It’s the time of year for spooks, spectres and things that go “ecky ecky ecky” in the night so in this supernatural episode, Dr. Buckhart Strangle invites you to ponder the existence of ghosts.
Reporting from glamourous Brixton, Ron Breful presents dictaphone recordings of empty rooms where aural manifestations are said to have taken place. If that wasn’t scary enough, somewhere in amongst all this is a cameo appearance by an actual improvising musician!
Meet Ottakar and his girlfriend Walushka. Ottakar would like to tell you about the fun times he and Walushka have in London’s happening art scene, except he can’t, because he doesn’t enjoy any of it. Not for Ottakar modern art exhibitions of piles of felt, or the radio programme where “the lady with the baby and the saxophone goes walking”. Sadly he would rather listen to that other station a turn of the dial to the right. Some people.
Harmon meets Hitchcock this time. A Resonance Radio Trainee Engineer is besieged by repeated telephone calls from a dark and sinister character who demands to hear something called “Grim Sleepers”.
Our protagonist, convinced that he has a “prune-bum” by a fortune teller in a toilet, decides to take cosmetic treatment and goes to his Eastern European GP for a prescription.
Harmon’s fortunes take a turn for the worse when he ends up in hospital, having injected his wrinkly buttocks with enough dioxin to kill a tank. There, as fate would have it, he meets a familiar depressive Australian pop star working as an orderly with a criminal bedside manner. Finally he undergoes an operation on his failed arse, the end result of which you won’t be able to foretell.
These are troubling times and Can-D is waiting for your thoughts. Is war the answer? Is there, in fact, an answer? What’s the question?
Plundering broadcasts from recent and not-so-recent times, The Harmon e. Phraisyar Show struggles to find a meaningful or progressive discourse, gets confused and drifts off into space for a moody thirty minutes of hovering floatiness.
“The human race is not much more than a bunch of lying, two-faced schnooks,” argues an unidentified voice in a heartfelt polemic on the regulations and bureaucratic chaos of modern Britain. This is surrounded by a medley of loops and collages.
Want to know the correct way to handle your copy of Blunkett’s Book of Regulations? Listen closely.
This satirical edition takes a second swipe at “Kaffy”, previous winner of Awards For Idiots, portraying her as the host of a self-promoting infomercial. “Kaffy” tells the listeners what to do with their violins and invites some decidedly biased journalists to review her improvisation CDs, or, in her words, her “product”.
And speaking of product, “Awards For Idiots” is one of the episodes available on the Resonance Radio Collection CD of the Harmon e. Phraisyar Show, at the Resonance FM Shop!
In this most excellent edition, tune in with Harmon to cable TV’s top poetry quiz, Bad Poims. Hosted by Mrs. Fokkerwolf’s new lodger, Malibu Stalk (don’t call him Chicken Legs), Bad Poims is a contest to find the world’s worst poem. The losers are dropped into raw sewage.
Space is filled with a myriad monos. Listeners are instructed to tamper with the cabling on their precious stereo systems to best enjoy this episode of the Harmon e. Phraisyar show, in which visiting lecturer Dr. Max Doubt delivers a passionate address on the superiority of monaural(or “moan-oh”) sound.
Accompanying Dr. Doubt’s speech and coming to you in glorious pan-chromatic mono are some bedazzling audio manipulations.
No sooner has Harmon begun his show, than he finds himself furry-handcuffed to the furniture by the smelly cohorts of Grungy Media, interventionist activists without a clue. They’ve invaded the studio and proceed to attempt a live coup of Resonance Radio.
What are their demands? Do they have any? Will they stop fighting with each other long enough to tell us anything?