Resonance FM Podcasts » Hooting Yard

Hooting Yard: Pallid Ada, The Crippled Heiress

salimfadhley — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:11:23 +0000

The wind was howling across the desolate moors. It was an incredibly howly wind, and they were almost unbelievably desolate moors. Such desolation has seldom been howled upon by wild winds anywhere, ever, throughout the records of time, since the unimaginably distant past when the moors were an alluvial plain across which roamed weird primitive beasts. Once those beasts howled here, now it was the wind, ferocious in its onslaught upon the barren emptiness of the moors. Barren and empty and desolate but for a tiny ramshackle near-dilapidated cottage hunched alongside the single faint path that stretched across the moors, twisting and winding and leading none knew where. It was in this vile brickish habitude that Pallid Ada, the Crippled Heiress, eked out her sorrowful existence.

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.

Hooting Yard: The Fatal Duckpond

salimfadhley — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:38:54 +0000

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.

Hooting Yard: Dixon of Dock Green

salimfadhley — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:11:43 +0000

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.

Hooting Yard: Abasement in a Basement

salimfadhley — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:30:29 +0000

Just as a bus is the best place for abuse, you should ideally perform abasement in a basement. There is something about the subterranean nature of the location which lends itself to the embrace of personal wretchedness.

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.

Hooting Yard: The Cow & Pins

salimfadhley — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:57:16 +0000

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.

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.

Hooting Yard: Dobson’s Kitchen Groanings

salimfadhley — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 01:35:07 +0000

I was mistaken, yesterday, to suggest that Dobson wrote a pamphlet entitled Kitchen Groanings, like the late eighteenth century work of the same name penned by an angry cook-wench or discontented housemaid. I was sure there was some kind of Dobson connection, and leapt to the most obvious thought, that it was yet another out of print pamphlet by the out of print pamphleteer. Unable to place it, however, I knitted my brows and set the tiny engines a-whirring in my pea-sized yet pulsating brain, and eventually, in the middle of the night, I realised I had been thinking of a radio programme made by Marigold Chew in the dying days of 1953.

This episode was recorded on the 21st 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.

Hooting Yard: Dismember that Heron

salimfadhley — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:59:34 +0000

“The terms of a carver be as here followeth. Break that deer – lesche (leach) that brawn – rear that goose – lift that swan – sauce that capon – spoil that hen – frusche (fruss) that chicken – unbrace that mallard – unlace that coney – dismember that heron – display that crane – disfigure that peacock – unjoint that bittern – untache that curlew – alaye that felande – wing that partridge – wing that quail – mine that plover – thigh that pigeon – border that pasty – thigh that woodcock – thigh all manner small birds – timber that fire – tire that egg – chine that salmon – string that lamprey – splat that pike – sauce that plaice – sauce that tench – splay that bream – side that haddock – tusk that barbel – culpon that trout – fin that chevin – trassene that eel – tranch that sturgeon – undertranch that porpoise – tame that crab – barb that lobster. Here endeth the goodly terms of Carving.”

This episode was recorded on the 7th 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.

Hooting Yard: With My Fife and my Drum

salimfadhley — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:26:44 +0000

With my fife and my drum I wandered in the hills. I tooted my fife and I banged my drum. This was why I was wandering in the hills, for I had been banished from town. My tooting and banging unnerved the good burghers, and the bad burghers too, and I was escorted to the town perimeter and shoved across the line. It was an actual line, painted in whitewash, and regularly repainted wherever it lost integrity through scuffing by bootsoles and the like. I was told plainly, by way of an edict, that I could never again toot my fife or bang my drum within the town, due to the unnervement I caused. I accepted this, and wandered up into the hills.

Hooting Yard: “Strangle a pig and burn down the barn and doh-si-doh your partners!”

salimfadhley — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:26:41 +0000

It was a rallying cry, and in its wake pigs were strangled, barns were burned, and doh-si-dohs were essayed. How sweet the memory of those dances of my grandparents’ youth. I was not alive then of course, so I have no direct memory, but I recall, as an infant, sitting in a basket slung over one of grandpa’s bison, and he goading the beast along the lane, and telling me tales of his childhood in the Wenkenblatt, the strangled pigs and the burning barns and the doh-si-dohs.

This episode was recorded on the 23rd April 2009. A complete transcript of this episode can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website. Accompanying Hooting Yard On The Air, the three publications Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags, Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars and Befuddled By Cormorants are available for purchase.

Hooting Yard: Dobson’s Card Index

salimfadhley — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:28:11 +0000

The astonishing thing about the “little placards” displayed by Father Sogol, the Professor of Mountaineering in Daumal’s novel, is how similar they are to the immense card index maintained by Dobson, upon which he relied when writing his out of print pamphlets. Dobson would have approved, too, the Professor’s method of displaying the cards – at least, sometimes. One of the pamphleteer’s more irritating characteristics was his inability to settle on the keeping of his cards. At times, like Sogol, he pinned them up on every available surface. Then a frenzy would take him and he would tear them all down and shove them into one of his innumerable cardboard boxes. Marigold Chew reports that Dobson spent hours upon hours arranging the cards when they were in their boxes, ordering and reordering them according to various abstruse cataloguing systems. No sooner was he done than he would once again tip them out of their boxes and pin them up on walls and screens and pinboards and what have you. And of course, all the time he was adding new cards to the collection.

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