The Preposterous Files

The BBC has a most intriguing radio show (on Radio 4) that they are curiously hiding from potential listeners. It is called “ The Preposterous Files” and is about “cases that show up Civil Service bureaucracy.” It was on their Listen Again page yesterday but was taken off yesterday. Its Listen Again button (pre-disappearance) replayed a segment about fiddling, alas.

So far there have been 5 shows. Perhaps that’s all there will ever be. (How unfortunate!) Here are their topics (taken from the show’s archives):

1. Deciding on the design, location and function of the police telephone box proved a dauntingly complex process. One difficulty was that most of the public had never used a telephone.

2. In 1900, the North of England press began to report a mysterious epidemic that was affecting thousands of beer drinkers. The medical profession declared that it was an outbreak of peripheral neuritis provoked by excessive alcohol consumption, but a sceptical chemist, working alone from a makeshift laboratory, thought otherwise.

3. In 1912, cost-conscious HM Customs replaced Falmouth’s steam launch with a former sailing boat fitted with an auxiliary motor. Unfortunately, the motor proved unable to cope with the strong currents off the Cornish coast.

4. In 1954, stevedores reported finding an unconscious young man on board a Polish ship berthed at Bermondsey Docks. Was he an asylum seeker or a stowaway?

5. The transcript of the court martial of Flying Officer DR Kenyon, who retracted his plane’s undercarriage whilst still standing on the runway prior to taking off for a bombing mission during the 1956 Suez crisis, makes extraordinary reading.