Showing results by narrator "David Benson" in All Categories

It's raining blood on the village of Happenstance. As the end of summer beckons, the local folk are planning the festival of Tatty Bogle. Hideous scarecrows are appearing all over the place, and almost everyone is behaving as if they're fudgeknocking bananas. Retired TV star Tom Baker is in the garden making friends with cabbages (especially Eric), and Mrs Frimbly is up to curious, malinky deeds of her own.

In the 19th century, when books were comparatively rare and expensive, encyclopedic compendiums about managing households became very popular. The most notable example in this genre is Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, first published in 1861. Three years later, Edward Abbott, who described himself as an “Australian Aristologist”, published The English and Australian Cookery Book, which has the subtitle Cookery for the many, as well as the for the ‘upper ten thousand’.

The Scarifyers is a series of rip-roaring tales of comedic supernatural intrigue set in 1930s Britain, distilling the likes of Dick Barton, The Avengers, The Devil Rides Out and Quatermass into cracking new audio adventures. The Scarifyers is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and has been described as 'rollicking good fun', 'a slice of audio perfection', 'the smartest and most enjoyable thing on British radio' and 'like Tintin but with the lights out.'

Welcome to ancient Rome, where the steps of the Forum are peopled by nubile slave girls and a range of outrageous characters including Lurcio’s owner, Ludicrus Sextus the senator, his wife, Ammonia, his son, Nausius, and his daughter, Erotica. Lurcio attempts to deliver his prologue and begin proceedings before he’s quickly caught up in the myriad of sexual liaisons in all quarters of his master’s house.

In this elegant comedy of manners, Penelope O'Farrell discovers that her husband has been having an affair with an attractive married woman. Instead of lapsing into despair, she decides to employ some cunning strategies to save her marriage.

Often considered to be Ibsen's most popular play in his lifetime, The League of Youth caused fighting in the streets, with conservatives claiming it was an attack on their party and liberals claiming it was an attack on theirs! A thought-provoking comedy that's sure to feel shockingly familiar. Unusually for Ibsen, this play has a lot of humour and a more-or-less happy ending.

Former Doctor Who star Tom Baker stars as himself, Tom Baker, in a series of bedazzling audio adventures from the pen of Paul Magrs: Baker's End. Peevish actors are descending mournfully upon the remote English village of Happenstance for the funeral of TV legend Tom Baker. His one-time costar Suzy Goshawk is sucked into a parochial vortex of intrigue involving the quailsome local vicar, Tom's acidulous housekeeper Mrs Frimbly and various other fruminous scumblebums.

Inspired by Oscar Wilde's classic story of hedonism and corruption, The Confessions of Dorian Gray imagines a world where Dorian Gray was real, and his friendship with Oscar Wilde once spawned the notorious novel. Starring Alexander Vlahos as Dorian Gray, this fourth series of supernatural horror stories comprises eight original half-hour episodes.

New South Wales struggled as a new British penal colony, facing drought, famine, social incoherence, and the development of an intransigent military cartel which did not lose any opportunity to exploit the circumstances. Together with an entrepreneurial landowner society led by John Macarthur, they made the task of the Governor, William Bligh (of The Bounty) very difficult.

Louis Esson is considered to be the first great Australian dramatist. The political comedy The Time is Not Yet Ripe was first produced in 1912 and is one of his best known works. Doris, daughter of the incumbent prime minister, Sir Joseph Quiverton, has news for her father - she has just become engaged. Much to Sir Joseph's dismay her fiancé is none other than an opposing candidate in the forthcoming general election - and a revolutionary socialist to boot. Is Sir Joseph in danger of losing both his reputation and his majority in parliament?

Ghost-hunting TV show Manifest Yourself is filming an overnight vigil in the infamous Gobbleknoll Hall, deep in the murksome woods somewhat near the village of Happenstance! When Mrs Frimbly gets wind of these swervish developments, she is terribly excited: she's a huge fan of the show. But the spirits of Gobbleknoll Hall are not to be messed about with, as the King of Cats knows all too well!

Louis Esson is considered to be the first great Australian dramatist. As with most of his work, these four plays depict life from the view of the common man and provide vivid presentations of life, both urban and rural, in Australia before the First World War.

Three more adventures for everyone's favourite transtemporal Adventuress and her long-suffering travelling companion, Panda. 'The Iris Wildthyme Appreciation Society'. Written by Cavan Scott. Panda isn't happy. One minute he's due to be crowned an intergalactic hero, with concubines galore, and the next Iris is dragging him to the planet Trull, the 42nd-century equivalent of Milton Keynes. As Iris becomes the hottest celeb in the galaxy, little do they know that everyone on Trull is about to die....

It's going to be a blue Christmas for Iris Wildthyme. Her best friend, Panda, is lost in time and space, and the only festive cheer she can find is at the bottom of a glass. If that isn't enough, this year's number one toy is trying to kill her! From a futuristic planet-size shopping mall to the frozen wastes of the North Pole, the search for Panda leads Iris to a fiendish plot that threatens to ruin Christmas for the entire multiverse. With only a jobsworth security droid to help, Iris turns to the one man who can save the season of goodwill - Saint Nick himself.

With her red London bus on course for the future, Iris runs slap-bang into the past! Materialising aboard Radio Yesterday, a space station broadcasting golden oldies to Earth's colonies, Panda finds something sinister in the air-conditioning and Iris comes face to face with her long-lost husband...(no, really!) As Iris, Panda and the crew of Radio Yesterday experience the true power of music, the evil Naxian hordes are poised to transmit a groovy message of death...to the entire galaxy!

Exiled to Earth by her mysterious superiors, Iris has been amusing herself and Panda by working for MIAOW, the Ministry for Incursions and Other Wonders. When a certain Professor Ramsbottom and his lovely assistant Audrey unearth a weird vehicle under a London railway station, Ms Wildthyme and her art critic chum are on the scene pretty sharpish. Among anachronistic skulls and crockery they discover the still-living forms of utterly perplexing, alien creatures.

When an unconscious Iris Wildthyme is rushed into a San Francisco hospital on New Year's Eve 1999, hunky doctor George Strangeways' life is turned upside down. As the world prepares to party its way into the next millennium, a space-time rift opens above the Golden Gate Bridge - where an old-fashioned London bus has appeared.... As the rift spills untold horrors from other dimensions into our world, Iris has just one question: where the 'eck is Panda?!

Iris is dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. She sacrificed herself to save her best friend, Panda, then exploded inside her time-travelling bus. On Earth in the year 2108, the North Bloc and the South Bloc teeter on the edge of terrible nuclear war. The fate of the whole world rests on a not-very-good disco in Spain. One run by the dastardly alien Naxians.... Iris Wildthyme is as dead as a doornail. But her new incarnation is going to have to get stuck in. Poor bloke doesn't stand a chance.

It's 1972 and Vince Cosmos is all the rage. He's the enigmatic Glam Rock star who sings about being an alien and whose followers worship him. Poppy Munday is the secretary of his fan club - Sunderland chapter - and all her dreams are about to come truewhen she finds herself drwan into the strange orbit of the Seventies' most fabulous star. But what if Vince Cosmos really is an alien? One engaged in a secret battle with aliens already on Earth?

Business in London's Soho is not going well and the designer menswear shop that Clayton Littlewood runs with his partner, Jorge Betancourt, is under threat. Will they survive? Following on from his award-winning diary Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho. Littlewood is back, watching the hookers, the gangsters, the rent boys and following the same strange characters who make up this strangest of villages. Will eccentric artist Raqib Shaw continue on his path to artistic immortality? Can Sue and Maggie, the Soho madams, keep the law at bay?