Looking Good, Feeling Great Episode 2 – His Knowledge Of London Was Extensive And Peculiar

Wotcha, Cock. Welcome to London. Home of the whelk, Old Joanna, The Pearly Queen and of course the mighty Resonance FM.

There it is, love, originally aired last Friday at 7pm, repeated this Tuesday at 2am. On this week’s show guided by the vintage voices of several competitively avuncular narrators and a grand piano, we’re taken on a whistle-stop audio tour of London, a fantastical city entirely populated by bad actors. We might go by underground. It’s quicker by tube, as you people say. The Police’ll be after you if you’re not a good boy. We’ll also have a cockney sing-song and enjoy a reggae tune about the joys of commuting. The great dome. A moon in the sky. Makes you think of horses, don’t it?

Join Robin The Fog as he digs up a plethora of inspirational, aspirational and instructional recordings of highly dubious vintage and embarks on a cut-and-paste odyssey that is by turns amusing, absurd and, on at least one occasion, almost unbearable.

[audio http://archive.org/download/LookingGoodFeelingGreatEpisodeTwo-HisKnowledgeOfLondonWasExtensive/LookingGoodFeelingGreatEp02-HisKnowledgeOfLondonWasExtensiveAndPeculiar.mp3]

(Or follow this link for the download)

Looking Good, Feeling Great runs throughout April, and I’m really rather fond of this week’s edition, which was consists largely of three separate ‘tour-guide’ records, a Linguaphone 45, and a man with an enormous 1960s tape machine concealed up his jumper, all edited seam-fully together with the usual bag of hammers. But, of course we’re by no means on virgin territory here. Almost as long as there has been a city on the banks of the Thames, there have been people being silly about it. In fact, let’s close business here with a completely spurious, unrelated coasting on other people’s brilliance, namely the greatest depiction of London ever made:

Call me old-fashioned, but that Palace Guard’s sudden about-turn from Parade-Ground bark to coquettish titter never fails to make me laugh. For ages. And then to demand that all of my friends and associates watch it, forgetting they’ve already seen it several times before. Not that I’m obsessive or anything, oh no.

Tune in next week where we’ll be learning how NOT to have a relationship, a subject on which I consider myself a veritable soothsayer…