Thanks for bringing this to our attention, @freshynfs! We are huge fans of the Focus Radio Theatre productions (I think we now have every one that has ever been made). I, too, have been in touch with FotF with great desire to see them producing more radio dramas of excellence. I have signed the petition, and will write to the C.O.O., as well. How we long to see them with funding again so they can move ahead with more beloved audio book drama projects.

The Narnia Chronicles are, of course, favourites, as are the following by Focus: Bonhoeffer: the Cost of Freedom; Amazing Grace (Olaudah Equiano, John Newton, William Wilberforce); C.S. Lewis at War; The Hiding Place; The Secret Garden; Les Misérables; A Christmas Carol; Oliver Twist; The Screwtape Letters (with Andy Serkis!); At Home in Mitford, etc, etc!  

*dusts off thread* I come bearing two Perry Mason audiobooks as the first audiobooks I plan to listen to this year, they are The Case of the Stuttering Bishop and The Case of the Substitute Face. I picked them up last month when I went on a last minute book shopping trip to get a few more Christmas presents. I read two Perry Mason novels last year and I really enjoyed both of them, so I think I will enjoy the series as audiobooks too.

Last year I listened to 22 audiobooks, mostly westerns by Luke Short or Max Brand. My favorite audiobook of the year was probably The Nazarene by Michael Card, well written and read by the author.  

SnowAngel

Audiobooks have become my staple from the library lately, especially on days when I have to walk home from work. I think I have multiple copies of some of the same books in order to have all forms (print, ebook, and audiobook)   

Audiodramas are great too, but I’ve found that if you get a really good reader, even audiobooks came bring the same depth as the dramas (minus the music and special effects) when they use different voices for the characters.

@ellesar 

I like audio dramas too.  Dr. Who and Focus on the Family are some of the best.  Audio readings of novels can be very good if an experienced actor with a good voice reads the book. The readings from the first four Narnia books by Ian Richardson, Claire Bloom, and Anthony Quayle are very good even though the stories are abridged. They were on vinyl records, although I think they may be available on CD.  It would be nice if they were the complete stories, but even with only parts of the books the readings are well the listening.  🙂

I have heard about Dorothy Sayers' The Man Born to be King for years, but have not pursued it until now. I am finally on Audible, so chose this as my free audio drama. I am only in the first (of 14) plays, focusing on the wise men visiting Herod, then baby Jesus. I am impressed so far, that is for sure! (Herod is rightly creepy and terrifying.) The acting and sound effects are very good.

Having just finished a re-read of Justin Phillips' book, C.S. Lewis at the BBC, I noted he spends an entire chapter on this play of Sayers, which was broadcast on the BBC in the early 1940s, which piqued my interest again. Also, a women's group of which I am a part (from the Colson Center) is reading/listening through The Man Born to be King during Lent, but I am getting a head start.  

I will report more on this classic play as I go through the 14 cycles.  

@jo Wait. Audible has a production of The Man Born to be King?! I adore that radio series-well, the script for it anyway. The only full production I could listen to on YouTube was heavily abridged and not that great. I've got to listen to Audible's! Thanks for the tip.

Posted by: @jo

I have heard about Dorothy Sayers' The Man Born to be King for years, but have not pursued it until now. I am finally on Audible, so chose this as my free audio drama. I am only in the first (of 14) plays, focusing on the wise men visiting Herod, then baby Jesus. I am impressed so far, that is for sure! (Herod is rightly creepy and terrifying.) The acting and sound effects are very good.

Oh wow — who produced it? I'm assuming they must have got permission from Sayers' estate, as I'm pretty sure her works are still under copyright... Just checked and she died in 1957, so that makes it another 3 years under UK law, at least. However, as you're in Canada, I'm guessing her copyright has already expired there.

I would really love to hear those plays performed as well — I read the scripts years ago and found them very moving, and was saddened to find out that the BBC had deleted all the original recordings and (at the time) they'd never been performed since then. Like Lewis's broadcasts that became the basis for Mere Christianity, Sayers' dramatisations of the Gospel story must have struck a chord with plenty of listeners during the war.

Here is the link to the info, @Courtenay and @Col-Klink. It is a BBC production. I presume the copyright has expired in Canada. But a friend from the US (the leader of the reading group) told me about the play being on Audible, so I assume the US's copyright has expired too. This production was adapted and produced by Raymond Raikes, a well-known British radio drama producer.

Posted by: @courtenay

Like Lewis's broadcasts that became the basis for Mere Christianity, Sayers' dramatisations of the Gospel story must have struck a chord with plenty of listeners during the war.

Indeed! This play also brought out much contention, as many people objected the use of contemporary speech, and particularly the audacity of Jesus being played by a actual person (versus a ray of light or something symbolic). However, many others really appreciated what Sayers accomplished and wrote her telling her so. (As did the opposers.)

