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BBC Radio 4: Documentary on Philip K. Dick

News

BBC Radio 4 will be airing a half-hour documentary on the transcendant experience near the end of Philip K. Dick‘s life. It’s called “Confessions of a Crap Artist” but the documentary’s title probably isn’t specifically about the PKD novel of the same name.

Here’s the BBC Radio 4 blurb:

“Philip K. Dick is now world famous, thanks to films like Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. But in the last years of his life he encountered something so strange and troubling he couldn’t stop writing about it. Writer Ken Hollings asks: Was it Phil’s fault God talked to him or was it God’s?”

It airs Monday 16th January 2006 bewtween 20:30-21:00 in the UK. You can use the PublicRadioFan.com website, mentioned below, to calculate when that will be for you. Another option ~~may be~~ is the “Listen Again” feature on the BBC4 website.

… UPDATE! …. HERE‘s a link to the listen again feature for the documentary.

posted by Jesse Willis

Though podcasting is cutting into traditional br…

Online Audio

Though podcasting is cutting into traditional broadcast radio’s audience the “tower and power” broadcasters still have a lot of great content that isn’t yet podcast. The problem is it’s not easily accessible if you are in a different time zone – in fact, unless you just happen to be listening to your chosen streaming radio station when something airs the whole prospect of figuring out when a program is going to anoyying to bother with. That said, here’s a tip, there’s an ingeniously designed website called PublicRadioFan.com which will certainly help. It features a complete database of public radio stations worldwide and it enables visitors to organize the stations’ streaming audio by program type, language, time zone and much more. This quick filtering and the ability to synchonize your time zone allows you to more easily see when a program will air on the internet stream. As an example, I can with a few clicks and filters bring up all the streams for listening to BBC7’s 7th Dimension program as it airs. I’d prefer to have the shows automatically downloaded to my iPod, but that just isn’t an option. Until it is, check out PublicRadioFan you’ll be amazed by how much content is out there streaming.

posted by Jesse Willis

Good news and bad news for fans of Science Ficti…

Online Audio

Good news and bad news for fans of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror audio dramatizations today. First the bad news…

Zombie Astronaut, one of our favorite mp3 webzines, has sadly shuffled off it’s undead coil. The aural delights have ceased due to ZA’s overwhelming popularity. It seems that the bandwidth traffic made for a giant expense in the anonymous host’s pocketbook. It is a bitter shame that mere $$ have downed this floating corpse when even death itself didn’t stop it. Alas.

The good news:

An interesting podcast in a similarly horrifc vein is available, it’ll help relieve some of the loss of ZA’s passing….

Tales Of Horror is an excellent source for genre Radio Drama, unfortunately its episodes are being removed at a fairly fast clip, no doubt due to some bristly copyright issues. Cool episodes still available include:

Tales Of Horror Episode 11 – From the BBC Radio series Chillers an AWESOME adaptation of John W. Campbell‘s classic “Who Goes There?” If you download no other, download this one!

Tales of Horror Episode 4 – From the CBC Radio series Nightfall “The Club of Dead Men” A Canadian student at Cambridge, spends the night in a room once used for meetings by members of the Everlasting Club. Spooky.

Tales of Horror Episode 2 – From the CBC Radio series Nightfall “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs an accursed curio from India destroys lives with its promises of three wishes. Much adapted, but likely never better that this.

posted by Jesse Willis

Saturday the 26th of November 2005 sees a bran…

Saturday the 26th of November 2005 sees a brand new unabridged reading of an H.P. Lovecraft story on BBC7’s The Seventh Dimension:

The Tomb
By H.P. Lovecraft; Read by Ryan McCluskey
STREAMING AUDIO – Approx. 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Broadcaster: BBC7
Broadcast: Nov 26th 2005 [available on the Listen Again service for 6 days following]
Jervas Dudley inmate of an insane asylum describes the sinister events leading up to his incarceration. He tells of how he became obsessed with the tomb of a long-dead family of aristocrats and how his obsession tipped him over into madness when he entered their tomb and spent a night lying in an empty coffin.

posted by Jesse Willis

BBC Radio 4 has just broadcast Zoran Zivkovic’s …

SFFaudio Online Audio

BBC Radio 4 has just broadcast Zoran Zivkovic‘s The Train. Which was first published in INTERZONE in 2000. Zoran Zivkovic is a World Fantasy Award winning author. This was the fourth in a series of five short stories on BBC Radio 4‘s Afternoon Reading collected under the heading “Opening Lines” which is billed as “A showcase of cutting-edge, contemporary writing”. It is archived for a limited time, likely just a 24 hours HERE.

The Train
By Zoran Zivkovic; Read by Roger Hallum
ONLINE AUDIO – 14 Minutes – [UNABRIDGED]
Broadcast: September 29th 2005
Bropadcaster: BBC Radio 4
A bank manager is travelling to an important meeting where he will announce whether or not his bank will grant a substantial loan to a new company. He’s mulling over the risks involved when he meets God, who reveals that he will provide the answer to a single question. The man can’t believe his good luck and asks God to solve his bank loan dilemma.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Crazy Dog Audio Theatre’s series THE LAST HARBINGE…

SFFaudio News

Crazy Dog Audio Theatre’s series THE LAST HARBINGER will be featured this Friday the 16th on BBC Radio 4’s A World In Your Ear programme just after the main lunchtime news.

Each week the BBC producers and team of researchers of A World In Your Ear select and present samples of what they describe as the ‘world’s best radio’.

In a special space- themed programme, A World In Your Ear hails Crazy Dog Audio Theatre’s THE LAST HARBINGER as; ‘a combination of dark comedy, social critique and riveting radio’, singling out this series as a ‘political satire for our times’.

On-line listeners can hear the programme at their convenience any time next week at the BBC A World In Your Ear page:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/aworldinyourear.shtml

Posted by Scott D. Danielson