On Thursday, I mentioned in passing Picnic For Detectives. This annual event has become one of the key dates in the Hooting Yard calendar, which is somewhat surprising, given its inglorious beginnings.

The very first Picnic For Detectives was hardly a picnic at all, and the official historian of the event estimates that only a handful of those taking part were bona fide detectives. All we know for certain is that a small group of people, no more than four or five, pitched up in a field with a couple of hampers, and spent an afternoon there. Meteorological records show the day was one of arctic squalls, but the field was in a temperate zone inland. In fact, it was just across the road from Pang Hill Orphanage. This anomaly has fascinated weather-fixated Picnic For Detectives buffs, who are legion.

So, not only do we have just a few people with a couple of hampers, we do not even know what was in those hampers. If you are familiar with ordinary picnics, you would expect to open up a hamper to find sandwiches, savoury flans, some fruit, crackers, cheese-related foodstuffs, cake, and bottles of refreshing barley water. Hardboiled eggs would be likely, too, unless the film director Alfred Hitchcock was one of the picknickers, for as we know from the many biographies, he was terrified of eggs.

• Shem, Ham, Japheth and Minnie Crunlop
• Mrs Gubbins and Mr Smith
• Picnic for Detectives
• Me and My Homunculus
• Blodgett’s Fiendish X-Ray Plot

This episode was first broadcast on June 29th 2005. The entire text of this show can be found on the Hooting Yard Website.

Unfortunately, due to a recording error, the last few seconds of this show have been truncated, additionally there is persistent distortion throuought the entire recording. Sadly there is nothing we can do about this. It is after all an entirely live show. We will make it up to you… somehow.

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O how they clanged, those gubernatorial bells! It is eighty years now since their peals sounded, but still I hear them in my head. They clanged ceaselessly, all day and all night, deafeningly loud, for years on end. Cows stood dazed in the fields around the bell-tower, many, many cows, too many cows to count, all dazed and stunned, and in those days no cowherds came to give them succour.

In your tongue, “gubernatorial” refers to governorship, but in my land at that time the gubernatorial bells were the ever-clanging bells of the ferocious tyrant known variously as the Gub or Guber or Gubernat. Some said the Gub was a fiend in human form, but none had ever seen it, so how could they be so sure, muttering darkly in the corner of the tavern, professing a knowledge they did not have, rewarded with a refilled tankard by some credulous foreign person on an ill-advised visit to our bell-blasted village?

Dobson came here once. He crashed through the tavern doors, a clumsy adventurer – for he was young then – and jabbered at anyone who would listen that he wanted to go up the hill to the castle, to meet the Gubernat face to face.

• Quotation from “A History Of The McGuffey Readers” by Henry H Vail
• The Story of the Lame Dog, The Caged Bird, The Drowned Cat, The Gold Watch, The Whisky Boy and the Insane Boy
• The Taxonomy of Ducks, Swans and Geese is in a State of Flux
• Titans of the Silver Screen (Walt Dinsey)
• Killer Bees: The Mystery Solved
• A Bag on your Foot
• Clot (Ferenc Puskas).

The Quotation alluded to in “Clot” from “What Philately Teaches” by John N Luff can be found on the Hooting Yard Web Site, along with a transcript of all the stories in this episode. This show was first broadcast on the 15th of June 2005.

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For too many years to count I travelled the world visiting bottomless viper-pits. I studied them, sketched them, photographed them, and wrote up lengthy and detailed descriptions of each and every one. My patience is almost inhuman, and it needed to be, because sooner or later some well-meaning numbskull would ask, in relation to this or that bottomless viper-pit, “Tell me, Professor Bindweed, if the viper-pit is bottomless, where in heaven’s name are the vipers?” And each time I would sigh, and give my interlocutor a look of saintly forebearance, and reply, “On ledges, of course, from very near the top and then at intervals of a few feet all the way down!” For in my experience this was invariably the case, from the bottomless viper-pit of O’Houlihan’s Wharf to the bottomless viper-pit of San Christoboole.

Then, one day, armed only with the shreds of a map and a flask of brackish water, I came upon the bottomless viper-pit of Gaar. One thing you must understand is that I had been at this work for so long that very little surprised me anymore. So please do not think I am exaggerating when I say that I was thunderstruck, bedazzled, giddy and incredulous, for I was all those things and more. The amazing thing about the bottomless viper-pit of Gaar was that it had been turned into a sort of tourist attraction. A fence had been placed around it, gigantic gaudy signs flashed on and off, and fairground music blared out of stacks of loudspeakers. To exploit one of the remotest bottomless viper-pits in the world for commercial gain seemed wrong to me, and, suddenly drained of my inhuman patience, I marched up to the person standing behind the counter of the ticket booth.

• Trumpets and Banners, the complete monologue
• How I Plunged Into The Bottomless Viper-Pit of Gaar
• Misprints (errata from the previous testimony)
• Quotation from “An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton”
• Wafers, Vile and Otherwise
• A Pedant’s Righteous Nostrums

This episode was first broadcast on June 8th 2005.

