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sanguinityI just finished listening to the CBS radio plays, The Adventures of Horatio Hornblower.
There are a ton of places that you can get the radio episodes free online, but most of those sources have mislabelled and missing episodes. The best source I found is on Archive.org: Horatio_Hornblower. I can’t 100% vouch for it (I listened to the Lieutenant and Happy Return episodes elsewhere), but I never found an error in it, which is more than I can say for every other source I tried.
So, some basics: the radio show first aired in 1952-53, and cover all the books that had been published up to that point. They begin with Happy Return and A Ship of the Line, before diverting to Lord Hornblower (why put Lord so early, I don’t understand?) and the short story about Barry McCool, then coming back to pick up where it left off with Flying Colours, continuing on to Commodore, and finishing with the prequel novels Midshipman and Lieutenant. Commodore and Midshipman are slightly interleaved: the first couple of Midshipman stories are framed as Hornblower and Bush shooting the breeze, first on the Nonsuch and later at Smallbridge, telling stories about their youth.
The radio show mostly closely follows the books, but there are significant departures here and there. Some things that caught my attention (assume spoilers for everything): ( spoilers for everything )
ETA: One more thing: I had no idea how attached I was to miniseries-Pellew, until I heard this Pellew, who is ponderously stiff and distant. It just felt so wrong!
All-in-all, it was an enjoyable listen!
There are a ton of places that you can get the radio episodes free online, but most of those sources have mislabelled and missing episodes. The best source I found is on Archive.org: Horatio_Hornblower. I can’t 100% vouch for it (I listened to the Lieutenant and Happy Return episodes elsewhere), but I never found an error in it, which is more than I can say for every other source I tried.
So, some basics: the radio show first aired in 1952-53, and cover all the books that had been published up to that point. They begin with Happy Return and A Ship of the Line, before diverting to Lord Hornblower (why put Lord so early, I don’t understand?) and the short story about Barry McCool, then coming back to pick up where it left off with Flying Colours, continuing on to Commodore, and finishing with the prequel novels Midshipman and Lieutenant. Commodore and Midshipman are slightly interleaved: the first couple of Midshipman stories are framed as Hornblower and Bush shooting the breeze, first on the Nonsuch and later at Smallbridge, telling stories about their youth.
The radio show mostly closely follows the books, but there are significant departures here and there. Some things that caught my attention (assume spoilers for everything): ( spoilers for everything )
ETA: One more thing: I had no idea how attached I was to miniseries-Pellew, until I heard this Pellew, who is ponderously stiff and distant. It just felt so wrong!
All-in-all, it was an enjoyable listen!
