A Decade of "Drama of the Week"

One of the things I've been doing every week for the past dozen years or so has been downloading mp3s off the BBC Radio website.  Originally, back in 2005, I was able to save audio content from the site that wasn't offered for download, by capturing the Real Audio file onto my computer and then converting it into an MP3 that I would then burn onto a CD-R for listening and preserving.  I stopped doing this in mid-2007 when my computer broke, putting an end to my obsessive preservation efforts.  

I didn't get a home computer again until late 2008, but by this time the BBC website had been making more of their programs available as mp3s, allowing for easier downloading to be done.  If memory serves, "In Our Time" was the first BBC Radio series to be offered this way; I think the oldest mp3 I have of this series is one about angels, with the file name "inourtime14.mp3" that I downloaded on March 24, 2005.  You can listen to that episode here.

Gradually more and more of the BBC's radio content could be downloaded as "podcasts." The only apparent difference between the mp3 "podcast" version and the radio broadcast is a short spoken introduction informing the listener that they are listening to a podcast from the BBC.

Unfortunately, at the time, not a lot of their radio drama plays were being made available to download as mp3s.  Finally, in March 2011, a "Play of the Week" page appeared on the podcast section of the site, which would offer an mp3 each week of one of the highlights of that week's radio drama schedule.  (Incidentally, this "Play of the Week" is not to be confused with a BBC World Service series of the same name, which offered original radio plays for many decades.  I had downloaded some of those back in 2005.  I don't know if that series is still being produced or not.)

Here is a screenshot (from the Wayback Machine) of what the page looked like at the very beginning, before the first program was offered.  (Click on the images in this post to view them at larger size.)

When the first drama to be offered was uploaded to the site on March 11, 2011, the page looked like this:

At some point, the name was changed from "Play of the Week" to (perhaps more descriptive) "Drama of the Week."  Looking at the Wayback Machine, it appears that this change occurred in February 2012.  (Incidentally, while looking through those old screen captures, I noticed that the June 16, 2012 offering was Part Two of James Joyce's novel Ulysses.  That's something I definitely would have downloaded, but I don't see it among the files I downloaded.)  The current download page for "Drama of the Week" can be found on the BBC website here.  These days they offer listeners the option of downloading a high-quality or low-quality version of the mp3 (the high-quality version taking up more megabytes.)

Back on November 3, 2011, I wrote the following in an email to a friend: "Pretty much the only radio-drama-related activity I undertake regularly these days is that every week I download a lot of BBC Radio 4's MP3s of various shows of that week.  (For example, they have a show called "Play of the Week" -- which is where each week they pick a drama from one of their drama series, such as "Afternoon Play," etc. that they allow listeners to download as an MP3.  It's only up for a week, and then it's gone, replaced by the next week's MP3 offering.)  But I actually download more of 'em than actually getting around to *listening* to them!"

At the time I was burning the MP3s onto CDs, so that they weren't taking up so much space on my computer.  I have nine CDs labeled "Play of the Week," and here are their contents, shown below:

I did have a "Play of the Week #6" disc that contained the remainder of 2012, but wasn't able to find it just yet.  When it turns up, I'll post a screencap of its contents here.  So, let's jump ahead to disc #7:

There should be a "Play of the Week" disc #10 containing the remainder of 2013, but again I wasn't able to find that disc at the moment.  After that, I saved the mp3s on an external hard drive, instead of burning them onto CD-Rs, but it looks like I was rearranging them for awhile to burn onto discs (but apparently never did), which is why the next few entries are a bit out of chronological order:

Apparently around this time, in 2019, my computer had gone ka-put, so I was using my smartphone to go online, and I downloaded the "Drama of the Week" mp3s each week onto my phone.  This was also the point where I stopped retitling the files when I was downloading them, simply retaining the long file names that they had on the site.

By this point, in December 2019, I had a computer on which to download the files again... 

And that brings up to the present month, June 2022.  I've already downloaded two additional files this month, starting off a new folder on my computer:

Someone else can do a check to see which episodes that I've missed over the past 11 years.  (Keep in mind that the BBC website also sometimes skipped a week, not uploading anything that week, or offered two episodes on occasion instead of only one.)

These days (and for the past several years), the only BBC Radio podcasts or broadcasts that I download anymore are Drama of the Week, Comedy of the Week, and the Learning English Drama.  I try to check them once a week, or every other week at most.  (Occasionally I miss an episode because I forget.)   I don't enjoy or even listen to every one of them, but I do like to see what new program (or programme, to use the British spelling) is available now, and I give it a listen if it sounds interesting.

How long will I keep downloading them?  I've never considered *not* downloading them.  I figure that as long as they keep being offered by the BBC to download for free, I will keep downloading them.  Presumably other people (or the BBC itself) retain copies of this same material, so it's not like I'm saving these shows from extinction (although you never know!).  But much of this material may be nonetheless harder to obtain as the years go by, and I'm happy to have copies within my collection, should I ever wish to listen.