Showing results by narrator "George Cole" in All Categories

Hercule Poirot is a guest at a weekend house party, given at the Cornish clifftop home of the celebrated actor Sir Charles Cartwright. The other visitors include keen amateur detective Mr Satterthwaite and distinguished Harley Street nerve specialist Sir Bartholomew Strange. Death visits the house soon after Poirot's arrival, the victim an elderly clergyman who's only had a sip of dry martini. What else was in the glass? Are natural causes to blame... or murder?

Between 1947 and 1957, Ealing Studios produced a series of immensely popular, darkly funny film comedies that made the West London borough famous throughout the world. Almost 50 years later, four of these timeless films were recreated for BBC Radio 4, and are now collected together for the first time.

First broadcast in 1953, A Life of Bliss ran for six series and 118 episodes on radio, concluding in 1969 when a TV series was made. Sadly, most are missing from the BBC archive (including the first seven, starring David Tomlinson) - but 19 were rescued and rebroadcast by BBC Radio 4 Extra, and are included here. They chronicle the misadventures of shy, absent-minded bachelor David Bliss, who goes through life with his head in the clouds and his mind in a fog.

Filled with an array of comic characters, The Chimes tells the story of Toby Veck, a humble porter whose loses his faith in human nature at the hands of his presumed social superiors but regains it thanks to the spirits of the bells. Like its predecessor, it carries a heartfelt plea for charity and brotherhood and examines such distressing themes as suicide and infanticide as well as the question of whether the poor have any right to live at all.

There is the warmest of Christmas fires in this hearth. It was reportedly written in a matter of weeks to catch the Christmas deadline. Unlike his other seasonal stories, this is not a supernatural tale but one of the perfect domestic scene with which Dickens was so obsessed throughout his writing. It is all here: the warmth of home, the loving little woman, the children, the food and the laughter. All the things that go to make an idealised Christmas are rolled into one very warming story.

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without A Christmas Carol. At the time Dickens was writing it, many of the time-honoured customs linked with Christmas were beginning to disappear. It is largely due to this book that we carry with us much of the imagery that is now associated with the traditional celebration and spirit of Christmas.

The greats of comedy, when they were young and struggling, performing their great early routines.