From Justin Phillips' book, C.S. Lewis was so enamoured with the play that he read the twelve cycles every year during Holy Week. His chapter on Sayers and this controversial play is a fascinating read!

@jo The link didn't lead directly to it for me — I think because my computer is automatically set to go to Amazon's UK site, which is what it did. But when I did a search for "The Man Born to Be King", it did come up. In fact, it's published as a BBC Radio 4 Drama Collection — is that the version you have, starring Gabriel Woolf, John Westbrook and others? I'm guessing the BBC must still have some stake in the copyright (since they produced the original radio plays), and so this new version was done by them as well.

I don't have an Audible subscription, but I may have to consider it, with this available! And yes, I do know about the controversies when these plays were first produced. Sayers alludes to some of them in her introduction to the published scripts, which I have somewhere. On top of the then-very-daring move of portraying Jesus as a character in a radio drama, there was the fact that we know he spoke with a noticeable regional accent — during Peter's denial, one of the questioners points out that he can tell Peter is a Galilean like "that man", because he speaks the same way — but for the BBC in the 1940s to give Jesus Christ a regional English accent would have been TOTALLY outré!! (In those days, of course, all BBC radio presenters talked extremely posh — Received Pronunciation, it's called — and were required to drop whatever regional accent they'd grown up with, so you can imagine the shock if they'd portrayed the Son of God Himself with, say, a Yorkshire or West Country accent, even though that would arguably be more appropriate... )

It is very rare for American radio stations to broadcast plays although a few months ago I heard Focus on the Family’s Narnia on the Moody station. I wonder if people here in the U.S. would even listen to anything else that was made into a radio play.  I kind of doubt it. But there is much audio material on Amazon if you are willing to pay for it. It’s kind of sad that only something with visual thrills appeals to most people today. 🙁

Posted by: @courtenay

is that the version you have, starring Gabriel Woolf, John Westbrook and others?

Sorry for my tardiness in replying, Courtenay. Yes, indeed, this is the version on Audible. I am now on Cycle 10, "The Princes of this World"; there are twelve in total. I only have a few minor niggles with this radio drama of the life of Jesus, but by far to the positive, this portrayal is of excellence. It does not move fast, as does so much entertainment these days (sadly), and I really appreciate the care and development taken with this adaptation. Bravo, Dorothy Sayers!

The telling often brings vividly to mind today's well-known multi-season series on the life of Jesus, for, to me, The Man Born to Be King was the mid 1900's The Chosen of today. Showing the disciples as very human (which they were!) is one strong and good similarity.

I finally listened to The Man Born to be King on Audible. (I decided to wait to do so until Holy Week.) There weren't many voice actors with whom I was familiar. (Only Miriam Margolyes and she was in a very minor role.) But they all did a great job. Well, I have mixed feelings about John Westbrook as the lead but mixed is not the same as bad and many of his line readings are great. And as I wrote before, I think the script by Dorothy Sayers is brilliant. It's easily the greatest dramatic retelling of the four gospels I've ever encountered. I do wish they didn't have to cut so much to make each episode 42 minutes. (See my post in the Books thread for more on this.) The crowd scenes lost a lot of depth. In the second episode, for example, Sayers emphasized that the crowd listening to John the Baptist be made up of three groups, each with a different reaction to his words. If Audible tried to do that, I couldn't hear it. Sayers also tried to make it clear how the crowd was convinced by the scribes and pharisees to ask for Barabas's release over Jesus's ("There's no nonsense about Barabas...He wouldn't tell you to pay tribute to Caesar! He doesn't hobnob with tax collectors!") and this production really doesn't. 

I think the music they used was from the original production because it sounds very old fashioned. It also sounds rather clamorous and heavy handed to my ears and I would have preferred they compose something new. Still, this is way better than having no production of The Man Born to be King at all.

