Ashley Sterne In the Next Weak Programmes

I hesitated to transcribe this parody radio program (or programme, as the British have it) by Ashley Sterne, because it consists of puns and allusions that almost impenetrable to any modern reader who is not knowledgeable regarding public figures of the 1930s.  (The light-hearted Hitler reference is a bit disconcerting.)  Nevertheless, in the relentless spirit of the literary completist, I offer my readers this Ashley Sterne column from the 1934 Christmas number of World Radio.

IN THE NEXT WEAK PROGRAMMES
Chosen by Ashley Sterne


MONDAY

A Rossini-Verdi Composite Opera
All Night.  Swiss Cottage, relayed by Appleby and Shooter’s Hill.  “William O’Tello,” conducted by Frank Can’t-tell.

Unrecorded Records
7.0 p.m.  Radio-Luckybag.  Gramophone Recital by Christopher Stein.  Jack Petersen singing “The Last Round Up;”  Henry J. Ford singing “Ole Man Flivver;”  Lady Astor singing “O, Play to me, Tipsy;”  Hitler singing, “I’m Danzig with Tears in my Eyes;”  Sam Small singing “Holloway, Awake, Beloved;”  and Victoria Grasshopper singing “Little Gnat, You’ve Had a Buzzy Day.”

Newly Discovered Work by Chopin
8.15 p.m.  Warsaw, relayed by Seesaw.  “Nocturne in the Old Kent Road.”  Played by Rashmanenough.

TUESDAY

A Cannibal Banquet
Opening Time till Closing Time.  Christmas Island, relayed by the Club-Sandwich-Islands.  Running commentary by Big Chief Rubbatummi.  Receded by a Tom-tom recital by Uncle Bones (of Margate), and followed by a cowrie-shell collection on behalf of the Widows of Shipwrecked Mariners.

Shykovski’s “Nut-Cracker” Suite
6.30 p.m.  Barcelona, relayed by Brazil.  Conducted by Munkinutz.

Carol Concert
8.0 p.m.  Bucharest, relayed by Buckhurst Hill.  Arranged by Carroll Gibbons and Billy Caryll.  The Worchester Philharmonic Club singing “Good King Worcestersauce;”  the Oswaldtwistle Choral Society singing “The Twistletoe Bough;” followed by solos from Arnold Sebastian Bachx’s “Isthmus Oratorio” sung by Ina Souez.

Beetrooten’s Chloral Symphony
10.0 p.m.  Medicine Hat, relayed by all chemists and druggist.  Conducted by Annie Sthetik.

WEDNESDAY

Coronation of the Sulphate and Sulphuret of Magnesia
All Day.  Glaubersalzburg, relayed by Mudbaden.  Running Commentaries by Herr Hauard, the Lord Marshall, and by their Excellencies the Manganese Ambassador and the Swedenborgian Minister.

Rollicking Russina Comedy by Tchoke-off
1.0 p.m. — 11 p.m.  Tobolsk, relayed by Kamschatka, Nijni-novgorod, and Earlswood.  “Three Sister-Seagulls in a Cherry Orchard.”  Dmitri Skratchanitch as Nokisblokoff, Olga Samova as Skarlatina.

An Act from the Kaffir Circus
8.30 p.m. ad nauseum.  Jerusalem, relayed from Hampstead.  A hand-to-hand Talk on the Mining Market between Izzie Apfelbaum and Rube Schweinfleisch.

Verdigri’s Opera “False-Stuff”
9.0 p.m.  Paddington.  Teddie Brown as False-Stuff; Padrick Waddington as Slender.

THURSDAY

Song-Cycle (with Bawl-Bearings)
7 p.m.  Teheran, relayed by Alsoran.  Squeeza Lemon’s “In a Purley Garden.”  The words adapted from “The Ruby At” of Michael Arlen.

Fun on a Lightship
8 p.m.  Helsinki.  A wooden sea-shanty, performed by an Elder Brother of Trinity House and his Buoys.

Item from an Antarctic Concert
10 p.m.  All Antarctic Stations, Third-Class Waiting Rooms, and Chile.  Organised by Eddie Pola and Pola Negri.  Relayed from Elephant Island.  Purcell’s “Trumpet Voluntary,”  conducted by Tuskanini.

Unheard Work by Schubert
10.15 p.m.   Wien, relayed by Weib and Gesang.  The “Unbegun Symphony.”  Incompleted and unorchestrated by Paul Cleanoffsky, and non-conducted by Sir Henry Wood and his Insulators, including Dorothy Silk and Billy Cotton.

