How To Find Your (British Actor) Blorbo On The Radio: A Brief Guide
(Disclaimer: British, because the main tool I'm using is the BBC's Genome.)
If you want more of your fave actor, or you love full-cast drama podcasts/audios (and audiobooks/NF content too) here's a guide on how to get your hands on BBC Radio broadcasts.
The BBC have a great free resource called Genome, which has all the Radio Times listings from 1922 to the present day (plus some of the actual articles), and it's searchable. Up until its arrival, it was really hard to do that, so \o/
Not all actors do radio and not everything you find will be obtainable, but it's always worth a try! It's especially likely for actor-blorbos who do other audio work, or theatre (theatre tends not to pay so well, and radio is a handy extra thing that can be more easily slotted in between performances than TV/film.)
Go to Genome, and put your blorbo's name into the search box:
Press search, which will bring back a bunch of results from both radio and TV listings from 1922 up to the current year:
2. Filter down to "radio only" on the sidebar to avoid scrolling through all the TV. At the top of the page you can change the display order to First broadcast (or Availability, if you want it only to bring things currently available to stream on the BBC website), among other options.
I can also cut down on extraneous results by selecting a date range that only covers when my guy was active.
I scroll down until I find something that looks interesting, in this case a proper audio drama, called The Hornblower Story. It's from 1980 and is an adaptation of a well known book. The details give me enough info to search the wider internet, and see if I get lucky...
3. Search the internet and listen to your blorbo act in radio drama!
There are several ways to obtain radio drama online. If you use streaming sites like Audible and Spotify, it may be there, although usually only if it's had a commercial release.
The BBC still broadcast old programmes on the radio, so it might be currently available on their website to stream - and unlike TV, you can listen to BBC Radio anywhere in the world! (If you are in the UK, you can also download and use the BBC Sounds app.) The Genome will usually provide a link for you to go straight there, if that's the case. ETA: Sadly, since I wrote this BBC Radio has also become region locked, but this will still work for UK people.
However, obviously, most BBC Radio from past decades is not available commercially or being broadcast by the BBC now and some doesn't exist in the archives, or was never recorded (as with TV), but as methods of recording audio at home have been widely available since the 1950s and 60s, there are loads of off-air recordings of radio made by listeners/collectors, and some have freely shared their copies online. Some are in closed forums etc., but three good sites to try first are YouTube, RadioEchoes & the Internet Archive.
I usually start with a Google search - e.g. '"Title" radio' or radio bbc and if that doesn't give me anything add on first "Radio Echoes" and then "Internet archive" to the search.
And I'm in luck! Radio Echoes appear to have the adaptation I'm after. I need to check the broadcast dates to see if they match up & then I can stream or download for free - and hear my blorbo play a stern Admiral for 5 minutes or less, hurrah!
Clicking on the links takes you to a screen where you can press play to stream or right click on the play bar to download the mp3 file to your device. (Click the "Save audio as..." option).
These are archive off-air recordings, so the quality can vary, especially for older programmes.
4. Rinse and repeat with each new likely Genome discovery.
If you find a copy of what you're looking for on the Internet Archive instead, you'll get up a page with a play bar (like the one above), with episodes listed plus details (to varying degrees) below. If you want to stream, just click play and enjoy. If you want to download it, then click on the MP3 files line on the right-hand sidebar, which will then give you an "X no of files" button to click and you can download them to keep.
(You can download all the files, but I usually cut straight to the chase and just nab the MP3s.)
Sometimes the BBC have released a commercial audiobook. In those cases, if you already use audio/music streaming subscription sites like Audible or Spotify, you should be able to find it there.
If you don't, or you want to buy a download, I've found the best option (weirdly!) (for UK users, at any rate) is to get the audiobook up at Penguin Books, which links to various paid subscription streaming and download options, so you can find the best one for you (and you know it's been recced by a hopefully reputable source.)
Last year, I wanted to buy Vivat Rex, the BBC's landmark dramatisation of all the English history plays rolled into one giant starry-cast Jacobean audio serial, and successfully used this route. (I'm very old by internet terms and still like listening via MP3 files on my MP3 player, as long as it survives.)
Pretty much the only affordable download option I've found so far I got courtesy of Penguin's links to Hive. (But this may be a UK only option.)
If what you're looking for seems likely to exist even if you can't find it by any of these methods - keep trying! New things are being added daily to all these websites, and the BBC cycle round old shows all the time.
And if you want to go deeper, there are closed forums etc. for radio enthusiasts where you need to make an account, but you may then be able to torrent or download an even wider variety of things.
Of course, whether or not your blorbo has been in anything good or any radio at all will depend on them, but I hope this guide will help enable you to find out!
YouTube, Radio Echoes, the Internet Archive and Old Time Radio all have radio from other countries too. So while the BBC Genome can't help you with anywhere outside the UK, the other links here can be good places to look around and browse for things you might be interested in.
You can of course use the same methods to search for things like a favourite author, or particular plays, to see if the BBC have done any radio adaptations - BBC Radio have done heaps of things that have never been adapted on screen, so it's always worth a look for anything you'd be into.
Radio Echoes is browsable as well as searchable, and while Internet Archive is a bit less so, there are some excellent collections you can look through, like the Saturday Night Theatre collection, and the BBC Radio Shows listings.