If I have a caveat that has to do with the writing and not the production, it's that it's somewhat anti-Jewish. When condemning the people of Israel, John the Baptist calls them "a nation of shopkeepers and petty bureaucrats, their hearts fixed on cash and credit, and deaf and blind to righteousness," which arguably evokes historical negative stereotypes of Jewish people. The script also emphasizes that Judea was considered backwater and culturally unimpressive compared to Rome though I think there are dramatic and doctrinal reasons for emphasizing that. The gentile antagonists, like Herod the Great and Pontius Pilate, are portrayed as tragic villains while the Jewish antagonists, except for Judas Iscariot who also gets to be a tragic villain, are as slimy and unlikeable as possible. (I've got to give a shoutout to Heron Carvic as Caiaphas the high priest in the Audible version. He's awesome as the baddie you love to hate.) FWIW though, Sayers wrote that her model for the Jewish high priest in The Man Born to be King was "the ecclesiastical politician, appointed, like one of Hitler's bishops, by a heathen government expressly that he might collaborate with the New Order and see that the Church toed the line with the State" and her models for the synagogue elders were "to be found in every parish council-always highly respectable, often quarrelsome and sometimes in a crucifying mood." So while she may have brought certain prejudices, even racist ones, to those biblical figures, the main thing on her mind was criticizing (ostensible) Christians, not Jewish people. The character of Matthew is deliberately written as a negative Jewish stereotype since many of the stereotypes people had about Jewish people in Sayers's day were the same ones people had about tax collectors in Jesus's day. I'd argue that's anti-anti-Jewish since Matthew ends up being a very positive character, but the implication is still that those stereotypes are true. If not, Jesus befriending him would be less impressive. 

To end on a lighter note, a listener apparently wrote to Sayers criticizing her for having King Herod tell his courtiers to "keep their mouths shut" because "such coarse expressions were jarring on the lips of anyone so closely connected with our Lord."  

I finally purchased, via a credit, on Audible, The Chronicles of Narnia Complete Audio Collection. I have heard about this from many sources, but only signed up for Audible last year, so am gradually adding books as I gain credits. The readers are as follows: Kenneth Branagh, Alex Jennings, Michael York, Lynn Redgrave, Derek Jacobi, Jeremy Northam, Patrick Stewart.

I am currently on The Magician's Nephew, read by Kenneth Branagh. While I adore this story, I thought the reading of it would have been better, given Branagh's stellar movie and stage performances. But he sounds rather bland and uninteresting at times. There is little or no life in his interpretation of TMN. Other sections are somewhat better, but, overall, this is a disappointment. Yet the tale, itself, is so wonderful, and has such nostalgia for me, that I can't help but listen to the entirety.

I have listened to numerous excellent audio books and dramas over the past year, the Harry Potter series being the most recent. Jim Dale does a superior job reading all seven books. What a vast difference between his and Branagh's reading interpretation. And, prior to HP, as I was in the kitchen baking or cooking, I went through pretty much all the Focus on the Family Radio Theatres, which are superbly done, and, in my estimation, far better than the films. As well, Andy Serkis' readings of The Hobbit, The LotR, and, more recently, The Silmarillion, are of very high quality.

@jo That's interesting that Kenneth Branagh, of all people, does a bland reading of The Magician's Nephew — I too would have expected him to give it some real life and colour. I've only heard two of those audiobook recordings of the Chronicles, LWW and HHB. The latter was pretty well done, as far as I remember, but I know I've commented elsewhere that Michael York's rendition of LWW gave me the irrits for a couple of reasons. The main one was that for several characters, instead of really trying to imagine what a Faun or a Talking Wolf or a Talking Beaver might sound like, he falls back on corny stereotypical regional accents that he probably learned to do in drama school — Mr Tumnus with an Irish accent, the Beavers with Yorkshire accents, and Maugrim with a Scottish accent (which sort of leaves me wondering what he has against the Scots ).  And on top of that, he pitches his voice up too high for the White Witch and makes her sound more like a cheesy pantomime villain than the deadly dangerous and totally evil being that she is.

I'd be interested to hear your (or anyone else's) thoughts on this or any of the other audiobook recordings in the series — I appreciate them for the fact that they are what Lewis actually wrote, rather than someone else's interpretation or adaptation, but obviously I'm not the only one who's found that in some regards, the readers may be a let-down.

Now that reminds me — recently I found out that John Cleese (as in Fawlty Towers and Monty Python) has recorded an audiobook version of The Screwtape Letters, which is of course another great C.S. Lewis classic. There are excerpts of it available online and I had a listen, very eagerly at first, but was soon hugely disappointed... far from sounding like a senior devil, he sounds exactly like, well, John Cleese.   There just didn't seem to be a lot of expression, let alone devilishness, in his delivery at all.

(Thinking about it, it took me quite a while to work out whose voice I actually hear in my head when I read Screwtape myself, as I knew I was basing it on some famous British actor I've seen or heard in a few things, but I couldn't quite place it, until at last I twigged — it's Jeremy Irons. No insult intended to him, of course. I wish he would do a recording of it!)

I remember with Kenneth Branagh's reading of The Magician's Nephew, he had Digory demand to know what Uncle Andrew had done with Polly in a perfectly calm tone of voice, not at all like his friend had just vanished off the face of the Earth. And when he said, "it's exactly the same as if you'd murdered her," he sounded like he was scolding a dog. It's weird because normally I find him a very entertaining performer. 

(I also remember listening to a sample of John Cleese's reading of The Screwtape Letters and thinking it was boring.)