyfeather, an earnest, scholarly Oxford student, knows nothing of 1920's high-life – until one night he encounters The Bollinger Club.... This darkly comic romp set in the early Jazz Age stars Kieran Hodgson, John Sessions, Emilia Fox and Tom Hollander.
Brideshead Revisited
During the Second World War, a disillusioned Captain Charles Ryder finds himself posted to Brideshead Castle: the scene of the happiest years of his life and the beginnings of his friendship with Sebastian Flyte. A classic tale of life, love and a forgotten era, starring Ben Miles, Jamie Bamber, Anne-Marie Duff and Toby Jones.
Scoop
Hapless journalist William Boot is mistakenly sent to report on a war in Africa, where he finds love and ends up in the middle of a revolution... Waugh’s celebrated satire of newspaper life stars Rory Kinnear and Tim McInnerny.
Sword of Honour (The Waugh Trilogy)
This three-part dramatisation of Waugh’s satirical masterpiece follows the comic adventures of Guy Crouchbank during World War II. In Men at Arms, Guy is scarred by a broken marriage and searching for a purpose to live. When war breaks out, he feels he may have at last found a cause worth fighting for. Officers and Gentlemen sees Guy sent home in disgrace following a misbegotten raid in Dakar. But his next posting takes him somewhere totally unexpected.... In Unconditional Surrender, Guy is beginning to lose his idealism about the war – but his military career is revived with selection for a mission to Italy.
Winner of Best Audio Drama (Adaptation) at the 2014 BBC Audio Drama Awards, this moving trilogy stars Paul Ready as Guy with Tim McInnerny as the Narrator, Tim Pigott-Smith as Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, Lee Ingleby as Trimmer and Lydia Leonard as Virginia.
Text copyright © Evelyn Waugh 1928 (Decline and Fall), 1938 (Scoop), 1945 (Brideshead Revisited), 1952 (Men at Arms), 1955 (Officers and Gentlemen), 1961 (Unconditional Surrender). All rights reserved.
Dramatised by Jeremy Front
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 27 October-10 November 2013
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After their mother passes, three estranged siblings reunite to sort out her estate. Beth, the oldest, never left home. She stayed with her mom, caring for her until the very end. Nicole, the middle child, has been kept at arm’s length due to her ongoing battle with a serious drug addiction. Michael, the youngest, lives out of state and hasn’t been back to their small Wisconsin town since their father ran out on them seven years before.
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Perfect Audio.
- By Black Women Read Too on 05-19-24
By: Jeneva Rose
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Technically Speaking
- By: Michael Elliot
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Oakland-bred LaVeesha “Vee” Gilliam (Coco Jones) is a determined single mother of an autistic son and a gifted aspiring coder. When Vee loses her job as a food-services worker at the onsite restaurant at Grapengine, a large Silicon Valley tech company, she’s unable to pay for her son’s much-needed specialized education. By a twist of fate, mistaken identity, and her tech skills, Vee meets Troy Wilson (Keith Powers), the company’s wealthy founder and CEO and a wunderkind in the tech industry, who believes that Vee is a college-educated techie who works at his company.
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Overdue Diverse Representation in Tech!
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Ghost Stories: Stephen Fry's Definitive Collection
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As the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, Halloween approaches. Come, brave listener, pull up a chair, and spend some time with master storyteller Stephen Fry as he tells us some of his favourite ghost stories of all time, in truly terrifying spatial audio. From the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow to the tortured spirits of M.R. James, from Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying tale of a doppelganger to Charlotte Riddell’s Open Door that should definitely stay shut, join Stephen as he tells you some truly terrifying tales.
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Wonderful narration. Mediocre stories.
- By Michael Fuchs on 11-07-23
By: Stephen Fry, and others
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Fahrenheit 451
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Tim Robbins
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
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Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."
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Wish I Hadn't Cliff Noted This in High School
- By Joel on 03-27-17
By: Ray Bradbury
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Brain Damage
- By: Freida McFadden
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As Charly struggles to recover from her brain injury, she begins to realize that the events of that fateful night are trapped in the damaged right side of her brain. Now, she must put the jigsaw pieces together to discover the identity of the man who tried to kill her...before he finishes the job he started.
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Who Else Laughed, Cried, and Shuddered?
- By Jennifer Chichester on 09-16-22
By: Freida McFadden
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Starship Troopers
- By: Robert A. Heinlein
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray
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Johnnie Rico never really intended to join up—and definitely not the infantry. But now that he’s in the thick of it, trying to get through combat training harder than anything he could have imagined, he knows everyone in his unit is one bad move away from buying the farm in the interstellar war the Terran Federation is waging against the Arachnids. Because everyone in the Mobile Infantry fights. And if the training doesn’t kill you, the Bugs are more than ready to finish the job.
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The definitive version!
- By Kristopher G. Hesson on 10-03-24
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BBC Classics Children’s Library
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This superlative collection of children's stories brings together a feast of fantastic fiction, read in full by a host of top narrators and with a comprehensive track listing for ease of listening. Comprising everything from fairytales for little ones to thrilling adventures for pre-teens, these unabridged readings are ideal for families to keep, treasure and dip into as their children grow.
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Stellar!!
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The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
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A book of brilliant entertainments: 39 stories spanning the entire career of a great modern writer and an undisputed comic genius, "a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers' row (Swift, Poe, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters" ( Time).
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MORE than actual print book!
- By Anonymous User on 02-01-19
By: Evelyn Waugh
What listeners say about The Evelyn Waugh BBC Radio Drama Collection
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Henry Riely
- 09-11-20
One of the best dramatizations I have listened to!
Wonderful production with many wonderful performances, and with such evocative music and songs of those times. I particularly enjoyed Rory Kinnear's performance in "Scoop" and Paul Ready's in the "Sword of Honour" trilogy, but there are many other excellent performances as well. I have enjoyed many radio dramatizations from the BBC, and this is one I will cherish and listen to many times.
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- Findlaigh
- 02-20-22
Almost a WWII anthology...
Waugh is dead serious writer. His satire is sombre, his lightest jibes leave scars, and his quips have heft. He delivers subtext through peripheral characters and his protagonists are often unwordly, even artless.
On the page, a Waugh hero can almost be viewed as a sacrificial lamb; we care for them from the start and wish we could ring them up and say "look, this is a Waugh story, you're headed towards a life-altering loss of innocence, read some Schopenhauer or something before you leave the house..." But a Waugh character would only offer a few polite words of appreciation and gently recradle the phone. Imbued with optimism, faith in humanity, and unerring decency, a Waugh character sallies forth...
An audible Waugh character casts a more complex shadow, particularly in a first rate production. And these are first rate productions - absolutely stellar.
Audible Waugh characters at war, at least for me, do not delight. I could not engage, couldn't keep up with the characters, and everything seemed soaked in testosterone and cynicism. It's astonishing in a way - familiar and well loved words rendered too potent for comfort when heard.
...so the second half of this collection felt oppressive, claustrophobic, even turgid at times. I am setting it aside for now and I will try again.
If you're not keen on Waugh's war stories, or indeed any war stories, this might not be the collection for you.
For those who are, you won't find better....
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