For various hellishly complex reasons, Harmon is obliged to murder and impersonate a famous female archaeologist. Will our hero accomplish the deed in time to catch to the next flight to Iraq from Croydon Rocket-Port?
Warning: This episode features sinister nocturnal activities and bogus archaeology.
Everything you need to surf the zeitgeist, with a wry smile playing about your lips
You can listen via iTunes or via our website: http://www.mindthegapradio.com
email: mindthegap@mindthegapradio.com
This week you can hear the Prime Minister described as an Ageing Pussy Hound and find out where to get tea, cakes, fighting and vodka in one venue in Bethnal Green…plus Big Brother natch
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.
This episode was oringinally recorded on August 31st 2005. For transcripts of today’s podcast please visit the Hooting Yard website.
Tim Pickup explores the low-fi world of Ice-Cream van chimes; the crudely synthesized ditties that herald the arival of the van full of frozen treats. Today’s show features a wide variety of anoying tunes, plus the perplexing legalities of the use of ice-cream chimes in public.
You might also be interested in this history of ice-cream van melodies courtesy of The Music Thing.
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 Shatteredâ€, 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 Yardâ€, “The Churn In The Muck†and “A Zest For Crumpled Thingsâ€, 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 .
Harman e Phrayser has just entered a time portal disguised as the notorious female archaeologist, Professor Bronte Twiblett-Jones.
Now he’s popped out the other end “like toothpaste from a tube”… but which of the multitude of infinite paralell universes has he ended up in? This question and many others will be answered in this week’s fun-packed episode of the Harmon e. Phraysier show.
A weekly round up of all the best bits, funny-smelling stuff and outright lies from the Sunday Papers – from the Financial Times to The Morning Star via The Mail on Sunday.
We’ve already read ’em all so you don’t have to!
Plus theatre, gigs, cinema and tv to beware of – with a soundtrack of new tunes that you should’ve already heard, but haven’t….
our contributors include theatre director Phil Willmott reviewing the West End and anything leisurely, Paul Carr from The Friday Project casting a jaundiced eye on the news, Lucy the Fringey Girl drinking and flirting in bars and at gigs, Grace Dent from The Radio Times on tv to avoid, plus the editors of The Penny Magazine and the Film Editor of Time Out…
Everything you need to surf the zeitgeist, with a wry smile playing about your lips
You can listen via iTunes or via our website: http://www.mindthegapradio.com
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.
This episode was originally broadcast on August 17th 2005. Full transcripts of this episode can be found on the Hooting Yard Website.
Through clenched teeth, in municipal yet verdant parkland, sprawled on grass, Blodgett recited the alphabet.
“A is for vinegar,” he grunted, “B is for worms, C is for villains swinging from the gallows…”
A little voice inside Blodgett’s head told him to stop. He knew he had got it wrong again. He rolled himself down the gentle incline of the grass until he came to rest. Then he sat up and picked flecks of plant-life out of his hair. The sun was shining but the park was almost deserted. He peered across the green towards the choc ice tent, and licked his lips. Would he splash out on a choc ice? Blodgett fumbled in his pockets for change, but they were empty. He wondered if there was anybody in charge of the choc ice tent. Perhaps it, too, was deserted, and the choc ices were there for the taking. It was more likely that there would be some kind of automatic choc ice dispenser, but Blodgett knew he could jimmy it open with his jimmy. He recalled that he had left his jimmy at home, in a cupboard, with his empty yohoort cartons. Blodgett always pronounced “yogurt” as “yohoort”, he was that kind of guy. He lay down again and closed his eyes and clenched his teeth and made yet another attempt at the alphabet…
This episode was first broadcast on August 10th 2005. You can find scripts, notes and additional material on the Hooting Yard website.
Midnight Sex Talk – Sex in the Movies
And we don’t mean porn, for once!
The history of sex in mainstream film is a parellel history of our world, whether pushing boundaries or simply reflecting what’s been going on behind closed doors for years, from Some Like It Hot to Secretary, via <9 1/2 Weeks and Basic Instinct, and more recent releases like Kinsey and 9 Songs.
Guests: our regular film critic Alex Fitch, of Backprojection.com, and film-maker and TV producer Havana Marking.
Go here and check out my first ever celebrity photocall….
This show was first broadcast on Sunday 27th February 2005. Midnight Sex Talk is taking a rest from the studio for a while, but if you want to drop us a line, or tell us what you’d like to hear more of, you can email us any time at midnightsextalk at gmail dot com.
More info here: MidnightSexTalk.com.
