Spokenworld Audio is proud to offer you exclusive access to an ever-growing library of top-quality radio arts documentaries, tackling subjects from music and modern dance, to poetry, classical music and art.
Between 5 and 10% of the BBC’s national radio output is made by UK independent producers, and we are the first to bring that talent together to create a one-stop-shop for the very best in mind-expanding, highly creative arts documentaries & features.
Real life as seen through the prism of art is contained herein, and there’s something for everyone. So take a look around and you’ll be sure to find something that will take your fancy and expand your mind.
Narrated by Tony Robinson
Sit back and enjoy as Tony Robinson narrates the stories behind some of the all-time classical music greats, as world-renowned conductors and their orchestras play the music underneath. Not heard since 1995!
Dur: 1hr 59minsSTEREO
Available in 3 'flavours' offering differing quality vs file size (all the same price!):
Written & Presented by Patrick Humphries
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 4
Patrick Humphries explores the life and career of an author whose works are household names but about whom little is known. Paul Brickhill wrote three of the most famous novels centred on the Second World War - "The Great Escape", "Reach for the Sky" and "The Dambusters", all of which were made into iconic films.
Dur: 28minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 64MB
Written & Presented by Rainer Hersch
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 4
In the musical powerhouse of Europe in the 15th century, one tune caught the imagination of the court composers. This was The Armed Man (or in its original French "L'Homme Arme"). A rousing first line warns that "the armed man must be feared" and goes on to tell everyone to arm themselves with a coat of mail. The musician and broadcaster Rainer Hersch unpicks the facts we know of the tune and its words, making his way through 40 odd church masses by as many composers, who used the melody as a base.Dur: 28minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 64MB
Written & Presented by Matthew Sweeney
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 4
According to a study by Kay Redfield Jamison, poets are thirty times more likely to undergo a depressive illness than the rest of the population, and twenty times more likely to be committed to an asylum. It is the unconscious that drives poetry, the jumps and sudden lurches that forge new connections with things not connected before, new ways of seeing. And it is also in the unconscious that the voices of the irrational lurk.Dur: 27minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 63MB
Written & Presented by Lowri Blake
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 3
Lowri Blake presents a programme about Debussy's work during the summer of 1912, talking to pianists Roy Howat, Peter Hill and Alasdair Beatson as well as musicologist Robert Orledge, and introducing music from that time.Dur: 44minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 100MB
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 4
eden ahbez is one of those extraordinary characters. His name is not well known but his story and influence are considerable. Credited with having singlehandedly initiated the hippy movement twenty years before it was to arrive in San Francisco in the early 1960s, ahbez was a songwriter who is now known for only one song. But what a song: 'Nature Boy'.Dur: 27minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 63MB
Presented by Tim Brooke-Taylor
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 4
The legacy of Charlie Chaplin extends far beyond the celluloid archive. There is a living strand of creative performance, which sees the grandchildren of Sir Charles exploring an adventurous new world of physical theatre, and adding a new dimension to those well-worn silent film images of The Little Tramp, battling against a hostile world.Dur: 27minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 64MB
Presented by Zeinab Badawi
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 3
Sudan has seen some of the worst fighting in its internal conflicts. In this “Sunday Feature” Zeinab Badawi visits the Albuga Festival in Khartoum to meet those actors and directors who are at theatre’s front line and find out how they use their skills to help communities recover from war.
Dur: 44minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 100MB
Presented by Yasmeen Khan
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 4
With more and more young British Asians choosing comedy as a profession, broadcaster and wannabe stand-up comic Yasmeen Khan explores how this fits with traditional Asian culture and how Asian comedy of all backgrounds is developing in the UK.
Dur: 28minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 63MB
Presented by Robert Powell
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 4
Playwright Alan Ayckbourn and actor Tom Courtenay are amongst those talking to Robert Powell about Britain’s experiment in theatre-in-the-round, which was begun in Scarborough by Stephen Joseph 50 years ago.
Dur: 27minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 62MB
Presented by Miles Kington
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 4
Miles Kington fell in love with the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre in his teens, inseparable from a dog-eared copy of ‘La Nausee’, Sartre’s early novel which caught the imagination of a generation with its portrait of a man adrift.
Dur: 27minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 62MB
Revelations: The Story Of The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre
Presented by Thomas DeFrantz
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 4
A crackling ride through one of the seminal dance-works of multicultural America.
Dur: 26minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 60MB
Written & Presented by Richard Holloway
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 4
Richard Holloway considers some of the universal questions about our existence and the meaning of life, and how some of humanity's best thinkers and most creative writers have approached these 'literally life and death questions'.
Dur: 4hrs 20minsSTEREO - 20 part Radio Series
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 -619MB
Presented by John Worthen
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 3
A series of short essays looking at different perspectives on the life and work of Robert Schumann.
Dur: 43minsSTEREO - Radio Documentary
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 99MB
Presented by Various
Originally Broadcast On BBC Radio 3 in 2010
A series of short essays looking at different perspectives on the life and work of Robert Schumann.
Dur: 1hr 7minsSTEREO - 5 part Radio series
Available as 320kbps Stereo MP3 - 153MB