A sci-fi comedy-drama putting surreal new spins on classic speculative fiction. When George Orwell and H. G. Wells accidentally double-book a getaway cottage, an argument about tea escalates into an aeon-spanning adventure of time travel and political machination. A full cast audio drama from award-winning writer Robin Johnson.
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Halloween special featuring bitter karella's Hugo-nominated microfiction The Midnight Pals!
In a quest to resurrect a Morlock, Orwell and Wells find themselves in a weird metaphysical forest inhabited by historical horror writers, and attempt to impress Mary Shelley, H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe around the campfire.
If you've enjoyed Untrue Stories, we'd love it if you could help us amuse more people by telling your friends about us, and/or leaving us a rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, Podchaser, Goodpods or your favourite podcast site/app—thank you!
00:39: Unannounced Halloween collaboration, and Season 2 of Untrue Stories
00:54: Turpentine Productions' H. G. Wells Has His Regrets
01:19: The Audio Verse Awards
01:48: Some other audio dramas I've been enjoying
02:51: Featured trailer for H. G. Wells Has His Regrets
You can listen to nominees for the Audio Verse Awards at their nominee showcase at https://anchor.fm/audioverseawards, then cast your ballot at https://audioverseawards.net/vote/. The first round of voting is open until Sunday 30 October. It would mean a lot to us if you included Untrue Stories on your ballot.
How a power-crazed junta of 20th-century dystopian authors overthrew Western democracy — and what went wrong.
In the fourth exciting instalment of the time-travelling adventures of George Orwell and H. G. Wells, 1984's Big Brother himself has appeared before our heroes to relate the story of his rise to power at the head of a team of dystopian visionaries — Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, Aldous Huxley and Yevgeny Zamyatin.
Zamyatin's We, often credited as the inspiration for dystopia as a modern genre, is in the public domain and you can find an English translation at Project Gutenberg. Huxley claimed not to have read We before he wrote Brave New World. Orwell definitely read both. Huxley really was Orwell's French teacher at Eton.
Season 1: Orwell, Wells, tea and time travel
Season 1
Sunday, June 26, 2022 • Duration 02:00
The infamous rivalry between two classic speculative fiction writers leads to a thrilling and bizarre story of tea, bicycles and time travel in Untrue Stories' first season, The Adventures of George Orwell and H. G. Wells.
Untrue Stories is a comedy-drama sci-fi serial that puts its own surreal spin on classic speculative fiction.
Written and produced by Robin Johnson and starring Robin Johnson, Patrick Spragg, Tara Court, Joanna Lawrie and Liselle Nic Giollabhain.
If you enjoy the show, we'd love it if you could leave us a rating on iTunes, Spotify, Podchaser or your favourite podcast site/app — and tell your friends!
Wells and Julia have changed the future, but can they be sure they've changed it for the better? No.
H. G. Wells' and Julia's tinkering with the timeline has unexpected (and, of course, untrue) results. Julia, born in the future they've just changed, experiences a strange transformation as the timeline ripples... but what does it mean? And all the while, their enemies' power grows ever stronger, leading to the arrival of a character who might finally be able to give them some answers — but if so, they'll be in the next episode.
Starring Robin Johnson as George Orwell, Patrick Spragg as H. G. Wells, Tara Court as Julia, Liselle Nic Giollabhain as Captain Rutherford, and Joanna Lawrie as Mrs Watchett, plus special guest appearances by Lionel Ritchie, Annie Lennox, Roger Daltry, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Peter Gabriel, Edwin Starr and Tony Fenelle. Sound effects were sourced from freesound.org.
2022-09-07: This episode has been updated to improve audio quality.
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H. G. Wells takes a wrong turn on his time-travelling bicycle, and finds that he and Orwell have both lost their bets.
Continuing the adventures of George Orwell and H. G. Wells, Wells' inaugural time-travel journey takes him a bit further into the future than he intended: instead of one week, he travels nearly forty years. What he finds matches neither his own predictions nor Orwell's – but is surprising, horrifying, and completely untrue.
Starring Robin Johnson as George Orwell and the telescreen voice, Patrick Spragg as H. G. Wells, Joanna Lawrie as Mrs Watchett, Tara Court as Julia, and Liselle Nic Giollobhain as Captain Rutherford. Sound effects were sourced from freesound.org.
7 September 2022: This episode has been edited to enhance audio quality.
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1. A Nice Cup of Tea
Season 1 · Episode 1
Saturday, June 25, 2022 • Duration 14:59
George Orwell has rented a Scottish cottage to complete his final novel. Unfortunately, he's been double-booked with the very last person he'd choose a holiday with.
The first season of Untrue Stories will visit the worlds of both H. G. Wells' The Time Machine and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, exploring how the infamousrivalry between two of Britain's greatest speculative fiction writers culminated in an astonishing, hilarious, and entirely untrue story of meddling with causality and bicycles.
In this episode, tea and tempers boil over as Orwell and his inadvertent roommate H. G. Wells argue over the fate that awaits humankind. Will society develop into Wells's steam-powered dream, or Orwell's dystopian nightmare? Wells' latest engineering project may allow them to settle their bet...
Starring Robin Johnson as George Orwell, Patrick Spragg as H. G. Wells, and Joanna Lawrie as Mrs Watchett. Sound effects were sourced from freesound.org.
If you've enjoyed the show, we'd love it if you could leave us a rating on
Halloween special featuring the Midnight Pals (trailer)
Season 1
Monday, October 17, 2022 • Duration 02:11
Coming this Halloween, a crossover Hugo-nominated twitter microfiction The Midnight Pals! Wells and Orwell sit round the campfire with Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley and H. P. Lovecraft in an uncharacteristically spooky episode of Untrue Stories.
