Sopwith was ushered to a seat at the top table, and a hush descended on the tent as the first course was brought in by the Hooting Yard Duckpond-Cleaner, whose name was Cackbag. This geriatric half-wit carried a capacious tureen containing gallons upon gallons of an iridescent broth, flavoured with pap, rime and bonemeal, and reportedly thoroughly indigestible.

Cackbag slopped a ladleful of the broth into Sopwith’s rusty bowl, and the majestic entertainer was about to spoon some of the piping hot liquid into his mouth, when of a sudden the tent was filled with cataclasm and pandaemonium.

“Cedric William Spraingue!” The words rang out, re-echoing round the canvas walls. “Tundists have come for you! We will take you now!”

Poor Sopwith, ashen, trembling and incontinent, could do little else but to obey the bidding of the unseen Tundists. As bolts of purple light spurted around the tent, and mesmerising noises deafened the townsfolk, he crawled to the entrance flap, a piteous figure on his hands and knees. As soon as he was through the flap, the uproar ceased, the tent interior calmed, the air grew still. Clamour and rack were no more: but Cedric William Spraingue, alias Guesbaldo Sopwith, was gone. Like so many others, he had been taken by the Tundists.Who knows why, or to what end? Like all who fell foul of Tundism, he was ne’er seen on earth again.

• Once Upon a Time (Cassowary Man)
• The Life and Times of Captain Cake
• The Life and Loves of the Immersion Man
• Dobson’s Leech Mishap
• Films on Television
• The Phial of Broth
• An extract from “The Immense Duckpond Pamphlet” concerning Blodgett and an Ogre.

This episode was first broadcast on the 2nd November 2005. For transcripts of this episode, please visit the Hooting Yard website.

The Phial of Broth [ 29:25 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

When Pabstus! Pabstus! was installed on his throne there was carnival and carousing. Fools danced around maypoles and jesting roisterers roistered and doistered as if tomorrow would never come. No one has ever been able to count the pies that were cooked that day. Many, many people drowned at the swimming gala at the Old Crumbling Outdoor Pool, and ravens were seen hovering in the sky. A post office person stuck pictures of Pabstus Tack to his hat and was chased across the fields by happily screeching children. But was there a trace of desperation in their screeching?

And tomorrow did come, of course, as everyone knew it had to. That was when the first rumbles were heard of Pabstus Sludge. To appease him, the throne was moved to a higher point on the hill, just above the coppice, where moles betrayed their presence in their usual mole-like way. A gang from the tavern headed thither armed with rifles, until Pabstus! Pabstus! made it known that moles were sacred and must never be harmed. Some say the men turned their rifles on themselves in terror.

Terror, it is said, is the only proper response to Pabstus Tack and to Pabstus Sludge. Wrapped up tight in their cardigans, hanging Tilly lamps from the rafters of their cabins, the braver villagers plot his overthrow. Turnips are chewed. Cigarillos dangle from the soot-blackened lips of the vanguard. Secret anthems, never written down, are mumbled rather than sung. Food poisoning has wiped out most of these souls since Pabstus! Pabstus! first emitted his light and his booms, seventeen years ago.

• A Thrilling Yarn
• Something about Podcasts
• Pabstus Tack
• Max Decharne talks about dictionaries and other important subjects.
• Dispatches from the nib of Van Dongelbraacke
• A description of Professor Zoltan Crunlop’s Crop-Circle Apparatus
• Max Decharne finds yet more poetry in dictionaries.

This episode was first broadcast on September 28th 2005. Transcripts of this episode can be found on the Hooting Yard Website.

Pabstus Tack and Pabstus Sludge [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hands up those of you who remember the cartoon character Billy Parallelogram. For decades in the last century he appeared weekly in The Pabulum, a comic which also featured Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet. Whereas all Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet’s adventures followed a strict, unchanging formula, you could never guess what might happen in the Billy Parallelogram strip. Sometimes he was accompanied by his cousin, Tilly Dodecahedron, or by the Massed Hordes Of Gruesome And Frightening Things From The Pit Of Foulness.

Sometimes the weekly adventure might be as simplistic as Billy Parallelogram buying an accordion and learning how to play it. There were serial stories, too, spread over two or three months, where Billy Parallelogram would be shown teaching children how to cultivate wheat, or to devise spring, prong and lever mechanisms to automate household tasks, or even to compose majestic symphonies for full orchestra so emotionally charged that listeners would blub into their handkerchiefs. His cousin Tilly Dodecahedron’s appearances often signalled storylines involving bees, turpentine, silhouetteists, farm implements and Dakkadakkadakka. This last was a speciality of the Billy Parallelogram strips, an ill-defined yet curiously unnerving monster goblin with bulging eyes and forehead, seemingly bent on destroying the universe but always distracted by parlour games such as snakes-and-ladders or gluttons-and-rhubarb.

One of Weems’ vile henchmen from the popular cartoon strip “Billy Parallelogram”.

