O what can ail thee, horoscope reader, alone and palely loitering? Make sure you treat yourself to an electric bath and a session in a sensory deprivation tank. The Bale of Gas in your House of Stupidity has incalculable effects. You will stand on the steps of the Insane Asylum, and hundreds of men and women will stand below you, with their upturned faces. Among them will be old men crushed by sorrow, and old men ruined by vice; aged women with faces that seemed to plead for pity, women that make you shrink from their unwomanly gaze; lion-like young men, made for heroes but caught in the devil’s trap and changed into beasts; and boys whose looks show that sin has already stamped them with its foul insignia, and burned into their souls the shame which is to be one of the elements of its eternal punishment.

A less impressible person than you would feel moved at the sight of that throng of bruised and broken creatures. A hymn will be read, and when the preachers strike up an old tune, voice after voice will join in the melody until it swells into a mighty volume of sacred song. You will notice that the faces of many are wet with tears, and there will be an indescribable pathos in their voices. The pitying God, amid the rapturous hallelujahs of the heavenly hosts, shall bend to listen to the music of these broken harps.

• Thoughts on Cardinal Ratzinger
• Module one of “Bird Recognition Skills”, “The Beak”
• Brain Exercise: How to think of things other than the Pope
• A Parlour Game
• Potted biographies of a marine hue #1: Captain Flask
• Mister Scrimejour’s Aviary
• Bats
• Your horoscope for today

First broadcast on April 20th 2005.

Karen played the drums and sang. Her brother Richard played keyboards and supplied backing vocals. Unfortunately, Karen died young. Richard is still alive, still active in music, but The Carpenters as a duo are no longer with us.

These bare facts stated, astute readers will note the remarkable similarities between The Carpenters and the homonymic The Carpenters who were so successful during the 1970s with songs such as Close To You and Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft. Neither of these songs was recorded by The Carpenters of whom we speak, for their music was somewhat different, an outré blend of salsa, bluegrass, acid jazz, bell-ringing and caterwauling, often driven by motorised electric balalaikas programmed by Karen. Richard was known to be fond of factory hooters.

• Meditations upon the papacy
• In Loopy Copse
• Synopsis of “Life in a Thousand Worlds” by rev W. F. Harris.
• What you should know about The Carpenters
• Dobson’s Fear of Squirrels
• Practical Seagull Exercises

This episode was first transmitted on the 13th April 2005.

Frank narrates victorian morality story about the perils of certain vices. This episode contains a single story, written not by Frank Key, but Edwin F. Roberts. This episode was first broadcast on the 16th March, 2005.

Update: This item had the wrong audio attached, please refresh it.

“You asked me to save the village from Doom. I have communed with a variety of weird and tiresome shades to seek guidance. You are correct, your village is imperilled. There is only one way to rescue it from the coming agony. Three of your number must travel many miles distant, to the town of Hoon. There, they must find a churn, possibly broken, the churn of Hoon, which has had engraved upon it a rather fetching likeness of myself. Do not ask why. Having scoured Hoon for this churn, and found in Hoon this churn of Hoon, it must be brought back here, with due haste, and hurled into the boiling sea from this very spot on the cliff’s edge. That task complete, your village will once again know glee. I have left unmentioned one crucial point. The three who will venture to Hoon, there to find and return the Hoon-churn, must all be called Ned. That is all.”

This episode was first broadcast on the 9th of March 2005.

• In A Bog (Blodgett)
• At the Hop
• The Stench from Outer Space
• Three Extracts from “The Book of Gnats”
• Massacre of the Innocents at Hoon
• Swiss Family Robinson

This episode was first broadcast on March 9th 2005.

Then Brother Fabrizius strangled another teal. “Hand me that retort, Brother Arpad, so that I may decant into it this teal’s gore.” Brother Arpad reached for the retort and in so doing smashed an alembic. There was a sound of bells. The monks were called to compline. For each canonical hour they allocated a duck to be slaughtered for its blood. At compline, a teal. At matins, a merganser. At prime, a pintail. At tierce, a shoveler. At sext, a wigeon. At nones, a smew. And at vespers, a bufflehead. Out in the fields, sweet little lambs gambolled and frolicked. They would not frolic for long, for soon, in the monastery, it would be bathtime.

