AND ALL FOR UNDER A POUND YOU KNOW [506]

"CheapShow" album cover (art by Vorratony - vorratony.bsky.social)

You can never accuse the “CheapShow” podcast of having a surfeit of chodneys in the last ten years, and you can make of that what you will, especially I can’t be objective about how much this show means to me.

When I first wrote about Paul Gannon & Eli Silverman’s podcast in 2020, it had already evolved from its initial premise as an “economy comedy podcast” that brings you “intriguing, nostalgic and detestable items that fell through the cracks of popular culture” into a comedic assault on the English language supported by a panoply of grotty characters, like “Derek & Clive” with “The Goon Show” mixed in. I wish I could remember in which episode Paul said, “it’s all mouth talk, isn’t it”, as the phrase perfectly explains my love of “CheapShow” fringing on a Dadaist rejection of podcast norms like structure, context and sanity.

This culminated in 2023’s episode “The Wedding of Squishy Jim and Madam Ladyplops”, a kind of “Crisis of Infinite Earths” storyline – arguably begun in a 2021 episode that introduced the problematic crooner Bill Donut – that reset the podcast’s universe, leaving initially leaving jobbing actor Grumpy Sessions behind as the Psycho-Pirate that remembers what the world was like. Slowly, some of these characters have come back, as “everything old is new again”, but not as often as they once did – telling yourself not to create characters in a podcast where every utterance could become a name is not going to work, and neither should it.

Something the COVID-19 pandemic innovated in “CheapShow” were episodes that took place outside, taking in narrative-led quests, learning about the history of an area, and spur of the moment walks because the weather is too warm. It is one thing to have a podcast that can be a magazine one week, and an audio drama the next, but when you can no longer predict if the next episode will take place indoors, you realise that podcast formats have nothing against force of will. This is before you even get to the audio quality, setting a high standard that other podcasts rarely attempt, having never come across another that offered selected episodes in mono or stereo.

The level of professionalism that I find in “CheapShow” makes me also appreciate how delightfully ramshackle an episode can become, intentionally or not. The recent episode “Walk Hard with a Vengeance” was a sequel to 2021’s “Die Hard... on a Podcast”, the edifice of the podcast substituting for Nakatomi Plaza, and ending in an existential podcast void, but instead of being a tight, contained 38-minute action drama, the sequel was a two-hour-plus sprawling epic recorded on location at Crystal Palace Park, the tension coming from both whether Paul & Eli could save London from the bombs planted around the park, and whether they could hold themselves and the narrative together until they reached the final showdown, the villain having graciously given them extra time. If they were attempting a simultaneous display of anti-comedy with a critique of Hollywood action movie structure, then it worked.

“CheapShow” marked its tenth anniversary in June 2025 with a series of celebratory episodes, and with an album, released on vinyl record and MP3, available at the link through www.thecheapshow.co.uk. I cannot be objective in telling you how good this album is, and why you should buy it, collecting new and previous songs from the show like “Top Notch Western Romance”, “Teen Yeti’s Delight” and “The Lament of Captain Blueballs”, alongside new routines and interjections from Paul & Eli between the songs.

The reason I cannot be objective is tracks seven and eight on side B: “Nostalgia’s Gonna Get You” and “The Mayor Requests”, both by myself. I made a video in 2021 about the former, my entry for that year's Urinevision Song Contest, titled “How to Win a Song Contest, apparently”, while the latter, my entry for the following contest in 2023, was about signs dotted around a town reading “The Mayor Requests the Participance of the Inhabitants in the Protection of the Trees” – based on a real sign I once saw on the old city walls in Chichester – and why this was “because of what happened last time”.

I am happy that these songs have been received well over the last few years, and that listeners remember them fondly, but I hope to remain bemused about being on the end of such goodwill and kindness, especially with their being considered worthy of being committed to the physical format of a vinyl record (and, in very limited amounts, MiniDisc). I remember writing and entering “Nostalgia’s Gonna Get You” to see if I could write a good song, completing “The Mayor Requests” to see if lightning would strike twice – I should write songs more often.

AND WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT, IT FIGURES [110]

Nine months after promising myself that I would upgrade my iPod nano to a Sony Walkman [link], I have done exactly that, when the iPod stopped working for a few days. I have now launched headlong into the devotional task of loading my CD collection of twenty-plus years onto it – the first purchase, from Virgin Megastore in Portsmouth, was of “Jagged Little Pill,” by Alanis Morrissette, and “Now 35.”

