You will recall the film Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) in which Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are aboard a bus which will explode if it goes below fifty miles per hour, having been primed with a bomb by cackling evildoer Dennis “Don’t try to grow a brain, Jack!” Hopper. I have been wondering if a similar adrenalin-thumping conceit could be applied to the writing of prose.

I am not suggesting I do anything so foolhardy as to ask a disgruntled and slightly maimed ex-police officer to hitch me up to a bomb which will detonate if I stop writing… well, I suppose that is what I am suggesting. Cowardice, or sheer common sense, persuades me, however, to hit upon a less perilous incentive.

• On Speed
• On The Latin Mass and Moby Dick
• On Quadruple Points
• Local Recipe Map
• Phantom or Bees?

This episode was recorded on the 1st March 2012. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Frank’s new eBook By Aerostat to Hooting Yard is now available for purchase.

On Speed [ 29:03 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The best thing you can do with your tin foil is to fashion for yourself a conical tin foil hat. It is important that you make a cone shape, rather than trying to mould the tin foil into the approximate shape of, say, a Homburg or a trilby or a stovepipe hat. Though the wonder of tin foil is that all these hat types could quite easily be made, you must stick to the cone. In part, this is in homage to Jimmy Goddard and the copper cone he used for daily communication with space people. But do not jump to the conclusion that your tin foil cone hat will help you to talk to space people. It won’t. Nor will it protect you from weird unearthly menacing electromagnetic rays and beams and invisible hoo-hah. If such phenomena exist, and can dislodge and jumble and even control the innards of your brain, they are hardly likely to be dissuaded by a sheet of tin foil, are they?

• On Tin Foil
• On Apps
• On Babinsky’s Idiot Half-Brother

This episode was recorded on the 2nd February 2012. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the six publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants , Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke and Brute Beauty And Valour And Act Oh Air Pride Plume Here Buckle! are available for purchase

Hooting Yard 2013/02/02 [ 29:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“Oh woe is me! for I have not two gulls’ eggs to rub together!” This is the plaintive cry of the otherwise happy fellow whose fogou lies empty. It is a cry that, however often heard, never fails to tug at the heartstrings, for those whose hearts have tuggable strings, which is most of us, or so I like to think, for I believe in the inherent goodness of humanity, despite all the evidence to the contrary. And goodness knows there is contrary evidence aplenty! I think it was Molesworth 2 who observed “Reality is so unspeakably sordid it make me shudder”, and even I can see the truth of that. So perhaps it is fair to say there is a measure of unreality about my belief in goodness. Real or unreal, however, I know that when I hear a poor benighted soul bewailing his utter lack of gulls’ eggs, I weep. I would like to think you would weep too.

• On Gulls’ Eggs
• On Clunks
• On Skippy The Bush Kangaroo
• On Feral Goblins

This episode was recorded on the 26th of January 2012. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the six publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants , Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke and Brute Beauty And Valour And Act Oh Air Pride Plume Here Buckle! are available for purchase

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Blötzmann’s interest in the alignment of tree clumps in the East Kent area was prompted not, surprisingly, by Tony Wedd’s important study of the alignment of tree clumps in the West Kent area, but by a stray reference in a yellowing old copy of the St Bibblybibdib’s Parish Magazine And Religious Tirade, where a writer identified only as “Righteous Wanderer In The Woods” makes mention of a wander in the woods when his righteousness was tempted by some sort of hobgoblin tree spirit, green and pagan and covered in leaves and twigs. The author claims that, after fleeing from this sprite in fear for his immortal soul, he lay in the bath and realised that the trajectory of his fleeing, if represented in diagrammatic form, was analagous to the pattern made by a journeyman hiking between the cantons of Switzerland in alphabetical order.