• Total Eclipse (Reprise)
• A Note on Bags (Reflections on the Book of Haggai)
• Fifty Years Ago (Dobson on the Radio)
• Orrery Sleuth
• Quotation from “A short history of monastaries” by Alfred Wesley Wishart
• Two Monks
• Tanis Diena
• Quotation from “Egyptian Ideas Of the Future Life” by E. A. Wallis-Budge

“Dobson woke up one wintry morning with an idea in his head. This was not uncommon, but usually his ideas could be – and were – dashed off in a brief pamphlet. Not so the gigantic multi-volume work he pictured in his mind, a compendium of every known soup recipe ever conceived, throughout human history, from the dawn of time to today’s date, across all cultures and civilisations. Even Dobson realised that he could not accomplish so mighty a project single-handed, so he asked Marigold Chew to draw up a list of likely contributors. The Soup Committee was her idea. Reasoning that if she invited people to take part in a Dobson plan they would probably decline, and thus shatter the pamphleteer’s already shattered nerves, she used her usual hardline tactics. The letter she sent out to over eight hundred unsuspecting souls is preserved in the Dobson Archive.”

• Introduction: Doppleganger
• Alphabet Soup
• Dobson’s Soup Committee
• Political Animals
• Pontiff: Pius XII
• Lecture:About Enchatons
• Tiny Enid Extinguishes a Volcano
• Total Eclipse of the Heart (Incomplete)

They called him MacTavish, and he was the village wrestler. He lived in a room above the post office. No other living being ever set foot in the room until the day MacTavish died. They found him lying on his bed, as if he were asleep, but there was no doubt that he was dead, for hovering above his chest was a baleful phantom, emitting gruesome suppurations of foul-smelling extraterrestrial hideousness which it poured into a funnel inserted into MacTavish’s right ear. They closed up the room and nailed the door shut and it remained unopened for the next hundred years.

• Three “Tales of the Uncanny”
• More About my Bomba
• Cosmic Friends – extracts from a pamphlet about extra terrestrial communication.
• Norwegian Woll
• Claude
• Wedd Star
• So you want to become a Haruspex?
• Jarvis and Cubbit

Scrofula is the Latin word for brood sow, and it is the term applied to a tuberculous infection of the chain of lymph glands in the neck, creating swellings between the angle of the jaw and the top of the breastbone. It has been known to afflict people since antiquity, and during the Middle Ages was known as “the King’s Evil”, because it was thought that the monarch’s touch would cure it.

We may scoff at such naïveté, especially given the rather disturbing personal habits of kings and queens past and present. An early scoffer was Valentine Greatrakes (1628-1666), a Cromwellian soldier during the English Civil War. In the revolutionary mood of the time, he correctly surmised that God could act through himself as well as through the royal personage, and did his own scrofula-healing by gently stroking his patients. He also applied poultices made from carrots, although it is unclear whether these were divinely inspired.

• Introduction: Scrofula
• Dream: The Glove of Ib
• Glib Hatter
• Waxy Insensibility
• Saint Mungo
• Poppy Nisbet’s Music Tips
• Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
• Stakhanov, Coleman (and Ronald Colman)

Back in the days of Stalin, it was a brave soul who mocked the Comintern. Uncle Joe and his myrmidons tended to get attacks of the vapours when ridiculed. Svetlana B was not particularly brave, however. For one thing, she mocked the Comintern from the comparative safety of a radio shack hidden in a village in the English fens, which she pronounced “fence”.

This fun-packed episode of Hooting Yard was first broadcast on the 26th January 2004.

• A letter of complaint from an Aztec Fundamentalist.
• Five Tiny Birds
• Crime of the Century
• Blodgett’s Fiendish X-Ray Plot
• Bilingual Comintern Mocker
• Quotation from Ignatius Donnelly, “Atlantis : The Antedeluvian World”
• Mrs Gubbins’ New Publish Venture
• Curd