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“In spite of the fact that he had fed his scribblings into the fire, the mere act of writing the words sport and sports two or three times sent Dobson whirling off on a new track. It was a morning of torrential rain, as usual, but Dobson donned a mackintosh and stomped out of the house. He was gone for hours. When he returned, sopping wet, he announced that he intended to write an Encyclopaedia of Sport based on an entirely novel classification. Instead of categorising sports into team and solo games, those using balls and those eschewing them, those that require bats, racquets, sticks and pucks and those that don’t, his work would instead approach the topic from what he called, immodestly, ‘a Dobsonian angle’.

“Swallowing a mouthful of toasted blob-cake, I asked him what he meant. He fixed me with those beady yet watery eyes and announced that he had, while walking along the lane that leads to the ruinous sump, devised six ‘bags’ of sporting activity; spindly, apprehensive, dashing, clotted, baleful and monkey-like. There was no known human sport, he shouted, growing hot with excitement, his arms windmilling, which could not be levered into one of these categories, and his task would be to draw out the ur-characteristics of each pastime.

• An Outing (to the balsa-wood factory)
• Swan News (eating swans is unacceptable)
• Grebe
• Dobson on Sport
• Quote from “The Quaker Colonies” by Sydney G Fisher.
• Quote from “Black Pool For Hell Maidens” by Hal K Wells.
• Glib Hatter (which also appeared in this episode)
• Trumpets and Banners (some truncated narration)

This episode was first broadcast on the 1st of June 2005. A complete transcript of “Hooting Yard on the Air” can be found on Frank Key’s official Hooting Yard website.

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Today it is of decisive importance that I tell you about Blodgettesque farming methods. The techniques pioneered by Blodgett in his heyday are breathtaking. Consider, for example, the uses to which a Blodgettian farmer will put hay. There are many, many diagrams in the manual which show bales of hay being commandeered for all sorts of inventive purposes, all over the farmyard, in all six seasons of the year. That’s right, six seasons. One of Blodgett’s most telling innovations was his calendrical recalibration, if I am using the word correctly. Out go winter, spring, summer and autumn, or fall, as they say in Pining & Pothorst Land; in come tally, spate, the time of mighty remonstrations, tack, hub and bolismus. So, come hub come the haywain, as the saying goes, with his big fat boots stuffed with straw? I mean hay.

• Blodgettesque Farming Methods
• Life and Loves of the Immersion Man
• Four extracts from Dobson’s autobiography
• Petrochemical Shiver-me-Timbers Conclave
• At home with Tanquod Shuddery (A tale of generosity)
• A guide to Pointy Town

This episode was first broadcast on May 11th 2005.

Cuppid is, as you might expect, related to Cupid, although there is a lot more than that extra P to help you distinguish between them. Cuppid is composed of both toxic and non-toxic gases, and tinkles a little golden bell whenever it alights upon the hairy back of a bison, which it often does, for Cuppid’s favourite haunts are the vast plains of North America. I say it because Cuppid is, if not exactly a hermaphrodite, neither male nor female, although sometimes when its gases cool and take on liquid form it can bear a fugitive resemblance to Sonja Henie (1912-1969), the legendary Norwegian figure skating champion. Such moments can be dangerous for Cuppid, for it is volatile, and seeks warmer air urgently to return to its gaseous state.

• Mr Bewg’s Reference
• Two extracts from “A Zest for Crumpled Things”
• Soup (A Chewist Text)
• Frustum, Tang, Sluice (An exciting adventure of Confidential Agent Blot)
• Scenes from the Lives of the Poets Number 1: Maude Abdab
• Cuppid
• A Lecture by Canute Hellhound (An extract from “40 Visits to the Worm Farm”)

This episode was first broadcast on 4th May 2005.

One of the more arresting facts about Dobson is that he spent a five-year period living in an evaporated milk factory in Winnipeg. Such was the hold on him of this location that he devoted no less than sixteen pamphlets to it. According to the statistician Aloysius Nestingbird, Dobson wrote more words about this factory than on any other topic. What was it about the place that exerted such a fascination upon Dobson? How significant is it that, during his stay there, the factory was still functioning, producing thousands of tins of evaporated milk every week, and not, as it is today, an abandoned ruin populated only by screeching birds? Was the workforce aware that the pamphleteer had taken up residence in an unused room on the mezzanine floor, and that he had attached his own design of bolts and latches to the door to prevent his being disturbed? Or that the carefully-lettered sign on the door, reading “S Q Perkins, Janitorial Padré”, was a fake of Dobson’s devising?

• Anaxagrotax
• Pontiff Mnemonic
• Pale Flapper (A Love Story)
• The Blot Family
• Starlings
• Dobson In Residence (An evaporated milk factory in Winnipeg)
• The Tale of Gaspard
• Excessive Revolver Shooting and Other Matters

This episode was first broadcast on April 27th 2005.