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Saki Stories on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra

A new reading/adaption of ‘Tobermory’ has been posted on the BBC website. It can be found here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p074m5yg

There are five other Saki short stories currently available on their website too. The link for these is:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qdqd2/episodes/guide

and the stories are the following:

  1. ‘The Open Window’
  2. ‘The Toys of Peace’
  3. ‘Fur’
  4. ‘The Schartz-Metterklume Method’
  5. ‘The Lumber Room’

These five were broadcast on BBC Radio  Extra, which is often used to repeat material; in this case it’s not clear whether these are new recordings or whether they have been previously broadcast.

Finally, Saki is discussed in BBC Radio 4’s ‘Open book’ programme about 20 minutes in:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0088mxm

The programmes are also available via the BBC iplayer app and its successor/replacement, the fairly stupidly named “BBC Sounds”. Some BBC content is, unfortunately, only available within the UK. (Being in Germany, I couldn’t access the ‘Tobermory’ reading.)

Many thanks to Rob MacGregor for the links.

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Interesting Literature’s ‘The 10 Best Saki Stories Everyone Should Read’

The literary blog Interesting Literature (A Library of Literary Interestingness) has a top-ten list of Sakis stories along with some short analysis and comments on their choices. The obvious ones are there (Gabriel-Ernest, Sredni Vashtar, Tobermory’, The Music on the Hill, The Lumber-Room) as well as some lesser known but worthy entries (Filboid Studge! Yes!). I dont completely agree with the choices made (The Jesting of Arlington Stringham has a good joke about rabbit curry but is otherwise only average Saki) but then again, isnt the point of these lists that you can argue about them?

Agree/Disagree here:

The 10 Best Saki Stories Everyone Should Read

 

 

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The Fashion for Turkish baths

Yahoo republishes an article in the Daily Telegraph about the Victorian bathhouse. While most of the article is about the fashion for orientalism in architecture and design in the nineteenth century, it does begin with a picture of the Jermyn Street Turkish bath where Saki set The Recessional.

Turkish baths occur occasionally in Sakis stories. (I speculated a bit about the reasons here.) The habit of going to such places also provoked the following bit of wisdom about human nature:

Spayley had grasped the fact that people will do things from a sense of duty which they would never attempt as a pleasure. There are thousands of respectable middle-class men who, if you found them unexpectedly in a Turkish bath, would explain in all sincerity that a doctor had ordered them to take Turkish baths; if you told them in return that you went there because you liked it, they would stare in pained wonder at the frivolity of your motive. (Filboid Studge)

Article link: https://uk.style.yahoo.com/curious-victorian-obsession-cleanliness-exotic-093234249.html