Maybe see if you can get a complete box set of the British series The Archers?
The Archers is hugely popular and I’m a big radio4 listener but have never got into it. I understand that twee is supposed to be part of the charm but it just doesn’t gel with me.
If you’ve got a little while you could listen to [The Archers](The Archers - Wikipedia https://share.google/HNm6SzoUffXpgh18X) there are only 20,000 or so episodes though.
Only the shadow knows…
Having read the original Foundation Trilogy twice, I can give a heartfelt stamp of approval to the BBC radio play of it, apparently it’s from 1977, I had assumed it was at least half a decade older than that. Hope you enjoy, I surely did.
Can’t believe no one has said the dramatized version of LOTR broadcast by BBC in 1981! 12 hours plus of pure magic. Fun fact: Ian Holm gave the voice for Frodo in the radio version, the same guy who plays Bilbo in the movie trilogy.
Looks like it is on internet archive already: https://archive.org/details/lord-of-the-rings-10_202401 though I first downloaded it on high seas many years ago.
Welcome to Nightvale is 13 years old. Does that count as a classic?
Assume 20 years is what it takes to make something classic. Go get classic plates for your 2005 Prius.
Wasn’t War of the Worlds an extended radio drama?
War of the Worlds was originally a novel in 1898. A 1938 adaptation was made for radio as a single 60 minute episode of The Mercury Theater on the Air.
The radio episode was formatted as a series of increasingly frequent “news bulletins” that interrupted light jazz orchestra music. This caused some listeners to believe that New Jersey was actively being invaded by Martians.
That broadcast is on YouTube!
This would be my recommendation too. Hilarious and thought provoking in equal measure.
Not a lot of people nowadays know that the first book was a novelization of the radio play
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mercury_Theatre_on_the_Air
The most famous is the War of the Worlds broadcast; that and others are available at the Internet Archive.
The most famous is the War of the Worlds broadcast;
Yarp, literally the only one I know off the top of my head.
The shadow knows.
Mmmuhuhahahahaaa
The gem smuggling episode was fucked
I had a good time listening to Wolf 359.
Cracker Barrel used to sell old radio dramas on tape and CD. They had the original ads, too. Awful quality, but the illusion was there.
The Adventures of Superman, Dick Tracy, The Green Hornet
As others suggested, just go to Archive.org and search “OTR”.
