They called him Blomqvist, 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 Blomqvist 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 Blomqvist’s right ear. They closed up the room and nailed the door shut. It remained unopened for the next hundred years.

• Alphabet Soup
• Four Uncanny Tales
• Kew. Turge.
• Moptop Of Gath
• Herodotus Storm Smog?
• Fringringhoe
• St. Dunstan’s Cup

This episode was recorded on the 25th November 2010. 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 and Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke are available for purchase

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Because of his drooling, the slack-jawed dribbler was a man of few words. It was said that he expressed himself more fully in the waltz than he could ever manage with words. When he spoke, he slurred and slurped and his eyes grew wild. The fey ladies shuddered or swooned, and who can blame them? It is also true that he had no conversation, of the kind suitable for tea dances and soirées. He had fixed views on two or three topics of limited interest, and these he expounded, so far as his drooling and slurring and slurping allowed, in a low monotone indistinguishable at times from the buzz of a distant swarm of hornets.

• Headline News
• A Lucky Find
• A Note On Gnomes
• The Steinerian Gnome: An Introduction
• Debilite Sociale
• Urban House Numbers
• Slack-Jawed Dribbler
• Mephitc Odours & Perverted Telelgraph Boys

This episode was recorded on the 2nd December 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

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I squelched across the marsh, in driving rain, and linnets sang within my brain. There were no linnets to be seen, just crows, drenched crows, drenched crows. I lit my pipe and sucked, and heard the caw of a drenched crow. The rain was pelting down as I made my slopping way from marsh to town. And in the town, no linnets, no, nor crows. Just shuttered kiosks and the stadium. An athlete threw his javelin in the air. I watched it soar then stab the sodden grass. I went to the canteen. An arty print of crows hung on the wall. I slurped a bowl of steaming warming broth, and then I caught a bus back to the marsh.

• Take One Weasel…
• Drenched Crows
• That Terrible Well
• The Defiant Ones
• Nature Notes
• Alpine Zombie
• O Anglepoise Man!

This episode was recorded on the 28th October 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

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“I’m afraid I have never seen any of your plays,” said the glintist, “My work keeps me fantastically busy, and on the rare occasions I might be free to make a trip to the theatre, I often have to go to a kiosk on a seaside pier where a charlatan healer makes enigmatic passing movements of his hands over my anomalous windpipe.”

• Further Spookiness At South Mimms
• The Despicable Noodles
• The Crooner and His Widow
• Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich & Wynken, Blynken & Nod
• Maud Wasp and the Top Glintist
• Where Is the Emperor?

This episode was recorded on the 21st October 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

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Twas midnight as I crept through the graveyard. The sky was pitch black, the stars obscured by clouds. My Toc H lamp shed only meagre light, and I stumbled many times over the rough and ravaged ground. Somewhere an owl hooted. I hooted in reply, mischievously, for even in so macabre a circumstance I retained my joie de vivre. Well, you have to, don’t you, when surrounded by doom ‘n’ death ‘n’ memento mori?

• W
• X
• Y
• Z
• An Irish Writer Of Some Repute
• Foul And Beastly Vice At South Mimms

This episode was recorded on the 14th October 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

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If it was shortly after dawn that you sank into your quagmire, bleary-eyed on a morning hike, you at least know that you have many hours of light ahead, and this knowledge should help you to keep your pecker up. After all, statistically, the longer the daylight, the more chance there is of a peasant passing by. I have not studied statistics, and of course there are all sorts of variables to take into account, but I think I can safely say that you have more reason for optimism if you have sunk into a quagmire early in the morning rather than at dusk, as the sun sinks in the west and the sky turns black. You can adjust the intensity of your hope or hopelessness based on what o’ clock it is when you sink, for of course it may be neither dawn nor dusk but two-thirty in the afternoon or one minute past midnight. If the latter, should you survive your ordeal, you would be well-advised to review your decision to go marching about the bleak countryside in the middle of the night, and resolve not to do so in future, if it can at all be avoided

• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V

This episode was recorded on the 7th October 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

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Over the years I have watched various crew members of ships, from Rear Admirals to barnacle scrapers, perform all sorts of baffling physical manoeuvres, and not once have I thought any of it fitted the definition of jiggery-pokery, except on one occasion when I was aboard a very sinister ship which sailed into a clammy mist, in which all sorts of ugly shenanigans took place until, at the last, I was marooned, with several other paying passengers, upon a remote atoll, populated only by squelchy creeping things, and bereft of paper and pencils and writing desks and panels of adamantine hardness.

H Pt. 02

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

This episode was recorded on the 30th September 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

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You shall knit tea-cosies and scarves and miscellaneous woolies, and at the very instant they are completed, they shall unravel and you will knit them again from scratch. From dawn until dusk and through the cold dark horrors of the night, you shall knit much like Sisyphus hopelessly pushing his boulder uphill. As he gaped to watch it roll down to the bottom of that hill, so shall you see your knitting unravel until all you have to show for your toil is a tangled skein of wool, wool you must knit again and again into a tea cosy or a scarf or a wooly. The only sound in your chamber shall be the interminable clack clack of your knitting needles.

• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H Pt. 01

This episode was recorded on the 23th September 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

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