The Intrepid Birdman Show

This week Reality once again develops a few worrying cracks. Déjà vu turns deadly, a charity-shop coat carries a tragic history of its own, a sleepwalker discovers he may have an entire night-time career, and Finkle learns that according to his bank, being alive is apparently a matter of opinion.

Dark humour, strange coincidences, lost voices and the usual collection of things that probably shouldn’t happen.

So come on in, take a seat, turn the lights down a little and stay with us for a while. You may not believe everything you hear, but that has never stopped us before.

Nothing here is real. Nevertheless, everything you hear is true.

As Halloween draws closer, The Birdman Show once again wanders into those uneasy places where old customs, forgotten rules and very inconvenient supernatural visitors still refuse to disappear.

This week we tell the bees, meet a family who seem to have misplaced time itself, consult a vampire with increasingly difficult dietary requirements, discover why some strangers really do need to be invited in, and finally encounter a gentleman who has waited nearly sixty years to collect the right suit.

With music from Christina, The Alan Parsons Project, Kate Bush, Jon Allen, and a suitably gothic contribution from our house band Slack Alice.

Nothing here is real. Nevertheless, everything you hear is true.

This week, The Birdman Show slips quietly into the shadows for a Halloween special.

Expect haunted houses, uneasy histories, strange roads, unreliable spirits and a séance that goes very badly wrong.

Dark comedy, odd music, supernatural bureaucracy and the usual suspicion that something just moved in the corner of the room.

Nothing here is real.

Nevertheless, everything you hear is true.

season 5 episode 14 - 09:10:2026, 07.20 by The Intrepid Birdman

You are on the threshold of a dream, perhaps a nightmare.

You are about to enter a place where the familiar has begun, very quietly, to lose its grip.

Nothing dramatic at first.

A room looks like a room.

A neighbour waves from across the road.

Somebody in authority assures you that everything is perfectly normal.

And perhaps it is.

But normality has always been a rather temporary arrangement.

Scratch at the surface and strange things have a habit of appearing underneath.

Old fears.

New explanations.

People who know considerably more than they are prepared to admit.

And occasionally, somebody at the very top who prefers the heating turned up and the curtains firmly closed.

Still, there is no reason to be alarmed.

Probably.

Tonight we shall wander a little further into those uncertain places where fact becomes rumour, imagination becomes memory, and the impossible sits quietly beside us pretending it has been there all along.

Nothing here is real, nevertheless everything you hear is true.

Come on in and take a seat.

It’s about to begin.

You are on the threshold of a dream, perhaps a nightmare.

You are about to enter a world which looks remarkably like your own.

The streets are familiar.

The people seem ordinary.

The clocks appear to be keeping reasonably good time.

And somewhere, somebody is filling in a form.

Nothing unusual there.

Except that ordinary things have an unfortunate habit of becoming rather strange when examined closely.

History is full of ideas that everybody knew were true, until they weren’t.

Professions existed which now sound completely invented.

Respectable experts have confidently recommended things that would today get them arrested.

Machines have been built to solve problems nobody had.

Rules have been written for situations nobody expected.

And human beings, faced with something they don’t understand, have always displayed an extraordinary ability to explain it anyway.

So tonight, we make no promises about where we are going.

We merely intend to look around.

Carefully.

Because sometimes the most peculiar stories are not the ones we invent.

They are the ones we discover have already happened.

Nothing here is real, nevertheless everything you hear is true.

Come on in and take a seat.

It’s about to begin.

Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. much.

We measure things, catalogue them, number them, photograph them, enter them into databases and place small ticks beside them.

And when we still don’t understand something, we give it a name.

That usually helps.

We are told what is safe.

What is dangerous.

What happened yesterday.

What will happen tomorrow.

Who is responsible.

Who is innocent.

What is true.

And increasingly, what we ourselves are supposed to think about it.

Certainty is wonderfully reassuring.

It allows us to move confidently through the world without constantly stopping to ask whether we have understood any of it correctly.

Of course, occasionally somebody discovers that the map is wrong.

The expert was mistaken.

The machine has changed its mind.

The eyewitness wasn’t actually there.

And the thing everyone knew to be impossible has been sitting quietly in the corner all along.

You are on the threshold of a "dream", perhaps a nightmare.

Tonight, the threshold lies somewhere behind us.

Beyond it is an older world.

A world before electricity, before antibiotics, before anyone had thought to put instructions on dangerous things.

A world of kings and fools, physicians and apothecaries, superstition and certainty.

An age in which almost everything had an explanation.

Unfortunately, most of the explanations were wrong.

Disease could be blamed upon the stars.

Misfortune upon the Devil.

Madness upon God.

And if something truly inexplicable occurred, there was usually a perfectly respectable man nearby prepared to explain it at considerable length.

These were simpler times.

Life was shorter.

Justice was swifter.

Medicine was considerably more adventurous.

And ignorance, far from being an embarrassment, was often the accepted scientific position.

Yet perhaps they were not so different from us.

They believed what they were told.

They trusted experts they did not understand.

They obeyed rules whose origins had long been forgotten.

And when things went badly wrong, they found somebody else to blame.

Some habits, it seems, survive remarkably well.

You are about to enter a place where history has become slightly unfastened from its frame.

Where fact and superstition sit comfortably beside one another.

And where the past may turn out to be rather less distant than we would like to believe.

Nothing here is real, nevertheless everything you hear is true.

Come on in and take a seat.

It’s about to begin.

Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. much.

Do not adjust your radio.

You are on the threshold of a dream, perhaps a nightmare.

This week, history misbehaves, bureaucracy develops teeth, a dead Pope is dragged back into court, and one unfortunate man discovers that other people’s sins are not always easy to digest.

Along the way, Sparks, Blondie, Paolo Nutini, Oingo Boingo and SOFI TUKKER help push the transmission from the ridiculous to the slightly unhinged.

Ordinary things behave badly. Explanations arrive late. Common sense takes the evening off.

Nothing here is real, nevertheless everything you hear is true.

Probably.

Looking for signs.

Some are helpful. Some are warnings. Some arrive three knocks at a time. And some simply say “EXIT” without troubling to explain exactly what you’re expected to exit from.

We begin in the woods with an unfinished warning, descend into the forgotten basement of an old asylum, encounter a doorway that leads “all the way out,” and meet two power-station workers faced with a red warning light nobody has ever seen before and a manual nobody has ever bothered to open.

Elsewhere, Rick attempts to convince the increasingly superstitious Gogol that three mysterious knocks, a bird and a stopped clock don’t necessarily mean death is coming. A deceased gentleman develops strong opinions about the accuracy of his own paperwork. And Joan of Arc discovers that receiving instructions from Heaven is considerably easier than getting Heaven to accept responsibility for the consequences.

Music this week comes from Sparks, Kate Bush, The Alan Parsons Project, Land of the Giants, The Who and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, along with our house band Slack Alice, who take us “All the Way Out.”

Nothing here is real, nevertheless everything you hear is true.

Probably.