From the Tech-VI list owner:
While some might argue that radio drama or audio theater is not specific to blindness, many blind people enjoy both old time radio as well as newer audio dramas. Since there’s no screen, there’s no need to be concerned as to whether the story includes an audio description track. After all, audio description is included in every audio play, making it an ideal and inclusive medium for blind listeners.
As my dad grew up with what we now call old time radio, he told me about it when I was a kid. When I was around 10 or 11, he bought me a recording of an episode of “the Shadow” with Orson Wells in the leading role. The story was a bit dark for a young kid but I was hooked. “The Shadow” was one of my dad’s favorite shows and it has since become mine as well, with Orson Wells being my favorite in the role of Lamont Cranston/the Shadow.
In the 1970s, the United States saw a revival of radio drama in shows like Zero Hour, CBS Radio Mystery Theater, General Mills Radio Adventure Theater, Alien Worlds, not to mention some dramas gearted to Christians that I used to enjoy. NPR assisted in this revival in the 1980s, most notably with the adaptations of the Star Wars trilogy and importing dramas from the BBC and the CBC. Nowadays, there is an uncountable number of audio drama productions produced by non-professional producers and writers directly to the Internet, as opposed to terrestrial radio stations.
While radio drama may be scarce on American radio, it never stopped on the BBC. Their acting and production values are of the highest standards and Radio 4 extra played archives of BBC dramas, comedies, books and other spoken word productions. 4 Extra plays treasures spanning the BBC’s archives, making 4 Extra itself a treasure in broadcasting. I fail to understand why the BBC can’t continue the service as an Internet-only station; it can’t possibly add much more to their budget by doing so and I’m sure many others would agree with me.
While there are many excellent stations on the Internet that broadcast audio theater, Radio 4 Extra played nothing but content from the BBC. I doubt that anyone will be able to legally carry on such a service in an unofficial capacity without the possibility of copyright infringement.
https://simonohagan.substack.com/p/down-the-radio-4-extra-rabbit-hole
Down the Radio 4 Extra rabbit hole
The station that is about to be axed is a repository of riches beyond compare
Simon O’HaganOct 31, 2026
Radio 4 Extra is soon to be no more, and I’ve been thinking of what it is I will miss about it beyond the programmes themselves.
The answer can be summed up, I think, in an excellent play that 4 Extra broadcast a few weeks ago — one of the many dramas that for decades was thought to have been “lost”, before it finally resurfaced thanks to the assiduous work of those admirable amateur sleuths who devote their lives to tracking down such content.
Vivien the Blockbuster, by a writer called Olwen Wymark, aired as part of 4 Extra’s long-running Hidden Treasures series. In recent years, Hidden Treasures has given us a whole load of amazing “lost” programmes, from Peter Sellers’s one and only appearance in Hancock’s Half-Hour to Roy Plomley-era editions of Desert Island Discs with castaways including Noël Coward, Dirk Bogarde, and Sophie Tucker.
The cast list for Vivien the Blockbuster illustrates what I’m talking about. First airing in 1980, the story of how a young author, seeking to rid himself of writer’s block, creates chaos in the family that’s meant to be helping him featured a trio of names that immediately leapt out at me.
Most prominent among them was Barbara Leigh-Hunt, an actor who eight years earlier had appeared in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Frenzy. The many other roles she played in a very distinguished career included one I was lucky enough to witness on stage — that of aristocratic Sybil Birling in the National Theatre’s brilliant early-1990s production of An Inspector Calls.
Then there was Anthony Bate. The year before Vivien the Blockbuster, he’d been a member of the illustrious cast in the TV dramatisation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Now here he was lending his talents to radio drama.
Alongside Anthony Bate, Harold Innocent. Remember Harold Innocent? You will if you enjoyed An Englishman Abroad, Alan Bennett’s 1983 TV film about Guy Burgess in Moscow, in which Innocent has a brief but delightful turn as a member of an English theatre troupe taking a production of Hamlet to the Soviet Union.
Radio performances like these can have a before-they-were-famous quality. Or they can remind us that even the biggest names do not consider doing radio beneath their dignity. Radio 4 Extra is where we can make such discoveries.
