Showing results by narrator "Jim Barclay" in All Categories

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. ‘Remember, remember, the fifth of November’. The gunpowder plot is a famed tale of treachery that continues to fascinate and capture the imagination four hundred years on. The Gunpowder Plot in an Hour reveals the elaborate background to...

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Jim Barclay, best known for their roles in The Young Ones and Jeeves and Wooster. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Christopher Rowe, also read by Jim Barclay. 'We set about founding the best city we could...

Take your seat on the boundary as we enjoy some of the most colourful and intriguing English cricket matches in the history of the game, from the village green to the grounds of Windsor Castle, with cricket-loving vicars, Harold Wilson in Moscow and the wartime bomb that stops play at Lords. An unforgettable journey around the world, from Australia to Trinidad and the Antarctic to Cambodia, we witness both triumph and disaster during the game's unpredictable adventures abroad.

The Pharos stands as a beacon of light in the darkness, a whisper of hope in the silent void, a bastion of defiance in the face of treachery. Without it there could be no Imperium Secundus - why, then, do the masters of Ultramar know so little about its operation, or the dangers it could present? Young Oberdeii and Tebecai, Scouts of the 199th Company, descend into the depths beneath Mount Pharos in search of the truth...though it may haunt them for all time.

In Swansden, it seems like the men and women of the Post Office must make their own fun. From following mystic runes on a fantasy journey and competing in a little light professional competitive cycling, to fighting the Tuareg in a fort in Africa after joining the French Foreign Legion and engaging the Jupiter aliens in an amateur musical, via climbing Mount Everest and attempting to record a Christmas Number One - Brian, Derek and Sue will just have to make sure all the boring stuff like sorting and handing out the post is actually done at some point.

August, 1755. Newcastle, on the north bank of the Tyne. In the fields, men and women are getting the harvest in. Sunlight, or rain. Scudding clouds and backbreaking labour. Three hundred feet underground, young Charles Hutton is at the coalface. Cramped, dust-choked, wielding a five-pound pick...

Gateshead, April 1866. The Apprentice of Split Crow Lane takes the forgotten case of a child murder in 1866 as a springboard to delve deeply into the pysche of the Victorians. What Jane Housham finds in this exploration of guilt, sexual deviance and madness is a diagnosis that is still ripe for the challenging and a sentence that provokes even our liberal modern judgment.

Steve Halliwell is best known as the loveable patriarch Zak Dingle in the hit TV show Emmerdale, a part he has played since 1994. He is now one of the UK's most recognisable and treasured soap stars. Yet before his success, Halliwell spent many years desperately seeking work and even spent time on the streets. This warts-and-all story of his rise to fame is an inspiration. It explores the wider class history that permeated the country in the '60s and '70s and still lingers today. Above all, it is an honest tale of rejection and redemption and will appeal to all who have the ambition to better themselves.

Cricket's legends play again as we join WG Grace, Jack Hobbs, Denis Compton, Geoffrey Boycott and other great cricketers. We relive Len Hutton's 13-hour stand against Australia in the summer of '38, marvel at Ian Botham's 1981 tour de force at Old Trafford, accompany Ted Dexter as he stands for Parliament and join Wilfred Rhodes, aged 49, taking 6 wickets for 79 as he saves England from defeat in 1926.

Travel around the world in the company of some of cricket's most notable personalities, from Australia to Trinidad and the Antarctic to Cambodia, as they witness both triumph and disaster during the game's unpredictable adventures abroad. We join a cricket match in a Japanese POW camp, we are with Don Bradman as England's bowlers adopt the 'fast leg theory' of bowling and we celebrate Garfield Sobers as he surpasses Hutton's record test innings, and then there is the English wicket-keeper who gets arrested in Australia.

Wisden comes to life as we relive the finest, the strangest and the most dramatic moments of cricketing history in this entertaining portrait of the English game. Take your seat on the boundary as we enjoy some of the most colourful and intriguing English cricket matches in the history of the game, as King George VI takes a hat-trick in the grounds of Windsor Castle, a cricket-loving vicar escapes death on the high seas, Denis Compton scores 18 centuries in one glorious summer and while a wartime bomb stops play at Lord's, Harold Wilson has an adventure in Moscow.