Showing results by author "R. A. Spratt" in All Categories

This is a weekly podcast of funny stories for kids. There are side-splitting versions of my own fractured fairy tales. Also short stories from some of my best-selling books, featuring characters from 'The Adventures of Nanny Piggins' and 'Friday Barnes, Girl Detective'. The stories are perfect for bedtime, long car rides or even if you're just stuck waiting a really long time at the doctor's office. They're written for 7-11 year olds but these are tales the whole family can enjoy. The silliness is ageless. I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I enjoy recording it. After years of being...

This podcast is hosted by R.A. Spratt, Jacqueline Harvey and Tim Harris. We're all authors, which means we tell stories for a living. This podcast is all about sharing our stories with you. We'll have a special guest each week.

When Mr Green announces his diabolical plan - he has decided to get married - his children (Derrick, Samantha and Michael) are horrified. Especially when they discover his real motive - he wants to get married so he can sack their beloved nanny, Nanny Piggins. Obviously their father has to be stopped, and Nanny Piggins is just the pig to do it. Because you should never ever cross a flying pig. And so, in the process of ruining Mr Green's matrimonial prospects, Nanny Piggins and the children have many exciting adventures.

With a runaway lion loose in the neighbourhood, Derrick, Samantha and Michael feel scared. Nanny Piggins feels like a slice of cake. And Boris feels like that lion looks strangely familiar. In this third action-packed book of adventures, Nanny Piggins tames a lion and a lion tamer. She revolutionises the sport of ski jumping, introduces hot-pink leotards to the local Neighbourhood Watch, demonstrates trapeze skills on a moving bus, plays badminton with a wok and teaches Shakespeare a thing or two about how to write a play.

In book five of her enthralling adventures, Nanny Piggins discovers some startling truths about the ruthless Ringmaster, provides counselling to a Molavadinian princess with pre-wedding jitters, inadvertently wins a Nobel Prize while impersonating her sister and catches up with her favourite 4-tonne friend, Esmeralda the forgetful elephant.

Derrick, Samantha and Michael should be in school. Instead they find themselves in NASA's space shuttle, which Nanny Piggins manages to accidentally launch, blasting them all into outer space. This time she has gone too far! In this thrilling fourth instalment of her adventures, Nanny Piggins wrestles with a crocodile, bungy jumps off the roof using the elastic from Mr Green's underpants, staples chicken wire over their chimney to keep out Santa, captures an apricot danish-loving jewel thief and rescues her brother, Boris, from an onslaught of professional wrestlers.

Nanny Piggins, the world's most glamorous flying pig, runs away from the circus and goes to live with the Greens as their nanny. The Green children, Derrick, Samantha and Michael, fall in love with her instantly. Who could not fall in love with a Nanny whose only job qualifications are her astonishing ability to be fired out of a cannon and her amazing ability to make chocolate cake, sometimes both at the same time?

When girl Detective Friday Barnes solves a bank robbery she uses the reward money to send herself to the most exclusive boarding school in the country, Highcrest Academy. On arrival, Friday is shocked to discover the respectable school is actually a hotbed of crime. She's soon investigating everything from disappearing homework to the Yeti running around the school swamp. That’s when she’s not dealing with her own problem - Ian Wainscott, the handsomest boy in school, who inexplicably hates Friday and loves nasty pranks.

Friday's Mum, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, has been accused of espionage. The police think she's been selling secrets about the CERN Hadron Super Collider. Friday knows her mother isn't capable of such a thing - this is a woman who can't even operate a dishwasher. She's got to smuggle herself into Switzerland to clear her Mum's name. Fortunately, Melanie is a master of disguise. After an extremely extreme make-over, Friday arrives at CERN and finds axolotls in the water coolers, graffiti in the great hall and most baffling of all - her sister has fallen in love with an engineer!

A prequel story to The Adventures of Nanny Piggins.

Selby hates homework. She would rather watch TV - anything to escape the tedium of school, her parents' bookshop and small-town busybodies. So Selby didn't plan to read Hamlet. She certainly never planned to meet him. This novel transports Selby, and the listener, into the cold and crime-ridden play itself. Here she meets Hamlet: heavy with grief, the young prince is overthinking and over everything. Selby can relate. But unlike Hamlet, Selby isn't afraid of making decisions.