A collection of BBC Radio adaptations of Kingsley Amis’s novels and short stories.

Novelist, poet and critic Kingsley Amis was one of Britain’s greatest post-war writers. A master of comic fiction, he first came to fame in 1954, and won the 1986 Booker Prize for The Old Devils. Included in this collection are dramatisations of his stories, all imbued with his characteristic wit and social satire.

All Free Now – A comic observation of the late 1960s. “As you get older, you’ll find that absolutely straight-down-the-middle sex doesn’t strike you in quite the way it did.” Sir Roy’s pursuit of something more stimulating wreaks havoc in his own life – and everyone else’s…
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 1989

I Want It Now – The late 60s. Ronnie Appleyard is an up-and-coming television personality – a bright young man with his own chat show. At a fashionable party he meets young Simona Quick and, after a bad start, decides that she’s the girl for him. Apart from her other assets, she’s rich. But the course of true love – if that’s what it is – has the proverbial vicissitudes.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 1977

The Riverside Villas Murder – “Don’t grow up too fast, Peter. When I was your age I couldn’t wait to get out into the world, because I thought it was going to be so marvellous. Well. it isn’t. Things like this – they’re happening all the time. And it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair at all.” Set in 1936, an adolescent boy’s coming of age is blighted bу a local murder.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 1976

Ending Up – Tuppenny-Hapenny Cottage is home to a hodgepodge of oldsters forced to live together more out of financial consideration than mutual affection. A darkly hilarious satire of old age
First broadcast on BBC 2 in June 1990

Something Strange – The four observers in the space capsule have unusual experiences to report…..
With Noel Johnson, Garard Green, Nerys Hughes, Olive Gregg, Charlotte Mitchell, Frank Duncan, David Garth, Tom Watson, Brian Wilde and members of the BBC Drama Repertory Company
Based upon the short story bу Kingsley Amis, first published in 1960
First broadcast on BBC 2 in February 1962

To See the Sun – Vampires, a mad Scots librarian, a handsome Englishman and a Countess of uncertain age – all in Dacia in the 1920s.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in October 1987

The ‘Green Man’ Revisited – Kingsley Amis finds himself in a pub peopled bу characters which bear a remarkable resemblance to one of his own novels. Are the events which follow fact or fiction?
First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 1972

Festival – A comedy drama about festivals and the start of a legendary literary romance. In 1962, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard took on the job of running the Cheltenham Literary Festival. It was to be a baptism of fire.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in July 2018

Interesting Things – Gloria Davis and Waldo Huws-Evans are on a date. They plan to go to the cinema, to dinner and then to a party. Over the course of the evening, the much older man realises he has fallen in love with the young woman. However, she isn’t interested in the slightest, and so problems arise…
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 1990

Lucky Jim – The academic and romantic tribulations of the eponymous James Dixon, a reluctant history lecturer at an unnamed provincial English university.
Based upon the Kingsley Amis novel, first published in 1954