[Click through to the site to listen to the audio]

See also: this previous post, again inspired by an item on You And Yours¹, on Birkenhead Park, complete with lively debate in the comments about its claim to be the first public park in the world.

1. Yeah, I listen to You And Yours quite a lot: proof, if proof be need be, that my Radio 4 addiction is completely out of hand. Just be thankful that I’m not posting excerpts from The Archers (which has been quite exciting lately, what with Owen’s rape trial).↩

[Click through to the site to listen to the audio]

Alien communiqué? The ghost of Delia Derbyshire? Numbers station intrusion? Cock-up at Broadcasting House?

I dunno, but it sounds good.

Update: Mike D points out in the comments that an Ask Metafilter user was wondering about the squeaks too.

It’s very funny, and very, very silly. Fake news—a report on the underground sport of Church Fighting—is leavened with a healthy dollop of puerile filth, like the trailer for blockbuster musical Dr. Screwlittle & His Suck-Me-Suck-You (from the makers of Kiddie Fiddler on the Roof!), or the scene in which an unfortunate serf is made to fellate a dragon. Go and have a listen.

Glaswegian readers may remember Innes as ‘that Angry Germans man’, famed for his S&M-riddled performances in Nazi uniform at top nitespot Optimo, singing that rousing child abuse/WWII anthem, Mount Florida’s Yo La Kinski:

[Click through to the site to listen to the audio]

And now for our first hymn, written by Pasta Theologian…

‘Good grief!’, I thought, ‘they’ve finally opened up the God slot to non-Christian religions! How odd that they’d choose a broadcast of a Pastafarian service to usher in this new policy!’

After the hymn was over, the minister began his sermon, and I realised that he was Welsh, and therefore must’ve said:

And now for our first hymn, written by pastor-theologian…

I am not at my best in the morning.

Previous incarnations - the first using the obscure Konspire protocol, the second essentially an experiment in styling RSS with XSLT - didn’t last long, because I never got around to automating the process of adding new content.

With Podbasket, all I have to do is upload a file and fill out a brief form, so SRR v3 should last a little longer than its forebears. To tune in, add this feed to your podcast recieving application - iTunes, say, or any feed reader that supports enclosures - and you can slurp down a dose of good music, and, perhaps, the occasional video, at least twice a week.

The first installment is a bid to salve the wounds of those missing their daily dose of Pete Burns. Birth of a Nation by The Mystery Girls is the wonderfully pervy single by Pete’s first band, which he formed with Julian Cope and Pete Wiley. Coming soon: some 1920s white country gospel, some histrionic progressive rock, a wee bit of rockabilly, and, inevitably, a fair number of rare Prince tracks.

Thanks to Peter, or Rob, or both, for pointing to Podbasket (I forget where I saw it first).

Rather than read out an URL at the close of a discussion about the American Society of Magazine Editors recent list of the top forty magazine covers of the past forty years, he said, “…and there’s a link to the American Editors Association on our website. If you Google ‘BBC Saturday Review’, you’ll get there.”

Not ideal perhaps - future listeners may be puzzled if Google ceases to exist, and present listeners new to the web might have trouble - but it beats the John Humphrys method (reading an URL three or four times, always incorrectly, before giving up).

While Delia Derbyshire has made the leap from unknown backroom toiler to posthumous genius, with even a play about her life (see our previous post), we had never previously heard of her late colleague, Daphne Oram. Oram died in 2003, two years after Derbyshire, and was instrumental in the formation of the BBC’s Radiophonics Workshop. She joined the BBC in 1943: “As war raged, she began to indulge her hobby after hours, in the workplace. Always a night-owl, and having initially failed to persuade her bosses to create an electronic studio, she would stay late and move the BBC’s first tape recorders together to build a studio. When morning came, she would disassemble it.” See also the late Hugh Davies’ Daphne Oram: Tribute to a Pioneer on the Sonic Arts Network.

Oram’s great innovation was the Oramics system, an early machine for converting imagery into musical compositions, using 35mm film and light-sensitive sensors.

(A related post here: Standing Wave)

Thanks to the XSLT magic, the feed is not only styled with CSS so it looks nice in a web browser, it now also has clickable links to the files, so that those who prefer not to ‘podcatch’ can use the feed as if it were a web page, clicking to download the songs. (Come to think of it, it would be nice gimmick to serve up a weblog entirely in RSS or Atom, using XSLT to re-purpose the XML feeds as web pages.)

Anyway, in celebration, I will now be posting a new MP3 or AAC file to the little radio station every Friday, instead of hardly ever at all, starting today with Psychic TV’s cover version of Only Love Can Break Your Heart.

If anyone would like to join in, email me the MP3 of your choice with ‘SRR: the artist - the song title’ in the subject field and a brief description of the song in the body.

And in just a moment we have the first in a series of monologues by Lynne Truss on the subject of forty-something men

Fuck off.

If you’re listening on or near a computer, go to bbc.co.uk and navigate to the Front Row page to view the paintings as we discuss them.

Wonderfully clunky.