Producer and writer John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and he shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact behind the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in Radio 4's weekend afternoon dramas.
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Contact path
Verified email
Booking probability
35%
Guest openness
Selective
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Signup to Generate a PitchProducer and writer John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and he shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact behind the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in Radio 4's weekend afternoon dramas.
Recent episodes include "Gulliver's Travels - Episode One" (25 October 2026, 14 minutes), "The Things They Carried" (6 September 2026, 14 minutes), and "Midnight Cowboy" (23 August 2026, 14 minutes).
Opening Lines publishes roughly weekly, with episodes averaging 14 minutes across 140 episodes.
Booking probability for Opening Lines is 35%, and the host is rated Selective on guests. Opening Lines requires a Pod Score of 80 or higher. Opening Lines's contact route on record: verified email.
The strongest fits for Opening Lines are News, Magazine & Book Publishing. Opening Lines has an arts audience.
Opening Lines is an arts podcast with 140 episodes published.
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Opening Lines
John Yorke looks at the first two parts of Jonathan’s Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver’s voyages to Lilliput and to Brobdingnag are the ones that will be familiar to many through countless adaptations for...
Opening Lines
John Yorke explores The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, novelist and veteran of the Vietnam War. Published in 1990 it’s a collection of interlinked stories about a platoon of American soldiers fighting an invisible...
Opening Lines
Midnight Cowboy, a 1965 novel by the American writer James Leo Herlihy, is best known to most for its film adaptation, starring Jon Voight as Joe Buck – a naïve dreamer from Texas - and Dustin Hoffman as Enrico "Ratso"...
Opening Lines
For the 100th title to be explored in Opening Lines, John Yorke picks up the 1988 novel Libra by the heavyweight American writer, Don DeLillo. In this second episode considering the book, he focuses in on the endless...
Opening Lines
For the 100th title to be explored in Opening Lines, John Yorke picks up the 1998 novel Libra by the heavyweight American writer, Don DeLillo. The book centres around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the...
Opening Lines
Alice Childress’s first major work is set in a world that she knew very well both as a performer and a writer – the theatre. It’s 1957 and rehearsals are beginning for a new Broadway production – Chaos In Belleville –...
Opening Lines
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? takes us into the strange and brutal world of dance marathon competitions dating from the Great Depression in America. It follows Robert and Gloria, a couple who’ve washed up in Los...
Opening Lines
In this second episode, John Yorke digs deeper into Euguene O’Neill’s 1921 play “Anna Christie” – about an estranged daughter who is reunited with her sea captain father, and falls in love with a sailor. The play...
Opening Lines
In the first of two episodes, John Yorke looks at “Anna Christie” by Eugene O’Neill - one of American theatre’s founding fathers, and the only American dramatist to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The...
Opening Lines
John Yorke examines Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, ten semi-autobiographical short stories in which Dylan Thomas looks back and observes himself growing into the artist – the writer – that he became in adult...
Opening Lines
Writer Penelope Lively’s enduring themes are the connections and interplay between memory, history and time. Nowhere is this more compelling than in Moon Tiger, published in 1987 and widely regarded as one of her best...
Opening Lines
John Yorke explores why Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes has had such a profound influence on storytelling in the 400 years since it was published in 1605. ‘Like Shakespeare, Cervantes is inescapable for all writers...
Opening Lines
John Yorke explores why Don Quixote has had such a profound influence on storytelling in the four hundred years since it was published. The first European novel, it’s an epic work of comic - and tragic - genius. Quixote...
Opening Lines
John Yorke takes a look at Transcription by Kate Atkinson. First published in 2018, Transcription tells the story of three different time periods in the life of our protagonist, Juliet Armstrong. The interweaving...
Opening Lines
Tom Stoppard was of course best known for his work writing for stage and screen - but the dramas he created for radio were also an extremely important part of his career and his development as a writer. Across five...
Opening Lines
Flight by Walter White, published in 1926, asks questions about race and identity when its central character chooses to ‘pass’ as a white woman. In this second episode about the book, John Yorke asks if this is why the...
Opening Lines
Flight was the second novel by one of twentieth century’s America’s most influential figures, Walter White. Published in 1926, it asks questions about race and identity when its central character chooses to ‘pass’ as a...
Opening Lines
John Yorke explores themes of loss, longing and the founding of America, in Willa Cather’s innovative novel, My Ántonia. A milestone in American literature, the novel’s heroine is - unusually for the time - a Czech...
Opening Lines
Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian did more than any other single piece of art in establishing the parameters of the Western as a genre. Telling the tale of a charismatic tight-lipped cowboy whose actions always...
Opening Lines
In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke concludes his exploration of Margaret Mitchell’s epic Civil War romance, Gone with the Wind. In the 90 years since it was...
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