• The Alignment Of Tree Clumps In The East Kent Area.
• The Song Of The Borts Of Pray
• Film Studies
• Chalet ‘O Prose
• Fair Stood The Wind For Frank
• The Manufacture of Tinplate
• Alphabet

This episode was recorded on the 17th June 2010. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the five publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, Befuddled By Cormorants and Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories are available for purchase

Hooting Yard 2010/06/17 [ 30:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Is there anything more frightening than the goat god?

No, there is not.

Must one tremble when the goat god appears, looming from a cloud of foul inexplicable gas?

Yes, one must tremble.

How must one tremble?

In awe and dread.

• Those Wednesday Potato Nights
• Goat God Catechism
• Gilliblat Recipe Time
• Brand New Goo
• In Search of Plunkett

This episode was recorded on the 16th July 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the four publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Those Wednesday Potato Nights [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

• Wordsworth, Dobson, Prescott
• The Most Filthy of the Squalid
• Slops-In-The-Pot
• Pallid Ada, The Crippled Heiress
• Lost Names
• The Spirit World
• Revenge of the Pig

This episode was recorded on the 11th June 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the four publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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As far as I can ascertain, the second album by the band VRIL has been made without any bee involvement whatsoever. These eighteen new waxings by the group – now a quartet – form the soundtrack to the European arthouse film classic The Fatal Duckpond.. Seven hours long, black and white, and silent for large s t r e t c h e s apart from these musical numbers and sparse patches of dialogue mumbled in an incoherent and invented language, the film is a visionary reworking of the 1956 Hollywood western The Bloodsoaked Revenge Of Escobar Beppo, itself an adaptation of a rare and little-performed Jacobean drama whose author was stabbed to death in a brawl and whose corpse was flung into the then stinking Thames.

• Sleeve notes from The Fatal Duckpond by Vrill
• Before Lunchtime
• The Joke Pamphlet
• In The Vestibule
• The Last Ditch

This episode was recorded on the 11th June 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the four publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Sleeve notes from The Fatal Duckpond by Vrill Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dixon went to Dock Green. It was a small patch of grass, hardly a lawn, at the edge of the dock. The dock itself was one where huge steamers came into port from faraway lands, carrying all sorts of exotic cargo. The cargo was mostly packed into wooden crates, which were winched from ship to dock by dockhands. When it was lunchtime, the dockhands sprawled on the green, the small patch of grass, and prised the lids off their Tupperwares and unscrewed the lids from their flasks. They ate their bloater paste sandwiches and drank their tea and while they chewed and swilled they talked to each other about the cargo they had winched ashore that morning. The wooden crates usually had lettering stencilled on their sides and tops describing what the crates contained. One might read FRUIT GUMS, another GIRAFFE BRAINS.

• Dixon of Dock Green
• Shenanigans
• Early Wireless Broadcast
• Other Glubs
• Dribbling for fun and profit

This episode was recorded on the 11th June 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the four publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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• Abasement in a Basement
• The Stinerian Gnomes: An Introduction
• L’Homme qui Grogne
• Mops Held High
• Tonsured Buffoon

This episode was recorded on the 6th June 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the four publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Abasement in a Basement Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Every so often I receive letters from readers asking for background information on particular features of Hooting Yard. My usual practice is to ignore such enquiries and stuff them into a cardboard box, and to shove the cardboard box into a dark cranny. But sometimes I feel impelled to shine a torch into the cranny, to rummage in the cardboard box, to take out one among the mouldering scraps of paper, and to give it due attention. There is no particular method in my choosing, though a letter written neatly and grammatically on scented notepaper headed with a heraldic device, however spurious, is likely to win out over a scribble on a torn bit of breakfast cereal carton stained with grease. You may wish to make a note of that in your pocketbook for future reference. Elsewhere I will provide some tips on drawing spurious yet strangely compelling heraldic devices for your letterhead, but there is no time for that now.

• The Cow & Pins
• If only the Rev. James McCosh were here!
• John Ruskin on the train
• Hospital Barge

This episode was recorded on the 28th May 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the four publications We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

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