Birdsong - BBC Radio Drama - Sebastian Faulks

Written by Sebastian Faulks
Read by Toby Stephens, Sophie Ward, John Rowe, Gavin Muir, Rachel Atkins, full cast
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Dramatization

Dramatized by Nick Stafford from Sebastian Faulks’s powerful bestselling novel, set before and during the First World War.

On a single morning 85 years ago during World War I, the British army lost 20,000 men dead and 40,000 wounded or missing.

In 1910, England’s Stephen Wraysford, a junior executive in a textile firm, is sent by his company to northern France. There he falls for Isabelle Azaire, a young and beautiful wife of the factory owner. Six years later, Stephen is back in France, as a British officer fighting in the trenches. Facing death, embittered by isolation, he steels himself against thoughts of love. He experiences the horrors of trench warfare both above ground but also beneath it as he accompanies miners deep underground as they attempt both to plant enormous mines beneath the fortifications of their enemy and deter the latter’s reciprocal efforts.

Episode 1 : France, 1910.
Englishman Stephen Wraysford arrives in Amiens to study textiles. He is fascinated by his host’s beautiful wife.

Episode 2: France, 1916.
Isabelle has left and Stephen finds himself immersed in one of the bloodiest wars of the twentieth century.

Episode 3:
With very few of his original platoon left, Stephen Wraysford revisits his old haunts in France, now torn apart by the First World War.

Cast:

Stephen Wraysford - Toby Stephens
Sophie Ward - Azaires
John Rowe - Jack Firebrace
Gavin Muir - Grey
Tom Mannion - Weir
Adam Godley - Douglas
David Brookes - Brennan
Ewan Thomas - Lisette
Alison Pettit
… and others.

Director Claire Grove.

First broadcast: BBC R4 27 Oct, 03 & 10 Nov 1997

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Note: Hat tip to @jnmx for his beautful cover art:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/159645550@N03/51361729987/

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A Note on Audio Metadata

One of my frustrations with the audio content I download from ABB is the amount of time I always need to spend fixing the metadata and adding cover art to make it work nicely with Plex/Prologue. With that in mind, all audio content I share on ABB will always have complete and correct metadata, including:

- Author and Title
- Description (using the DESCRIPTION field read that can read by Plex)
- Narrator (using the COMPOSER field which can be read by Prologue)
- Genre Tags (I add all relevant Genres typically taken from Goodreads. These can be used to create smart collections in Plex.)
- Cover Art (I always use the highest resolution image I can find. Where none exists, I will find a suitable image from the internet - often r/audiobookcovers - or create one based on existing artwork.
- Date (For audio books I use the year the book was first published. For audio dramas I usethe year the drama was produced.)

Furthermore, the audio will always be in m4b format (to support chapter markers and ensure Plex can read the Description tag). The audio will always be correctly chapterized, where necessary, and chapter markers will be correctly named.

This means that all content I share here can be considered Plex/Prologue-ready with all metadata and artwork included. I hope this encourages others to do the same.

(FYI: I typically add metadata using kid3 and chapter markers using Ocenaudio.)