Forget TOWIE, snooty writers have been staring aghast at the people of Essex for 300 years... It is commonly observed that, were Shakespeare or, say, Dickens alive today, they would probably be engaged in writing soap opera scripts. But what of Daniel Defoe? On the basis of this extract from A ... Read More...
Key’s Cupboard
The mind of Frank Key
Just who was the mysterious 'Eighth Dwarf'? Frank attempts to shed some light on this much-discussed question... Over the years, there has been a great deal of discussion about the exact identity of the so-called “fifth Beatle”, as there has been regarding which pinniped deserves the title “the seventh seal”. Much ... Read More...
Frank considers the nebulous boundaries between childhood dreams and memories... One of the most memorable incidents in my childhood took place in the Newty Field. If I am to be wholly accurate, I would have to amend that to say it took place within my head. It was a dream, but ... Read More...
Today, a classic from the Frank Key oeuvre. For more such uncategorisable fictive brilliance, you should buy the Dabbler Editions ebook By Aerostat to Hooting Yard: A Frank Key Reader... My mother had a tin ear and a voice like a corncrake. In spite of these shortcomings, she saw it as her maternal ... Read More...
How technology and radical new forms of communication are changing the way the General Election campaign is fought... With less than a week to go before polling day, and the parties still neck and neck, only one thing can be said with certainty. This is the first electoral campaign where the battle ... Read More...
All you need is rage, says Frank, who has discovered that ill-tempered ranting is the secret to a long and happy life... In the pub one evening, many many years ago, I delivered myself of a magnificently intemperate tirade of loathing about … oh, who knows what?, someone or something that had ... Read More...
'A brimming bowl of hogwash': Aldous Huxley's views on jazz... It was the first time, I realised, that I had ever clearly seen a jazz-band. The spectacle was positively frightening… Oh, those mammy-songs, those love-longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied? ... Read More...
On this day in 1970, a crow spotted a craggy-faced, heavy-set poet, and was inspired to write... The diary of a crow, on this day in 1970: Woke up in a foul temper. I was really, really pissed off. Sat atop a tree and shouted my head off. I was still pissed ... Read More...
How might history have turned out if Skippy the Bush Kangaroo had been called 'Googie' instead, asks Frank urgently.... Skippy The Bush Kangaroo might so easily have been called Googie. The eponymous marsupial heroine of the Australian television series, which ran from 1966 to 1968 and is still shown regularly on ... Read More...
Frank busts some of the myths surrounding Lothar Preen's storied Four Last Songs... Tra La La, The Drainage Ditch is one of the Four Last Songs by elegantly-bouffanted sociopath Lothar Preen [above]. It is, for the majority of critics, the best of the quartet, a brain-numbing racket of melodic astringency with ... Read More...