Vintage danger, built for the edge.
High Adventure (SA) presents self-contained radio dramas where ordinary movement turns hazardous fast. Ships creep through fog, aircraft carry threats, desert gold hunts sour, and enclosed rooms become pressure chambers.
PRESS PLAY
High Adventure (SA) is an archival adventure-drama anthology with a practical sense of peril. Its stories begin close to action. A skipper gives bearings in thick fog. A passenger warns that a briefcase can destroy an aircraft. A grounded helicopter crew debates cold, radio batteries, and a mayday call. A desert search for old Spanish coins turns toward poisoned water and murder. A late-night workplace becomes a sealed room when snakes appear in the corridor. Across the excerpts, the show favors confined danger over abstract suspense. Vehicles, weather, weapons, animals, and geography all become engines of pressure. The scenes are carried by urgent dialogue: orders from a bridge, clipped cockpit exchanges, frightened workplace voices, and military briefings. Wartime material is a recurring part of the range, with enemy raiders, shipping losses, intelligence reports, and naval combat shaping several passages. The tone is earnest and forceful. It does not linger over atmosphere when a warning, threat, or command will do the work faster. That gives the dramas a propulsive old-radio texture, where listeners learn the stakes as characters discover them. The settings move widely, from South America and the Rocky Mountains to the Black Desert, Darwin, and enclosed urban interiors. The variety matters because the pattern remains recognizable: a journey, job, or search turns dangerous, and survival depends on judgment under stress. Some language and attitudes reflect older adventure fiction and may land as dated today. The show is best approached as period suspense, not contemporary realism. Its pleasure is in the machinery of jeopardy: bad weather, blocked exits, unreliable rescue, hidden motives, and the moment when a routine trip becomes a story someone has to survive.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants archival adventure drama with ships, aircraft, deserts, wartime threats, and survival predicaments. Best for someone comfortable with older dramatic conventions and brisk, plot-first suspense.
What sets it apart: High Adventure (SA) stands out for how quickly it turns physical settings into traps. The drama often lives in bearings, mayday calls, enclosed corridors, bad weather, and hard choices rather than in narration-heavy explanation.
High Adventure (1972–1985) - a series of dramatised adventure dramas. Replaced the series "Next Stop Makouvlei" on Tuesday evenings. The series was directed by Henry Diffenthal at the Olympia Recording Studios in Durban. Writers included Ron Evans, Denver Morgan, Norman Partington etc. The series moved to Thursday evenings in 1976 and then Saturday evenings in 1979 and ended in June 1985.Listen to our radio station Old Time Radio https://link.radioking.com/otradioListen to other Shows at My Classic Radio https://www.myclassicradio.net/Entertainment Radio | Broadcasting Classic Radio Shows | PatreonRemember that times have changed, and some shows might not reflect the standards of today’s pol…
A helicopter gets stranded in the Rockies, and your warm blanket starts looking like survival gear.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A questioned helicopter detour strands a bickering party in the Rockies, where survival and publicity start to blur.
A helicopter booked toward Denver slips into mountain trouble after Mickey Madden, Rosie, Davey Dalton, and Chip take off with a long-range fuel tank and Grayton hovering in the background.
A Burma river mission becomes sardonic adventure through biscuits, suspicion, and battlefield improvisation.
Steamboat Down the Irrawaddy shapes a late-1942 Burma mission into a brisk, sardonic adventure about nerve, luck, and Major Camberley's oddly memorable lecture on biscuits.
A Spanish Armada clash turns into an intimate escape story, with romance shadowed by loss.
Ron Evans's "The Prisoner" begins 400 years ago, as a ship sails into the Spanish Armada and the fleet's fear breaks into a sharply staged sea battle.
A storm, a collision, and a rescue search that keeps hope alive against brutal odds.
The Cruel Sky shapes a planned descent into a high-altitude collision, then tracks the rescue effort through storm reports, wreckage on a road, and the hardening question of whether anyone could have survived.
A damaged boat, a silent threat, and an explosive deadline force one desperate search for escape.
Seafoam is cornered from the start. August Merrick has set an explosive device to go off at eleven, the rubber dinghy is losing air through a dozen or more punctures, and the reefs make the run toward the nearest island even more hazardous.
A routine overtime shift becomes a warehouse trap when snakes take over the corridor.
A routine overtime shift turns into a tight little warehouse nightmare when Grace spots a snake at the top of the stairs and Norman realizes the corridor may be no safer.
Classic clues, quick deaths, sharper deductions.
A naval skipper navigates through thick fog in a suspenseful adventure drama set during wartime.
High Adventure's "Steamboat Down the Irrawaddy" follows a British river mission in Japanese-held Burma, where Major Camberley turns a lecture on weevily ships' biscuits into a point about survival.
A fishing trip off Arline Keys turns into a bomb scare when August Merrick tells Sam Godwin that Seafoam has been booby-trapped for an 11:00 detonation.
Ron Evans introduces High Adventure's "The Prisoner" as a 400-year-old Spanish Armada story, opening with Captain Rupert Haynes trapped in a naval fight off the English coast.
High Adventure's "Cruel Sky" follows Jockey One and Jockey Two from Brown Hill Air Force Base after a mid-air collision at 50,000 feet.
High Adventure's "Weekend Stopover" sends Mickey Madden, Rosie Caxton, Davy Dalton, and pilot Jim Baker off toward Denver before Mickey quietly reroutes the helicopter to Grayton.
High Adventure's "The Snakes" traps Grace and Norman in a warehouse corridor when a snake appears at the top of the stairs just before 11 p.m.
A dramatized adventure radio series from the 1970s-80s, featuring a story titled 'You Can't Pray With One Hand'.
A passenger threatens to blow up a plane unless a note is delivered to the pilot, set in South America.
High Adventure’s “Let There Be Heroes” dramatizes the 1941 Cormoran-Sydney encounter, following reports of ships disappearing near Australia.
Paul Denison, a British transport driver on Cyprus, risks an ambush to reach Kara in a contested town.