The run
- Network
- BBC
- Years active
- 1948–1950
- Surviving broadcasts
- 10
- Genre
- detective
The Adventures of PC 49 British crime drama. The radio adventures of Police Constable 49, and his girl friday, Joan, during the 1940s and 1950s in London. Brian Reece played PC 49 and Joy Shelton played Joan . The series was written by Allan Stranks and produced by Vernon Harris. PC 49 was a mere uniformed constable, but this didn't deter him from pursuing his own theories in solving the cases, frequently to the dismay of his superiors. The show mixed drama with light comedy, allowing both PC 49 and Joan to trouble the higher ranking officers who were notionally in charge of his cases, usually by having PC 49 solve them. Long believed lost, presented here are some extremely rare recordings f Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive.
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
3 dated broadcasts across 79 years on the air, with 78 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2026, in original transmission order.
- 1. Dead Air · 2 Jun 2026
- 2. The Long Silence · 9 Jun 2026
- 3. A Room Above the Street · 16 Jun 2026
The Long Silence
4 Aug 2026 · 55 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
Dead Air
28 Jul 2026 · 18 min
The one everybody argues about.
Sign Off
21 Jul 2026 · 33 min
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
The Case of the Missing Hour
14 Jul 2026 · 48 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
Night Broadcast
7 Jul 2026 · 1h 3m
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
The Last Train Out
30 Jun 2026 · 26 min
The one everybody argues about.
Signal at Midnight
23 Jun 2026 · 41 min
Recorded on location, with the room left in.
A Room Above the Street
16 Jun 2026 · 56 min
New tape, a reluctant witness, and a timeline that finally stops making sense.
Also on BBC
BBC in 1948–1950
Other series the network carried while The Adventures of PC 49 was on the air.
Same seasons
detective on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
The private eye at the microphone
First-person narration, a case that walks in the door, and a city that talks back. Marlowe, Sam Spade and Johnny Dollar turned detection into a listening form.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of The Adventures of PC 49
Modern series carrying this form forward.
If you liked this
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