A complete archive of Hooting Yard on the Air, hosted by the Internet Archive. Bizarre and beautiful short fictions, presented as half-hour radio shows, written and presented by Frank Key. Sort of a drily deranged Prairie Home Companion, with its locus in the murkiest boroughs of London.

Paul Byrne (29 January 1959 – 13 September 2019), who used the pseudonym Frank Key, was a British writer, illustrator, blogger and broadcaster best known for his self-published short-story collections and his long-running radio series Hooting Yard on the Air, which was broadcast weekly on Resonance FM from April 2004 until 2019.

I enjoyed the show contemporaneously in the aughts, including its celebrated three-hour read-through of the Jubilate Agno. Something brought it to mind recently, and I found that its old RSS feed is still up, but contains only a handful of recordings from the end of Key’s abbreviated life. It still confirmed for me that his work is entirely timeless. I’m glad that the Internet Archive preserves the lot of it.

Also: An archive of various Hooting Yard-related text, including transcripts, illustrations, and a full episode index.