From the ghast spattered bowers of Gaar to the cast-iron gates of Hoon; a single voice resounds; His lordly voice booms with a gnarled yet mesmeric resonance; an extraordinary baritone addressing you with wistful oratory. He is Frank Key, sole begetter of the Hooting Yard.
Hooting Yard is a show on London’s Resonance FM. It’s been broadcast every Wednesday at 4 p.m., shortly after Epistaxis Time. I’ve recently started collecting episodes of Hooting Yard with a view to building the definitive guide to the recorded works of it’s author and reader, Frank Key. Yesterday I had the opportunity of plundering the rather shambolic resonance archive; I managed to retrieve 40 episodes of Key’s masterpiece. I suspect that there are at least thirty more episodes that have yet to be discovered, but these are on ancient and largely uncatalogued disk-packs somewhere in the cellar beneath Resonance studios.
The format of the show is simple; After a brief theme tune, Frank reads out a the week’s selection of short stories; They are mostly his own work, peppered with quotations from arcane and archaic sources.
The themes he tackles are diverse, for example one episode includes a story called “How I fell into the bottomless viper put of Gaar”, a brief biography of Professor Bindweed, a man obsessed with studying, cataloguing and understanding all aspects of the world’s bottomless viper pits.
The episode continues with the author pointing out a number of mistakes in Bindweed’s story; Specifically that the town of O’Hoolahan’s wharf (unlike Gaar) contains no viper pits, bottomless or otherwise. This item concludes with an extended letter of apology and it’s reply from the five fiendish burghers of O’Hoolahan’s Wharf.
Another favourite episode of mine is “The Book of Gnats”, an unusually long story which fills the entire half-hour time slot; It tells of the creation, loss re-discovery and destruction of the aforementioned book; the single fictional work of “Maud Glub”. Many of Frank Key’s best pieces are in the style of literary or artistic histories; All are of course pure splendid fiction.
While the themes of his stories are diverse, he has a few regular characters, most importantly ‘Dobson’, one of the 20th Century’s most prolific pamphleteers. Dobson’s name and date of birth are unknown (even to his creator), but his life’s adventures are chronicled in most Episodes. Dobson is portrayed as a brilliantly creative serial-obsessive whose wanderings rival Hemmingway
The most delightful thing about what Frank writes and reads is not the meaning of the content, but the manner in which it is written and read; Frank likes to toy with his words, re-arranging them like brightly coloured Lego bricks in strange and befuddling combinations. He clearly delights in literature of all kinds and is able to emulate those styles for his own comedic purposes.
Over the next few weeks I hope to build an archive of his work, that you my dear reader may benefit from his sweet sweet poetry.
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