Tinker Tailor is a comfort listen for me at this point. This weekend, I also watched the two first episodes of the Alec Guinness miniseries, and I might like the radio adaptation more? It’s really good.

“Came In From the Cold” may be Le Carré’s best, but I think “Looking Glass” is my favorite. That’s true of the book, but Ian McDiarmid as an incompetent agency director is also a lot of fun. Le Carré has a particular kind of plot that boils down to “stupid people making stupid decisions,” and I think this is the best of them. It’s a damning story of toxic World War II nostalgia, desperation to be doing something meaningful with one’s life, and manipulation by more competent cynics.

I know that “Tinker, Tailor” is good, and I’m looking forward to revisiting it for the nth time, but I really think this is the best of the Smileyverse. The most twisty, the most cynical, the most appalled at its own cynicism. It’s no surprise that the most recent additions to the Smileyverse have revisited this story—it’s the best.

In some ways this is the least interesting of the Smiley stories. There’s something fun about a retired Smiley doing detective work, and it’s fascinating to get glimpses at the British class system, but it’s not Smiley in his element (as it will later become), and it feels like a distraction in that sense. Yet, the radio adaptation is so, so nicely done that I can’t help but give it full marks.

I love these radio dramas so much. I honestly can’t remember if (an imagined) Ann serves as a narrator in the original book, but she does in the dramas to great effect. I can’t listen to Call for the Dead without thinking about the ambiguous continuity of the Smileyverse. On one hand, Smiley feels like a one-off character here, and it’s weird to start him off as resigning from the Circus when Le Carré will want to use that to greater effect later on.

I’ve had this on my radar since listening to the audiobook and thought I’d give it a try. It is terminally 80s in some ways (I liked the music anyway, but the sound effects felt like bad Doctor Who), but there were some excellent choices for adapting it to radio. It kept what I found interesting about the book: depicting the possibility of another way of living but without settling for naïve utopia.

I think I got this in an NPR Humble Bundle, and I’ve been meaning to relisten to it for a while. It’s a real mix of good and bad: Thanks to John Williams and Ben Burtt, it’s got some great audio to work with; however, it does a lot of awkward “tell since we can’t show.” It sometimes feels like it’s reaching to fill in an extra four hours, but also it maybe demonstrates that Star Wars could maybe be a miniseries with some better writing?

This was a very interesting subversion of stories like The Last Starfighter, where a young “chosen one” is called to save not their own people but another, not through violence but through peace. It wasn’t perfectly done, but it was a compelling story and invoked the then-contemporary Gulf War in all the right ways.

I had an awful experience with the last Sam Vimes adaptation, so I wasn’t sure about this—especially since it is one of the longer adaptations in the collection I have. I think the key is the adapter, though, because Robin Brooks’s shows have been my favorites, and this one was quite good. I really got why people like Sam Vimes stories, I appreciated nods to Discworld continuity even if I didn’t understand them, and I am a real sucker for “time travelling into your own past” stories.

Okay, I finally listened to one of these that convinced me how good Discworld can be. This is a clever, expert skewering of what religion so often is—but holds out hope for what religion can be. I ought to read the original book, because I imagine I’d be copying a lot of passages down.

I have some complaints about this show, but I was so relieved to find myself smiling at the jokes that I’m giving it some grace. It’s a wonder I keep listening to these, but I spent a lot of time driving this weekend and needed something to listen to—besides, I’ve owned this collection for years without ever getting past Mort. I don’t know how much longer I’ll keep going, but I want to give it a try, at least.

I’m beginning to wonder if I just don’t like Discworld, which would be a tragedy, since Pratchett is revered, and it seems like I should like his style of fiction. I at least know that I didn’t really like this series, which also seems a shame, since I’ve always wanted to get into the Sam Vimes stories. I suspect some of it may be the adaptation: It seems just too hard to follow.

I don’t know if I didn’t like the adaptation or if I wouldn’t have liked the source material, but this just felt like a slog to get through, and I didn’t really enjoy it.

There’s something especially dark about the voice actor who played Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit) starring as a naïve Englishman in this story about the horrors of nuclear war. I’ve wanted to read the book this is based on for quite some time—and may yet read it now that I’ve found a copy on the Internet Archive—but I got to the radio adaptation first. The couple at the heart of the story are so naïve as to make the story heavy-handed, but it’s also a good literary device for just how helpless one is in the face of nuclear weapons.

