All four series of the hilarious historical sitcom set just before and during the American Revolution. Baltimore, 1770, and shopkeeper Samuel Oliphant has much to worry about. Storm clouds are gathering, business is bad and to make matters worse, he’s been forced to play host to two British soldiers. Hapless officer Captain Brimshaw is decent enough, but his fellow redcoat - the one-eyed, one-eared, one-armed and one-legged Sergeant McGurk - is a shameless rascal obsessed with money and sex.

Writer, broadcaster and recovering comedian Natalie Haynes mixes comedy and conversation to bring the ancient world entertainingly up to date in these four radio series. Each episode sees her profiling a key figure from ancient Greece and Rome, and, aided by her special guests, creating a stand-up show around them. 

Simon McGrath is a nice chap - he donates blood, he recycles, he cares about the world. He just happens to work as an arms dealer - or a 'defence and security equipment system solutions broker', as he prefers to call it. It wasn’t planned, and what he really wants is to pursue is his career in electronic music, but until that takes off he’ll stay where he is. After all, he has to pay his mortgage like everyone else....

Autumn, 1646. The English Civil War is raging and there’s trouble ahead for Sir John and Lady Anne Firebasket. There’s a Roundhead platoon camping out in the barn, a perplexed priest hiding behind the panelling and, unbeknown to the Firebaskets, their scullery maid Mercy is actually a disguised aristocrat (and Royalist spy) named Melissa Fortescue-Bottomley.

One of the main movers and shakers at TS Sports Stars agency, Trevor Heslop is honest, decent and sensitive. Unfortunately, he works in a world of cutthroats and corruption, with nightmare clients and a rapacious partner with the morals of a barracuda. Add to that his dysfunctional family - estranged wife Meryl and teenage son Toby - and it’s a miracle he manages to stay afloat in the shark tank that is his life.

John Fuller-Carp, the Machiavellian head of chambers at Forecourt Buildings, is determined to become a QC and will perform almost any moral contortion to achieve his goal. When left-wing Ruth Quirke, rumoured to be a High Court judge's daughter, applies to join his chambers, Fuller-Carp's imagination goes into overdrive and promotion seems inevitable. However, his attempts to project a 'New Labour' image cut no ice with Ruth, and the two are soon at each other's throats. 

Norman is an idealistic, Beethoven-loving revolutionary. Max is a boring but cheerful timeshare salesman who won't stop talking. Fellow passengers on a flight to the Moon, they're thrown together to become reluctant companions after the lunar shuttle's toilet cubicle explodes, crash-landing them both on the desert sands of a distant alien planet. They are rescued by the friendly Oblivions, who could not be more delighted to see them. 

1961. Radio producer Hugo is proud of his new science-fiction show. Admittedly, the dialogue is somewhat creaky, the two lead actors despise each other and the sound effects were knocked up in the engineer's kitchen - but it has rocket-ships, hover-cars, robots and Martians. It's the world of the future, where anything can happen: and often does....

February 2012. Somewhere in the North Atlantic. In an increasingly uncertain defence environment, a deadly new arms race has begun. In an attempt to secure her boundaries, Britain has deployed the very latest sub-sea military technology. Beneath and beyond the front line, these are the adventures of the HMS Goliath. A 55,000-tonne M-Class nuclear stealth submarine, prowling 5,000 metres below the surface, manned by idiots.

A full-cast dramatisation of Robert Graves' brilliant account of the madness and debauchery of ancient Rome, starring Tom Goodman Hill as Claudius and Derek Jacobi as Augustus. The wickedly entertaining inside story of the lives and deaths of the Imperial dynasty from Augustus to Caligula is told by their obscure relation, Claudius. In public, Claudius is a stammering, drooling weakling, whose reputation as an idiot keeps him safe from office and assassination.

It is the 1980s, and Stamford Holmes is still living in the shadow of his famous grandfather. Languidly living on Sherlock's fortune, he reluctantly agrees to do some work as a consulting detective - if only to provide 'Doctor' Watson with material for the Sunday papers. Watson, on the other hand, brings all the bumbling enthusiasm he can muster to their new cases, forever aping and quoting both their grandfathers - and wielding a magnifying glass.

Dot's had quite enough of making tea in the Cabinet War Rooms. When she finds a cryptic message in the newspaper she enlists the help of her gals - will this be the big break Dot's been waiting for? Follow Dot as she gets squiffy over Agent Bertie Whiff-Whaff, concocts stirring yet pithy slogans for the war effort and goes on a mission to St Horribly Vulture’s School for Boys to enlist a teacher for...'shhhh...Bletchley Park!' Dot will do her bally utmost for King and Country in these spiffing tales of derring-do (and, occasionally, derring-don’t), whether investigating suspicious deaths, outwitting dastardly spies or helping the Prime Minister with his French vocab.

Sisters Alison and Maud are joint landladies of the Abbeyfield Guest House, dispensing hospitality to a variety of demanding clients while also looking after their irascible, bedridden father downstairs in the granny flat. Dreamy ornithologist Alison has just moved back from Bloomsbury, while Maud ran a 3,000-acre farm in Africa - but neither sibling is really up to the task of managing a B&B, and chaos generally ensues.

The story so far: unfortunately, Burrows, the leader of the colony, has died on the voyage, so his number two, Brian (Nicholas Lyndhurst), is now in charge. He's a nice enough chap but no alpha male, and his desire to sort things out with a nice friendly meeting infuriates the colony's chief physician, Lillian (Vicki Pepperdine), who'd really rather everyone was walking round in tight colour-coded tunics and saluting each other. She's also in charge of Project Adam, the plan to conceive and give birth to the first colony-born baby.

Nine BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramas by Mike Walker, chronicling Rome’s greatest rulers. Drawing on historical sources including Suetonius’ ‘Lives of the Caesars’, Mike Walker’s compelling drama cycle follows the story of the leaders of Rome, from Julius Caesar’s ascension to power to the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West in AD 475.