Earlier this week I treated myself to a whole day of Radio 4 Extra, and those discoveries kept coming. A highlight of its schedule put me in mind once again of TV’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy because here, from 1988, was a radio dramatisation of the same John le Carré tale of Cold War espionage.
What an enterprising thing to do — dramatise Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the radio — given the primacy of the TV version. The whole thing was immaculate — right down to the unmistakable sound of the idling motor of a London black cab as it waits outside the premises where the mole is about to be unmasked. And what was especially interesting about this Tinker Tailor was that the actor playing George Smiley was Bernard Hepton, taking on the role some nine years after, like Anthony Bate, he’d been in the cast of the TV series, performing alongside Alec Guinness’s Smiley. I was reminded that nobody could do sombre quite like Bernard Hepton.
I was soon disappearing down more Tinker Tailor rabbit holes. Toby Esterhase — the part played by Bernard Hepton on TV — was on the radio played by Charles Kay. Charles Kay! So wonderful in Edge of Darkness and in so many other screen roles. I randomly looked up the career of one of radio Tinker Tailor’s few female cast members. I hadn’t heard of Ann Lynn, but I had heard of the man she was once married to — Anthony Newley.
My 4 Extra listening moved on to a creaky hunt-for-wartime-treasure yarn from 1961 (“with attitudes of the time”, we were advised beforehand) called The Sand Leopard. It had first aired on the Light Programme and it was pure time capsule. Lead actor, a Canadian called Neil McCallum. I looked him up. Fun fact: Neil McCallum once dated Julie Andrews.
4 Extra was this week also giving a run-out to After Henry, Simon Brett’s inter-generational bitter-sweet comedy, dating from 1987. It starred Prunella Scales, Joan Sanderson, and Benjamin Whitrow. Wow. What a trio. Truly we were in the presence of greatness. Was it still funny? Not laugh-out-loud, but such lovely performances. And here’s another fun fact: After Henry “graduated”, like so much that started life on radio, to TV. But not, in this instance, to BBC TV, but to commercial television, the series airing on Thames for four years in the late 80s/early 90s.
Something that was still properly funny was The Goon Show. Yes, you can still hear The Goon Show on 4 Extra. It’s only 70-plus years since Spike Milligan and co were changing the world, and 4 Extra hasn’t forgotten them.
Goon Show joke I enjoyed this week, all the dialogue voiced by Peter Sellers:
A couple on an English seafront:
“Millie, hold my elephant gun.”
“I don’t know what you brought it for. You can’t shoot elephants in England, you know.
“Why not?”
“They’re out of season”.
Tony Hancock continues to enjoy a long afterlife on 4 Extra. This week there was an episode of The Missing Hancocks — newly recorded shows using scripts of original episodes, since lost. In A Visit to Russia, Hancock takes it upon himself to launch his own diplomatic mission:
Sid James: The Soviet Union? Is that on the way to Russia?
Hancock: Sid! Don’t be ignorant. That’s an insult. Is it on the way to Russia! Illiterate oaf. It’s nowhere near it.
In short, Radio 4 Extra is a repository of riches beyond compare. No wonder the announcement that it is being cut — following on from the cutting of so many Radio 4 programmes — has caused such dismay. This week’s edition of Feedback on Radio 4 covered the topic very well, and the feeling that output especially beloved of older listeners was being specifically targeted came through very strongly.
Yes, Radio 4 Extra content will — we are told — still be available on BBC Sounds. But how will we navigate our way round it? Make the kind of discoveries (and rediscoveries) that is the joy of such things as a 1988 dramatisation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy?
No doubt there are people at BBC radio working out the answer to these questions, but the disappearance of an entire station certainly doesn’t improve life for the countless listeners — not all of them old enough to recall Barbara Leigh-Hunt or Bernard Hepton — for whom Radio 4 Extra is no more “heritage” radio than the Beatles are “heritage” pop.
This week’s Feedback, extensively devoted to the demise of Radio 4 Extra, is here:
The preamble was by David Goldfield.
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