To wage by force or guile eternal Warr
August 31, 2016 1:31 PM   Subscribe

A nine hour radio adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost, starring Linus Roache as Adam and Ian McDiarmid (Dragonslayer, Return of the Jedi) as Satan.

Adapted and lightly abridged by the poet Adrian Mitchell, Paradise Lost was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1992, in 41 installments of 14 minutes apiece. Paradise Regained followed in 1994.
posted by Iridic (18 comments total) 67 users marked this as a favorite
 
This thread is possibly done a disservice by not just stating, balls-out, "..and Emporer Palpatine as Satan"! With this many nerds, however, I'm sure its fine.
posted by BigBrooklyn at 1:50 PM on August 31, 2016 [6 favorites]


Man, this is great.
posted by michaelh at 2:04 PM on August 31, 2016


I decided against emphasizing the Star Wars connection. You kind of forget about it as the poetry rolls on and the imagery builds up. McDiarmid delivers a fantastic performance, with glints of gold through shadow, and I promise your brain will stop inserting "young Sky-walkuh" into his lines after the first few minutes.
posted by Iridic at 2:22 PM on August 31, 2016 [8 favorites]


Will Franken comedy bit: John Milton at the Poetry Slam.
posted by larrybob at 3:01 PM on August 31, 2016


I decided against emphasizing the Star Wars connection

Good call. Personally, My favorite Ian McDiarmid line is not from Star Wars.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 3:07 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


This is cool. I must be a nerd because I associated McDiarmid as Inspector Morses' arch enemy before Star Wars which is odd as Star Wars was made first.

Ms.Clav says he has a voice of Patient evil.
posted by clavdivs at 3:17 PM on August 31, 2016


youtube-dl
posted by Going To Maine at 3:37 PM on August 31, 2016 [9 favorites]


until I can actually listen to this I'm going to assume that Hayden Christensen plays Beelzebub
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:59 PM on August 31, 2016


There's a BBC TV adaptation of Crime And Punishment out there starring Ian McDiarmid as Porphyry and John Simm as Raskolnikov, which wasn't as amazing as you'd hope it to be. McDiarmid was good though, so I'm looking forward to listening to this.
posted by comealongpole at 4:06 PM on August 31, 2016


No no no. Donald Sutherland as Satan
posted by IndigoJones at 4:10 AM on September 1, 2016


I started listening to this last night. I read it for an undergrad lit class, and I remember us talking in class about how Milton undermines his thesis by turning Satan into a kind of scrappy survivor and leader of his band of exiles. Everyone in class agreed that Satan was our favorite character. That was a long time ago and I don't remember it especially well, so I'm enjoying listening to it. Fun to listen instead of reading.
posted by not that girl at 4:43 AM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


Everyone's favorite character is Satan, including Milton's.
posted by michaelh at 6:05 AM on September 1, 2016 [3 favorites]


I think my favorite story that illustrates this point is the one where a nearly illiterate country Squire is sitting by the fireplace, his gouty leg propped up on a cushion, and his young daughter is reading him Paradise Lost soon after it was first published. Every night he listens more intently and with growing interest, until finally he turns to his daughter and exclaims, "By damn girl! I don't know who this Lucifer chap is, but I hope he wins!"
posted by seasparrow at 7:35 AM on September 1, 2016 [8 favorites]


I know what I'll be doing this evening. Need to listen to a sample to see what level of quality filter I need to run over it and then toss a VBR over it and transfer to the phone for listening on my hikes.
posted by Hasteur at 6:39 AM on September 6, 2016


Hasteur, could you briefly explain the process of how you are going to do that? I mean what software you use, what the file sizes are, how you transfer, etc. Because I would really like to be able to do the same thing and it sounds like you're pretty smart with this sort of technology and I am not.
posted by seasparrow at 10:45 AM on September 6, 2016


Can't speak for someone else, but this is roughly my process for getting a bunch of mp3s on a mac:
mkdir empty_directory
cd empty_directory
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install) # if Homebrew isn’t installed
brew install ffmpeg youtube-dl  # get the all-important youtube-dl and ffmpeg
youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7gpC5nA4yWfD559C9SKWPf2T5Br6aoUa # get youtube files
for entry in $( ls ); do ffmpeg -i $entry $entry.mp3; done  # for loop to convert files
posted by Going To Maine at 1:03 PM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


@seasparrow: See the references to youtube-dl to download the file. Then use Going To Maine's advice for converting it to mp3.

My final step is to run lame (Lame aint a MP3 encoder) in variable bit rate mode over the file:
lame -V5 input.mp3 output.mp3

You don't need 128 kbps to encode silence.
posted by Hasteur at 6:46 PM on September 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


Thank you guys, that was great! I need to go learn how to do that now.
posted by seasparrow at 10:23 AM on September 7, 2016


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