FRIDAY

A Chinese Playlet
All Day and All Night.  Hong-kong, relayed by King Kong.  “Bung-Ho” a tragedy by Hi-tid-li-hi-ti.  Wun Yung Kow as Too Long Tung.

New Work by One-Egger
7.0 p.m.  Zermatt, relayed by Dohrmatt and Bathmatt.  Variations for Alphorn and Shoehorn on an old Swiss folk-song, “Oh dear, what can the Matterhorn.”

A Never-Too-Oftenbach Opera
8.0 p.m.  All stations on the underground.  “Tails of Hoffmann,” produced by Sydney Kyte and conducted by John Barcarolli.

Surprise Item
10 p.m.  Madrid, relayed by Yarmouth and Finnish Common Wave.  Cast-a-net Recital and Herring Fishing Bulletin.

SATURDAY

All in the Day’s Shirk
6.30 p.m.  Naples, relayed by Saffron Hill and Soho.  Signor Occhi-Pocchi describes a day in the life of a Macaroni Calibrator.

A Newly Discovered Opera by Smetana
8.0 p.m.  Prague, relayed by Blague.  “The Buttered Bread, or, Half a Wife is Better than no Bride.”  By arrangement with the Hohlmiel Breadcasting Corporation.  Well-known Bohemian loafers in various roles.  Baton wielded by Stuckwangler.

Billets Doux
9.30 p.m.  Poste Restante Parisienne.  Revue, featuring Enid Stamp-Taylor and Billet Leonard, readdressed from the Dud Letter Office, Mount Unpleasant.

In Thun To-Night
11 p.m.  Bernve, relayed by Chard and Burnt Ash.  Excerpts from his Visitor’s Register by a Swiss hotelier.

=====

Here To-day and Gone To-morrow

The history of the MS. of Smetana’s opera, The Buttered Bread, is a most romantic one, for it possesses the distinction of having been lost no fewer than fifty-seven times, fifty-three by Smetana himself and four times by his typist, Fraulein Pumpernickel.  Some of its subsequent recoveries have been well-nigh miraculous.  In 1872 it was found in a disused butter-churn in a Burmese diary.  Five years later it was returned with four of Mr. Gladstone’s shirts from the Hawarden Temperance Laundry.  In 1890, Mr. J. N. Maskelyne suddenly produced it from a borrowed top-hat, out of which he had previously extracted nothing but bowls of goldfish.  Last summer it was again rediscovered by a retired fog-signalman of Leighton Buzzard, who found it in a trouser-press which had formerly belonged to Georges Sand.

In the same receptacle were found the rough sketches for a concerto for four cathedral organs and a police whistle, an oleograph portrait of Queen Victoria being not amused at something, a recipe for toad-in-the-hole, and a writ of Habeas Corpus made out in the name of a Mrs. Amelia Dinwiddie, of Steeple Bumsted.


The Russian Ben Travers

T’Choke-off, whose latest farce will be broadcast on Wednesday is the author of 3,097 farces in all, including adaptations for the Russian stage of our own Mr. Robert Browning’s “rollicker,” A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon, and P. Bysshe Shelley’s no less hilarious Prometheus Unbound.  Tchoke-off’s method of work is characteristic of the man, for he is not a playwright by profession, but a designer of stomach-pumps.  All his MSS. are written in tincture of iodine on very thin slices of cheese.  His most recent work has been written three times.  The first version was eaten by mice, and the second inadvertently converted into a Welsh rabbit by Muck, his cook.


A Schubert Anecdote

Schubert omitted to start his “Unbegun Symphony” in the year 1818.  At that time he was giving the fascinating Caroline Esterhazy lessons on the double-bassoon, and in a letter to Messrs. Francis, Day and Hunter, who had just undertake a threepenny edition of “The Erl-King,” Schubert complains that he has already not had the opportunity to complete unbeginning the first movement.  Asked on day by his friend Mayrhofer in what key he hadn’t begun to write it, Schubert replied: “G sharp minor.”  “Why?” asked the poet.  “What a fatuous question!” was Schubert’s retort.  “Why don’t you ask W. G. Grace why he never scored ninety-three?”

[W. G. Grace was a cricket champion.  A century (100 points) is considered an outstanding cricket score.  All the same, the humor of the punch-line is unclear to me.]