Apparently, my NW-A45 Walkman can play “HD Audio,” which Sony defines as anything above CD quality. I had not looked into this before buying it, as my main intention was to find something that can accept a 200 Gb micro SD card – Sony says it can take a card with ten times that capacity, but none has been made yet. However, if this Walkman is expected to beat CD quality, then I can leave MP3 behind: in 2015, Ryan Maguire reconstructed a version of Suzanne Vega’s atmospheric song “Tom’s Diner,” used in the 1990s as a control when testing the “lossy” codec that compresses sounds into MP3 format, that only plays the sounds that were, in effect, discarded – enough sound is left behind for you to still identify the song as “Tom’s Diner.”

After some research, I now have the definitive advice for converting your CDs, which I will be using on my entire collection: only use FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format, setting it to 44.1 kHz 16-bit if you have the option, because this matches the settings of the CD.

The “lossless” element of FLAC, a format that has been around since 2001, means all the available information on your CD is being retained. Because of this, you do not set a bitrate of kilobits per second like you would with MP3, because that rate will change with the song. Using the first CD I converted, “Hot Potatoes: The Best of Devo,” there is a difference based on the type of song: “Devo Corporate Anthem,” a simple fanfare, reaches a maximum of 655 kbps, while “Through Being Cool,” a more involved, complicated, recording has a maximum of 871 kbps. A few Bee Gees tracks I have break the 1,000 kbps barrier, louder and richer than the Devo recordings, which proves what you can still get from a CD if it has been mastered correctly.

Put in as simple a manner as I can, CDs use a 44.1 kHz sample rate because it is twice the 20Hz to 20 kHz range of the human ear – it also matched the highest usable rate for recording digital audio on video tape - while the 16-bit pulse-code modulation used to digitise the sound, the latest development of a technology initiated to reduce the noise in long-distance phone calls, means the amount of detail picked out by the technology is more than “enough,” with a grove that won’t wear out like vinyl will.

What this does mean is that, if you have a CD that is “24-bit remastered,” this is talking about the digital master used to make the CD, which will still be 16-bit, even if more detail is available to sample. As an example, I have a 24-bit remastered copy of David Bowie’s album “Never Let Me Down,” but I also have the original 1987 release, because Bowie hated the song “Too Dizzy” enough to leave it off all subsequent reissues. The song “Beat of Your Drum,” with a chorus sounding like Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” is 34.3 Mb in size when taking a FLAC copy from the 1987 album, but the 24-bit mastered version raises this to 36.6 Mb – the difference is there, but you need a very quiet room to start with.

But with Sony highlighting the enhanced “experience” of HD Audio, the extra resonance adding to the recording, I feel like I have already achieved that, for now, by leaving MP3 behind, regaining the lost layer of sound from my, in some cases, decades-old CDs.

IT’S ENOUGH TO DRIVE YOU CRAZY IF YOU LET IT [8]

I know it is the twenty-first century, but that didn’t stop me from buying a typewriter. My nephew recently bought a second-hand one – of course, there are no new typewriters anymore – which reminded me of the one we once had at home, before computers overran it over twenty years ago. Looking at examples on eBay, I wound up bidding on a grey and brown Litton Imperial Mercury, a grand name for what used to be a very ordinary machine.

Once I make room for it, how useful will I be when using it? The challenge will be not to make a mistake, and to resist throwing the paper away to start again. If I slip on the wrong key, I should find a way of justifying the mistake, and see where that takes me. Or, I could just let rip:

“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, and ran to Currys to steal a food blender. He was arrested, and was made to speak the alphabet in a loud, clear voice. ‘A’, the fox said, followed by ‘B,’ then ‘C.’ By ‘J,’ the fox broke. ‘All right, I confess! The kids wanted smoothies, but they are so expensive to buy…’”

Anyway, buying a typewriter also means I can hear that particular clacking of keys and metal rods, a background to life and industry, that is just not heard anymore. This is not nostalgia, as I have grown up with computers, just as vinyl records are mostly being sold to people that grew up with CDs and MP3s. Old technology, if it works, does not have to be rendered obsolete or dead.

I imagine receiving a letter typed on a typewriter will mean more than one printed from a computer: there is still an element of craft on the part of a writer, not as much as writing by hand, but enough of a change to make a difference to the reader. Anyone receiving a letter from me will now know what to expect.

From this, you might expect using a typewriter would give me an ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), the curious, dubious abbreviation now given to the tingling in the back of your head or neck you get in response to a sensory stimulus of some sort.

I only discovered a name has been given to this feeling when, after researching the typewriter I just bought, I found YouTube videos consisting solely of people typing letters, just for the viewer to sense the sound, and the physical act, of the typing. I’m sure it won’t be so great if you had the machine in front of you, engaged in a duel to harness the written word to create a work of great meaning, all the while trying to spell properly. For me, the feeling of release may only come when I stop using it.

Having said that, I am looking forward to getting started!

Meanwhile, the fox has been convicted of theft, and is currently awaiting sentencing.