Around Christmas, the BBC aired a radio play of Good Omens, the Pratchett-Gaiman novel. Has anyone else listened to this? It's available online here for the next week or so, though I can't promise the BBC link will work in America; I suspect there's other sources out there, though.

It's... really good, actually. They've put virtually all of the book dialogue in, and most of the stuff they've added is from the book too; the neat thing about Good Omens is that a lot of the best 'narrative' passages are presented as third-person internal monologues - which means they can become first-person speech very easily. About all they've had to add from scratch is the usual radio play 'now I shall mutter my actions/question yours' stuff.

For the voices - well, Newt is voiced by Merlin (the one from, uh, Merlin), and Crowley is Peter Serafinowicz, who people know from all sorts of things but I mostly remember from 'Look Around You'. Pretty much all the voices are good fits, though I find Anathema to be far less frumpy than she should be.

The story mostly focusses on Crowley and Aziraphale for the first part (oh, hey, in-character picture, neat), then switches over to a full ensemble. They managed to make most of the characters easily distinguishable - the Four Horsemen in particular are very distinct - though I'm not even trying to remember which is which between Brian and Wensledale.

They've thrown in a couple of lines to bring it into the present - there's a Doctor Who name-drop, and a reference to smart phones - but mostly just haven't bothered, and it doesn't seem to hurt anything. There's also rather more radio announcers than I remember - I think the BBC presenters wanted to get in on the act! There's always a couple credit 'as themselves' by the end of an episode.

It runs to six episodes, which are half an hour each (though the finale is a full hour), and I think it's well worth a listen. It also gives me hope that it might eventually become a movie - if they keep the dialogue this intact without visuals, it should be even easier - and better - with them.

(Apologies for any mini-Hellhounds in there; I dirrent mean to!)

hS