Bleak Expectations – BBC Comedy 2007-8, Charles Dickens Parody

NOTE - First discovered on radioarchive.cc, the home of all things BBC and radio, I am distributing this here for wider audience. I have cleaned up and relabeled these mp3s, and compiled both seasons in a single torrent. I truly urge any English-speaking and loving person who has not heard these, OR who has not had the unequaled treat of reading Dickens to make both an immediate event in your life. Dickens is essentially the father of English letters, and this parody is WORTHY of him. This is not a question of taste - if you don't like this, the problem is YOU. If you give a copy of this to any English teacher, they will kill themselves laughing. So, either get a free 'A', or kill an English teacher. Either way, what's to lose?


Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans will get an additional kick out of hearing Anthony Head (Giles) playing a caustic and maniacal villain.

As always, great thanks to the original uploaders.

Rambam1776


Bleak Expectations is a 6-part 2007 Radio 4 comedy series, first broadcast at 11.30am on Wednesdays from 15 August 2007, with the first series repeated on Radio 4 from 9 January 2008. It is a pastiche of the works of Charles Dickens, like Bleak House and Great Expectations from which it derives its name, and costume dramas set in the same period, and parodies several of their plot devices (such as cruel guardians, idyllic childhoods interrupted, lifelong friendships, earnest young people). It is written by Mark Evans, who also stars.

The plot revolves around Philip "Pip" Bin and his two sisters, Poppy and Pippa, whose seemingly ideal life is disrupted by the death of their father and the madness of their mother. They are then locked away by their guardian, Mr. Gently Benevolent, in St. Bastard's, the most vicious boarding school in England, and St. Bitch's, a near-by convent. Pip and his sisters attempt to free themselves of their guardian with the help of Harry Biscuit, whose father invented the biscuit. It is narrated by Pip as an old man.

A second series was commissioned late 2007, and was recorded on the 18th, 23rd and 26th of May 2008 at the BBC Radio Theatre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleak_Expectations