Audiobooks

 

Christmas Collection, The

Author : Various

Performed By : Full Cast Production

Publisher : Select Music & Distribution

Runtime : 2 hours 30 minutes

Categories : Poetry
Classic Literature
Dramatizations
Religious

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Christmas brings out the best and the worst in us, as can be seen in this evocative anthology. Among what Thomas Love Peacock calls the 'many poetical charms in the heraldings of Christmas' there are eulogies by saints and diatribes from curmudgeons. Here, Christmas is expounded by divines, sung by rustics, deplored by philosophers, made mystical in stories and summed up in a line by the poet Elizabeth Jennings: 'The hush, the star, the baby, people being kind again'.

This collection includes complete versions of such old favourites as 'The Little Match Girl', 'The Night Before Christmas', 'Ring out Wild Bells' and 'Christmas Day in the Workhouse'. But there are also discoveries: a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes, an account of Christmas under the Puritans, a first, poverty-stricken Christmas in turn of the century New York and a Mummer's Play. Adding the final touch is the music: from traditional Christmas carols and Corelli to Benjamin Britten. On this recording, Christmas past brings alive Christmas present.

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Forty Years On

Author : Alan Bennett

Performed By : Full Cast Production

Publisher : BBC Audiobooks Ltd

Runtime : 1 hour 35 minutes

Categories : Dramatizations

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The Headmaster has been at Albion House for fifty years, man and boy. Now he is retiring and tal<es part in the end-of-year entertainment for the last time. Entitled Speak For England, Arthur, It weaves together a multi-generational story of England: the glorious era at the turn of the century, when the summers were always golden: the fast-living inter-war years peopled by the Bloomsbury Group: and the growing cynicism of a country facing a second world war with the scars of the first still fresh in their memories.

Tongue-in-cheek, the play-within-a-play prompts an outraged response from the Headmaster, who can only see his beloved standards being mocked. Yet within the parody lies an almost painful nostalgia for a more peaceful age and the timeless misunderstanding of one generation by another.

Clever, funny and poignant, Alan Bennett's masterful play is rightly regarded as a modern classic.

Written By
Alan Bennett

First Broadcast
BBC Radio 4
28 August 2000