If you've enjoyed Untrue Stories, we'd love it if you could help us amuse more people by telling your friends about us, and/or leaving us a rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, Podchaser, Goodpods or your favourite podcast site/app—thank you!
Complete Season 1 omnibus: The Adventures of George Orwell and H. G. Wells
Season 1 · Episode 7
Tuesday, September 6, 2022 • Duration 01:42:20
A supercut of all season 1 episodes for convenient bingeing.
George Orwell has rented a getaway cottage on a remote Scottish island to finish work on his groundbreaking novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Unfortunately, he finds he's been double-booked with the last person he'd choose to take a holiday with—his annoying literary nemesis, H. G. Wells! An argument about the destiny of humanity and the right way to make a cup of tea escalates into an aeon-spanning adventure of time travel and political machination, as Orwell conspires with other classic dystopian science fiction authors to use Wells's time-travel technology to shape the world into the dark future of their own books.
This omnibus episode includes all six main episodes of Untrue Stories' first season, plus its three bonus mini-episodes, two of which have been integrated into the main continuity and the third of which is included as a post-credit scene. The episodes are linked together with short music cues, leaving all the credits to the end. There have also been numerous improvements to audio quality, particularly in the earlier episodes.
Episode 1: A Nice Cup of Tea (0:00:58—0:14:27)
Episode 2: The Wheels of Chance (0:14:30—0:28:15)
Episode 3: Battle Ground (0:28:19—0:33:21 and 0:34:58—0:40:06)
Mini-episode #1: Evil George Orwell (0:33:20—0:34:59)
Episode 4: How a Nation Is Exploited (0:40:09—0:56:17)
Episode 5: Man Becomes a Different Animal (0:56:20—1:11:02)
Episode 6: The Wonderful Visit (1:11:05—1:21:50 and 1:27:59—1:33:33)
Mini-episode #2: Exile to Hell (1:21:51—1:27:58)
Mini-episode #3: The Telescreen Programme: Newspeak Phrasebook (post-credit scene) (1:37:02—1:42:21)
CAST:
Robin Johnson as George Orwell
Patrick Spragg as H. G. Wells
Joanna Lawrie as Mrs Watchett
Tara Court as Julia
Liselle Nic Giollabháin as Captain Rutherford
Simon Beck as Aldous Huxley
Alexander Walsh as Yevgeny Zamyatin, Isaac Asimov and the radio/telescreen announcer
David Court as Ray Bradbury
6. The Wonderful Visit
Season 1 · Episode 6
Saturday, September 3, 2022 • Duration 20:00
Orwell, Wells and their pals gather in 1948 for the astonishing season finale.
Wells arrives back on the Isle of Jura with an uninvited guest, where things come to a head as even more time travelling science fiction writers arrive to interfere.
This episode marks Untrue Stories' first season finale. Producing Untrue Stories is the most fun I've had for ages. I'd like to thank everybody in the cast for being part of my daft thing, and the audiodrama communities on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, who are all much nicer than the ambient niceness on those hellsites. We're of course indebted to all the speculative fiction writers we've messed about with—George Orwell, H. G. Wells, Ursula Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood, Isaac Asimov, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Alice Ilgenfritz Jones, Ella Merchant, John Wyndham, and any I've forgotten—and to you for listening. Thank you!
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The Oceanian National Anthem, Oceania, 'Tis For Thee, with lyrics extrapolated by Robin to the tune of The Internationale, can be heard on our soundcloud, sung by several of Robin and two of Eve.
While this episode was in production, the US Supreme Court struck down the federally protected right to abortion. This directly endangers and removes bodily autonomy from tens of millions of Americans, and sets a terrifying example for the rest of the world. Of all the dystopian novels discussed in the episode, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is now the most horribly relevant. Untrue Stories is free, but if you've enjoyed it as much as something you'd pay a few dollars for, you could donate those dollars to an organisation like the National Network of Abortion Funds, and/or perhaps to an organisation that will help the queer and trans people whose rights the Court has more or less promised to dismantle next. (You can even make those donations if you haven't enjoyed the show.) Love and anger.
2022-07-27: This episode has been updated to adjust volume levels.
If you've enjoyed the show, we'd love it if you could leave us a rating on iTunes, Spotify, Podchaser or your favourite podcast site/app — and tell your friends!
Eve Morris as the joycamp commander and Oldspeak interpreter
Additional voices by Robin, Eve and Alexander
Sound effects were sourced from freesound dot org, and include sounds made by the users alecbark, anagar, caitlin-100, ccomics88, deleted-user-56114036, djgriffin, fabrizio84, fillsoko, floodmix, hasean, ikbenraar, inchadney, inspectorj, iwanplay, juanfg, katelyn100, keweldog, keithpeter, m1a2t3z4, mootmcnoodles, prim-ordial, panska-tlolkova-matilda, sin2xv0, sophielhall3535, soundsnapfx, timbre, vpp-2015, webbfilmsuk, and wlabarron. Original music was by Robin Johnson. The Internationale (as used as accompaniment for Oceania, 'Tis For Thee) was a public domain recording by the Belinskogo Radio Orchestra.
A transcript of this omnibus episode is available here.
If you've enjoyed the show, we'd love it if you could help us amuse more people by telling your friends about us, and/or leaving us a rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, Podchaser, Goodpods or your favourite podcast site/app — thank you!
If you've enjoyed the show, we'd love it if you could leave us a rating on iTunes, Spotify, Podchaser or your favourite podcast site/app — and tell your friends!