• Horse Begone ( An unfortunate encounter with the Woohoohoodiwoodadooronron Woman )
• Tadeusz Kapisko and his Ears of Wheat
• Dobson in the Land of Nod
• When Haddo-Haddo becomes Musto; Or, The Greaves of Way-O
• Give me a Glossary ( an explanation of “When Haddo-Haddo becomes Musto” )
• Nomenclature of diminuitive persons who plunge down 150-Ft Cliffs and survive with hardly a scratch.
• Billy Parallelogram
• Metal of the week: Tin
• Dietary News ( Foods of the future )

This episode was first broadcast on the 7th September 2005.

Standard Podcast [ 31:06 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In those days we had many gods in Gaar, but only one was authentic, the one whose name could not be uttered. In addition, we had fifteen green-eyed weasel gods, a pair of plastic marchmont gods, the hideous centipede god of Tuesday evenings, Bosh the crumpled god, eighty squirrel gods, numberless gods with two or more heads, even one god with no head at all, and a god whose breath ignited stars. We had the bucket god and the athletics track god, the god of railway platforms and the gods of puddles. Some gods were ephemeral, tiny things, like your mayflies. Others were massive and solid and permanent. But only one god was real, the God with the upper case G, the one whose name could not be spoken.

Nowadays, those of us who rode the motorcycles in the sidecars of which blasphemers languished, muffled, in pods, are thought of as fanatics. I still get sidelong looks of contempt or loathing when I go to the post office or the greengrocery. I was spat at in the street as recently as six months ago. When I buy my fireworks, they are invariably tampered with, so that they sputter rather than sparkle. I can’t remember the last time one of my fireworks went whoooosh!

My favourite god was the gas god. It made a tremendous growling noise and it was usually sixty feet high, but sometimes smaller. Every now and then, because I was a motorcyclist, it would carry out its godlike doings in my back garden, and I would watch from the window, entranced. Our windows then were made of cellophane, and I would prick holes in my window with the point of a sharpened pencil, the better to appreciate the misty wafts of the gas god.

• Quotation from the Bible
• The Game of Bosanquet (Some handy tips)
• Smashed Gods ( of Gaar )
• Cinematic Dobson ( A Numbers Racket )
• And I Shall Walk
• Murder in the Murk (By Chlorine Winslow)
• Destiny’s Darning-Needle Pierced My Very Soul (A Trebizondo Culpepper devotee’s enrapturement)

This episode was oringinally recorded on August 31st 2005. For transcripts of today’s podcast please visit the Hooting Yard website.

Standard Podcast [ 29:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

UPDATE: The auction is now open. You can bid on eBay until 8pm next Sunday. In the meantime you can discuss this auction on the Resonance Forums.

My name is fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol and I’d like to speak to you today on behalf of the Hooting Yard Benevolent Fund For Distressed Out Of Print Pamphleteers.

I don’t know about you, but often, as I go about my day, waiting for a bus, say, or roaming in the hills and getting my socks snagged in a thicket of brambles, or sheltering in a kiosk from a thunderous downpour, I find my thoughts turning to out of print pamphleteers… you know, those poor bewildered wreckages of humanity, snivelling in their rags, covered in pustules and boils and running sores, with whole colonies of flies whirling around their heads, those wretched figures whose pamphlets were once in print.

Now they are reduced to destitution, sprawled hopelessly with their spindly legs dangling in the brackish water of some pond in the middle of a field, watched over by sinister cows, but forgotten by those who once read their printed pamphlets with a mixture of glee, excitement and drooling. They may even have danced to the text of a pamphlet in a seaside disco, out at the end of the pier, before jumping into the sea and flailing around, waterlogged but happy.

Ah… but for the out of print pampleteer such a joyous readership has long since disappeared. And that is where the Hooting Yard Benevolent Fund for Distressed Out Of Print Pamphleteers steps in to help. On this occasion, we are pleased to announce an exciting auction. We have one copy of the exceedingly rare paperback book “Twitching And Shattered”, a 136-page compilation of work by Frank Key originally published as long ago as 1989. Here you will find over a dozen texts, including “By Aerostat To Hooting Yard”, “The Churn In The Muck” and “A Zest For Crumpled Things”, together with many fine illustrations, scribbled drawings, and old photographs, including a big A3 fold out diagram and a piece of real sandpaper.

HOW TO BID: This charity auction will begin at Sunday 21st May, 2006 at 20:00 BST. This will be a 7 day auction. You can place your bid by visiting ebay lot number: 8815045576 .

Standard Podcast [ 3:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

For many years in the last century Mudchute was the home of a monomaniac. Actually, to call Caspian Sea Spanglebag a monomaniac is not strictly true, for he had not one but two abiding obsessions.

The first, which is of little interest to us, was his conviction that the tyrant of the Soviet Union was called Josef Starling, while the heroine of Thomas Harris’ The Silence Of The Lambs was named Clarice Stalin. Being bonkers, Spanglebag was unmoved by the facts that the moustachioed and heavily pockmarked dictator chose the pseudonym “Man of Steel” in preference to his real name of Djugashvili, and that the troubled FBI rookie is a fictional character.

