Listening to the Dead

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BBC Radio 4 Extra

Your digital radio entertainment station showcasing the best in comedy and drama

Your digital radio entertainment station showcasing the best in comedy and drama. With recent favourites from BBC Radio 4.

Eva Sayer

Michael Bertenshaw

Georgie Fuller

Priyanga Burford

Ben Crowe

Carolyn Pickles

Arthur Hughes

Joel MacCormack

Ami Metcalf

Jessica Dromgoole

Katie Hims

Katie Hims - Listening to the Dead: 1. Enoch's Machine

listening-to-the-dead episode 1

1. Enoch's Machine

Katie Hims - Listening to the Dead

BBC Radio 4 - Katie Hims - Listening to the Dead, 1. Enoch's Machine

Victorian gentleman scientist Enoch Cartwright tries to contact his dead daughter Emily.

A Victorian scientist ploughs his wealth into developing a device to record his dead daughter’s voice. Stars Michael Bertenshaw.

Enoch Cartwright, Victorian gentleman scientist, invests everything in the development of a machine to record the voice of his dead daughter, Emily, unaware that his living daughter Clara talks to her sister every night.

Written by Katie Hims.
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole

Enoch …. Michael Bertenshaw
Clara …. Eva Sayer
Emily …. Georgie Fuller
Wesley Blackburn …. Ben Crowe
Woman at door …. Carolyn Pickles
Joe …. John Hughes
Josie …. Priyanga Burford

After developing the means to make long distance radio transmissions, Marconi devoted much of the rest of his life to listening out for the voices of the dead. If radio can conjure a voice disembodied in space, he expected, as have legions of people since, that radio can capture the voices of those disembodied in other dimensions - in time, in ethereal planes. As technology becomes more sensitive, more diverse, more obscure, there are pioneers always ready to harness the new to the service of this age old fascination.

This is the story of five generations of a family whose members can and can't hear the dead. It's an enterprise to explore the myriad ties, stories and quirks that bind families through the generations, across the spectrum of meanings of 'listening to the dead'. Between allowing the echoes of a beloved's voice to live on, and the notion that the dead can engage in communicating new information, are vast grey areas of misinformation that beguile the bereaved and thrill the imagination.

Katie Hims' previous series with Jessica Dromgoole, Lost Property, won Best Audio Drama in the Audio Drama Awards 2011, and they are now collaborating on Radio 4's epic commission, Home Front.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2013.

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By Katie Hims. Story of five generations, exploring the ties and quirks that bind families

By Katie Hims. The story of five generations of a family whose members can and cannot hear the dead, exploring the ties, stories and quirks that bind families

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