After five years of planning and an 18-month campaign costing more than œ15m, England's bid to host the 2018 World Cup ended in humiliation in front of millions of TV viewers around the world. This thrilling drama tells the behind-the-scenes story of what happened in Zurich in the days leading up to the momentous announcement on 2nd December...

Born and bred in Dundee, Servant sees himself as a people's champion. His extraordinary self-belief stems largely from his dominant position in Dundee's notorious Cheeseburger Wars of the early 1980s - a period of riotous appreciation for the traditional American snack that caused madness on the streets and lined Servant's pockets. He continued his...

An absurd black comedy thriller, set in Baghdad. The first of three Arabian Afternoons - contemporary plays inspired by tales from The Arabian Nights. Junior diplomat Bob Goldacre is in trouble: the American businessman he was looking after has vanished from a Baghdad street. As the suspects pile up, Goldacre is going to have his work cut out if he...

Three short stories written and performed by leading new comedians at The Pleasance Theatre in Edinburgh as part of the Festival Fringe. In May Contain Nuts, by Janey Godley, a woman glimpses her own mortality when she calculates that only twenty-seven years separate her from her cantankerous father. The Hair of the Dead, by Sarah Millican, is a mo...

Three more short stories which capture the atmosphere of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Recorded live at The Pleasance last week, leading comedians perform their own work in front of a packed audience. The Woman Who Sniffed, written and read by Susan Calman, is a wry look at office politics. Just When You Thought It Was Safe to be Green, written an...

A series of three brand new short stories written and performed by leading comedians. Stairlift Us Up Where We Belong, written and read by Sarah Millican, is a poignant and funny monologue exploring the tricky turning point in a woman's life, when she goes from being thought of as useful to becoming invisible. In Spooky and the Van, written and rea...

When the TARDIS is buffeted by 'time slippage', the Doctor experiences a terrible vision of the end of everything. Tracking the source of the disruption, he takes Rory and Amy to what appears to be an English public school in the 1950s. But the friends discover that there are some very unusual things about Darkstar Academy. For a start the prefects...

It's a big day for Sally, and she's been planning it for weeks. But when her mystery man finally arrives, she's left hopelessly unprepared. Intimate drama by award-winning playwright Nick Payne. Starring Olivia Colman, Ralph Ineson, Nishi Malde, Nishi Malde, Jane Whittenshaw, and Simon Bubb. Directed by Sasha Yevtushenko.

Northern Ireland was a very dark place in the 1980s. A hunger strike was looming, street violence and tit for tat murders were an everyday occurrence, but in a small corner of West Belfast something extraordinary was happening. In a factory in Dunmurry a unique new sports car was being built, a DMC 12, a style icon for the late 20th century. For 2...

Derek Nimmo is one of Just a Minute's famous sparkling raconteurs, whose sharp wit and skill made him a pleasure and delight to listen to. This episode is one of four which showcases his highlights - the moments which reveal Derek Nimmo at the very top of his game. First broadcast 18 April 1981, it features Derek Nimmo, Clement Freud, Peter Jones,...

Derek Nimmo is one of Just a Minute's famous sparkling raconteurs, whose sharp wit and skill made him a pleasure and delight to listen to. This episode is one of four which showcases his highlights - the moments which reveal Derek Nimmo at the very top of his game. First broadcast 4 April 1989, it features Derek Nimmo, Peter Jones, Paul Merton and...

Douglas Kelly stars in another adventure for radio's greatest hero. Heralded by an instantly memorable signature tune, the adventures of Dick Barton, Jock and Snowey originally ran on the BBC Light Programme between 1946 and 1951. Very few of the BBC's original recordings still survive, however, in 1949 some were re-recorded for transmission overse...

It's difficult being young and in love when your Dad is a high ranking official in Ceausescu's communist machine, your mother weeps all the time and your brother is trying to kill you. This wild and sideways look at life behind the Iron Curtain during Ceausescu's regime is a first play by a young Hungarian writer living in Romania and was shortlist...

Angela Carter's relationship with radio began with an accidental sound effect. She went on to write two docu-dramas, Come Unto These Yellow Sands (about the Victorian painter Richard Dadd) and A Self-Made Man (about Edwardian novelist Ronald Firbank) and re-worked two of her short stories into radio plays. Carter loved radio's technical possibiliti...

The Royal Collection is one of the most wide-ranging collections of art and artefacts in the world and provides an intriguing insight into the minds of the monarchs who have assembled it. In this series, BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz examines dozens of these unique objects, in a quest to 'use the Collection as a prism through which to better unders...

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the dea...

Katniss Everdeen continues to struggle to protect herself and her family from the Capitol in this second novel from the bestselling Hunger Games trilogy.

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she's made it out of the bloody arena live, she's still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge.

Germany as we understand it, unified and strong, only came into existence a mere 140 years ago. Before then? Well, there was Bavaria and Prussia, Saxony, Baden Wurttemberg, Pomerania, Westfalia, Schleswig Holstein - this list is extremely long. And defining where one bit ended and the next began - well, it was utterly bewildering.' Misha Glenny pre...

John Gordon Sinclair stars as Scotland's most celebrated doctor in six BBC Radio full-cast dramatisations. When Dr Cameron gets called in to see a patient, he doesn't expect it to be his new partner Dr Finlay. But the new doctor is full of surprises: caring, stubborn, idealistic and clever, Finlay might have been welcomed to the practice with a bla...

A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Virgil's sweeping epic, starring Ralph Fiennes as Aeneas and Derek Jacobi as the Narrator. One of the classics of all time, The Aeneid was Virgil's last and greatest work. In it, he recounts in vivid imagery the legendary origin of the Roman Empire. The story begins after the Greeks have destroyed the city of Troy. Th...