But it was the Mudchute man’s belief that hendiadys is a disease afflicting poultry, rather than a figure of speech, which consumed most of his energies. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Spanglebag declared war on the makers of dictionaries, lexicons, grammars and encyclopaedias. Most of the major publishers of reference books have somewhere in their archives a fat file containing letters with that Mudchute postmark, all written by pencil in tiny, tiny handwriting, their tone varying from mild complaint to violent menace. One example will suffice.

I purchased the latest edition of your wordbook, writes Spanglebag on 23rd June 1989, and was surprised to see you define hendiadys as “a figure of speech in which two words connected by a conjunction are used to express a single notion that would normally be expressed by an adjective and a substantive; the use of two conjoined nouns instead of a noun and modifier”. You then go on to list instances from the Bible, such as “a mouth and wisdom” in Luke 21:15, and “the hope and resurrection of the dead” in Acts 23:6. I do not take kindly to spending money on such drivel, and have torn your worthless book to shreds, and I would have scattered those shreds to the winds from atop a hill, were there any high hills in Mudchute, which there are not, so instead I steeped the shreds in buckets of water until they were but pulp, yes! pulp. Please correct your gruesome error in future editions, or I will ensure you become the laughing stocks of the reference book world, and you will weep with shame.

• Railway Forecast
• “Hendiadys In Mudchute”, pertaining to Caspian Sea Spanglebag, a monomaniac
• Fan Fiction Fad (contributed by R Hanrahan)
• Gods ( a story you may recognise from the episode called “Gods” )
• Last Night’s Dream (about Roy Kinnear)
• Netherlands, Holland, Dutch – What’s That About?

This episode was originally broadcast on August 17th 2005. Full transcripts of this episode can be found on the Hooting Yard Website.

Standard Podcast [ 30:31 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Imagine, just for a moment, that you live in ancient Latvia. Now look at today’s date. Gosh! It’s Kazimiras Diena, the festival which commemorates the return of the larks! Being an ancient Latvian, you know full well that larks are passerine birds of the predominantly Old World family Alaudidae, small terrestrial birds with often extravagant songs and display flights. Often, you have pointed out to your ancient Latvian pals that larks nest on the ground, laying between two to six speckled eggs. Sometimes you get into arguments with your ancient Latvian next hut neighbour, who insists that most larks are fairly dull in appearance. Both of you agree, however, that their food is insects and seeds. Now, amity restored, you set off arm in arm with your neighbour for the festival.

“Look, Arvids,” you say, pointing to a nearby bird, “a lark!”

“Indeed it is, Egils,” says your neighbour, “But what species of lark do you suppose it is?”

• Vaporetto or Bus? A review of “Incredibly Detailed Report Of The Commission Of Enquiry Into The Provision Of Public Transport Services In And Around Hooting Yard As Requested By Civic Functionaries Many, Many Years Ago.” by Anon
• Land of Nod News (Emily DIckinson)
• More extracts from “Further Science” by Norman Davies.
• Important Lark Information
• A Recipe for Gruel
• Since You’ve Been Gone
• Suzanne Takes You Down

This episode was first broadcast on August 3rd 2005. All of the prose in this podcast can be found on the Hooting Yard website.

Standard Podcast [ 30:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What is the Groist? Throughout the centuries, or to be more specific, in the summer of 1127, during most of March 1784, and last week, human beings have asked this question. And I should be specific about those human beings too, root and branch. I am not entirely sure that “root and branch” means anything in that last sentence, but it slipped out, soup to nuts, as did “soup to nuts”, just then. This is what thinking about the Groist does, it seems, love in a mist and toffee apples. I am going to stop referring back, chimes at midnight, to the otherwise irrelevant phrases creeping in to this serious attempt to explain to readers what the, force majeure, Groist is, or was, or will be, or all three, throughout the years, on this delightful planet of ours, Henry.

So picture yourself for a moment as a twelfth century peasant scrubbling around in your accustomed muck. Feel that smock. Your hair will as likely as not be matted, unwashed, and you will have several teeth missing, God be praised, Brief Encounter. There you are, on a rain-soaked morning, trudging up or down the hillside to go to tend your pigs, or hens, and all of a sudden the Groist invades your brain. You are understandably startled, and some think this startlement is what inspired some of history’s mystics, lean and fat, that is, a visitation from the Groist.

• Introduction: The greatest radio programme on Resonance at 4.00 p.m. on Wednesdays (probably)
• How to festoon yourself with old netting
• Take me back to Old Plovdiv
• Ugo Goofs Off
• Bronchitis Person’s Helicopter Journey
• The Groist
• Bilingual Comintern Mocker
• Two days in the life of Blodgett
• How to look after a horse

As ever, transcripts of the stories in this week’s podcast can be found on the Hooting Yard website. This episode was first broadcast on July 6th 2005.

Standard Podcast [ 29:15 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

Standard Podcast [ 28:20 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download