This bounced off of me at first, which surprised me, because I remembered liking it when listening to it years ago. I think it might have been a case of the Mondays, though, because by the last episode, I was totally on board. It’s funny, adapted well to radio, and worth the listen.

I had started listening to the recent Audible adaptation, believing that it was a BBC adaptation, but between not loving Audible and it feeling overdone, I ditched it pretty quickly and found this actual BBC adaptation instead. For bonus points, Christopher Eccleston is in the lead role! I feel like it’s the kind of adaptation that you have to know the original to really appreciate, but that doesn’t make it bad.

I discovered this cycle of 12 radio plays that adapted the four gospels for the BBC on the Internet Archive and decided to give it a try! From a hermeneutical and theological perspective, I have some complaints. For one thing, even though it’s a radio play, it still manages to make clear that its Jesus is blond (and, by extension, white) through repeated references to golden hair, so that got under my nerves.

There’s an interesting premise behind this spy thriller adaptation, and some of the radio work is pretty good, but I felt like there wasn’t enough connective tissue to keep it together. I don’t know how much of the weakness was in the original novel versus introduced in the adaptation—the rushed pacing makes me suspect the latter—but while I don’t regret finishing it, I can’t say I was impressed.

This series wasn’t bad—it’s just that maybe I shouldn’t be binging them series after series, because despite some clever moments, I just felt like there wasn’t much new about this material.

I didn’t listen to the finale all in one chunk, so I didn’t appreciate it as much as I could have, but the excellent use of callbacks and flashbacks in that episode was enough to bump up my rating. I think this is also the first series I hadn’t heard before, so it was nice to hear some new content.

Still fun! Just didn’t stand out as much as some of the other series.

I really enjoy metahumor, and Finnemore’s talent for it is on full display in this series—even to the extent of calling himself out on overreliance on it. Doesn’t bother me, though!

I’ve been tempering my praise of this series through this relisten, but the time travel sketch in the finale is excellent, and there are other top notch examples of Finnemore’s humor scattered throughout. What’s more, the recordings of this series on the Internet Archive are actual recordings and have bits of continuity announcer on either end of the episodes. I just love that, for reasons I can’t fully articulate, and I wish all the series were like that.

I miss the traditional “storyteller” sketches at the end of every episode, but I know they’ll be back in future series, and there were plenty of laugh out loud moments in this one.

This show continues to be fun, even if it wears off its genius on the third run. Some parts still make me laugh out loud, though!

This is the third time I’ve listened to this series in the past five years, and I wonder if I’m rating it a bit low because of that. At any rate, I couldn’t help myself from trying it again after finishing Cabin Pressure. I might like this show even better—Finnemore has more freedom to show off his gift for words and his intricate plotting and callbacks.

It’s been about a decade since I was introduced to this show, and I’m very glad to finally have experienced the whole thing. The last season was fun, the finale was a nice wrap-up, and I really do think the whole thing is a masterpiece.

This series feels like Finnemore kicking things up a notch. There are some interesting new character arcs in play, and it’s fun to see Finnemore playing with the fact that one of his actors is now taking on the role of Sherlock Holmes. He’s also clearly having fun subverting some audience expectations with stories and characters. I hadn’t heard this series before, and it was fun to come back to it!

My journey through Cabin Pressure continues! I can’t remember how much of this series I’ve previously listened to—definitely not the Christmas special, but probably the rest of it. At any rate, it continues to have exceptional writing and lovely acting. Radio is underrated, and John Finnemore is perhaps the best example of that.

It’s been ages since I’ve listened to this, though I’ve listened to some of John Finnemore’s other work in the meantime. It’s such an excellent show: brilliantly written, well acted, and a real joy to listen to. I’m confident I haven’t listened to all four series, though I can’t remember which bits I’ve missed. Looking forward to finding out!

I first picked this up through an Audible deal several years ago, with the idea that it would help with the move from Michigan to Kentucky (I can’t remember if I wasn’t yet anti-Audible or if it was just a good deal that I couldn’t pass up with the whole family living off my grad school fellowship). Anyway, the U-Haul didn’t have an aux jack or Bluetooth, so my brother-in-law and I cranked my phone as loud as it would go and tried to make out the jokes over the highway noise.